My obsession with labyrinths started many years ago, at Gloucester cathedral. I was living on a boat at the time, and mooring in the Gloucester area sometimes. By chance, I visited the cathedral on several occasions when they had big canvas labyrinths out in the main body of the building. I was utterly enchanted.
Building labyrinths wasn’t an option for me until I landed in Stroud. I didn’t have the space on the boat to store suitable materials. Stroud has a number of public spaces where it is feasible to lay out something on this scale, and I’ve done that a number of times now in various locations.
For reasons, I haven’t built a temporary labyrinth in a little over two years. They take a lot of setting up so I’ve got to be in a pretty good place to be able to do it. Being able to just rock up and walk a labyrinth was a really welcome thing for me. On the downside there were children who were being allowed to treat it as a playground, and adults who walked right across it while others were using it – this has always been an issue with labyrinths in the cathedral and it frustrates me encountering people who don’t notice the beauty of what’s there and who undermine that with their carelessness.
I walked the Gloucester labyrinth twice. The first time I was grieving the lack of labyrinths in the last two years, and grieving what happened around the last one I built. I was remembering my first labyrinth experiences in the cathedral, and trying to manage my frustration around how other people were being disrespectful and disruptive.
My second journey was undertaken without disruption from others and allowed me the space to explore gratitude for the labyrinths in my life and for my relationship with Gloucester cathedral. There’s no active Christianity in my Druidry, but nonetheless, Gloucester cathedral is a sacred place for me and has been so my whole adult life. It’s a place of ancestry, of history, and of peace, and has been a place of solace for me during times of extreme difficulty.