Toronto+Vancouver City of Labyrinths Project

Now THIS is interesting.

Lands End Labyrinth in San Francisco as a Tiny Planet.

Photograph by Karen X. Cheng.

This instagram photo is taken from my story about Land’s End Labyrinth in San Francisco 11 years ago in July of 2005.

That’s my hand holding a printout of a seven circuit inner-Chartres Labyrinth design in front of Land’s End Labyrinth with The Golden Gate beyond and through the fog.

Here’s a photograph I captured immediately after the one instagrammed above…

Sometimes… Images from my City of Labyrinths website… re-appear… unexpectedly.

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“Walking the spiral path of twists and turns is an ancient spiritual exercise.

“Often the words labyrinth and maze are used interchangeably, but they are not the same. A maze is a network of paths and dead-ends, and one has to puzzle her way out. In contrast, a labyrinth has only one way in and only one way out. The walker simply follows the path.

“Twenty years ago in San Francisco at Grace Cathedral, I walked a labyrinth on its marble floor, a replica of the famous design found at Chartres Cathedral in France. It was an exercise that gave me profound calm and unexpected answers, all from just putting one foot in front of the other.

“I discovered there is a scientific reason for why this happens. The left side of the brain, which governs rational, logical and linear actions, is often overworked. Walking a labyrinth allows that side to rest, while the right side of the brain, which is associated with non-verbal, non-rational and the intuitive, is exercised, according to “The Healing Labyrinth,” an article in Barron’s by Helen Rafael Sands in 2001. After walking a labyrinth, the two hemispheres of the brain become balanced.”

— Suzette Martinez Standring, MyZeeland

Pedestrian Sundays – Blackout Anniversary Car-Free edition.

August 16, 2009, 12 p.m. – 10 p.m.

Streets Are For People present Pedestrian Sundays marking the 6th Anniversary of the Blackout.

For the sixth anniversary of the memorable day when we all realized that we consume too much, we will celebrate by turning the lights out!

All acoustic music, kid-powered fun, and community meals are what make remembering the blackout such a delight.

• http://www.pskensington.ca/
• http://www.streetsareforpeople.org/blog/

This pinwheel design is painted on a tennis court surface in the middle of a playground in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

As a game – Four people, at their own entrance, race to the centre where they must leave by another route without touching anyone.

First one out wins.

This afternoon in Kensington Market on North Augusta Avenue, a re-inspiration of this pin-wheel labyrinth design will find its way on to North Augusta Avenue.

And pedestrians, four at a time, will be invited to play The Game.

Beyond sunset, the pin-wheel will be illuminated with candlelight luminaria to mark the sixth anniversary of the 2003 Blackout.
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I spent a couple of days earlier this week in The City, San Francisco.

Initially it was to honour the sixth anniversary of the Boxing Day Tsunami.

I built a giant outline of a candle in luminaria, then as I did exactly five months ago on the one month anniversary of the Tsunami, I waited for the Sun to set on the west coast of North America…

In due course, the same Sun would rise in East Asia.

This Giant Candle is my way of sending hope from here to there; of saying without words, that you all have not been forgotten.

I decided to stay overnight at Ocean Beach after building a fire with driftwood, sharing warmth with strangers, falling asleep to echoing rhythms of The Pacific as waves crashed womblike upon the shore.

The morning brought breakfast beside The Cliff House above the ruins of the Sutro Baths, then ultimately, exploring the Land’s End trail near Mile Rock Beach.

Without expectation, following a winding trail, a discovery.

But who and when and why and how…

The what however, is known: Lands End Labyrinth.

Second in a trilogy of Bay Area labyrinths by Eduardo Aguilera.

It’s about a year old, though I had no knowledge of that at the time of discovery.

As it happened, I was still carrying a printout of a seven circuit Chartes labyrinth design.

I struck up a conversation with Roger, one of the early morning labyrinth walkers who you see wearing a Farley’s hoodie.

Roger had no clue as to the origins, but turns out, he himself had just built a labyrinth in his backyard.

Roger also owns Farley’s Coffee in Potrero Hill.

…Amazing who you can meet when you walk newly discovered labyrinths…

A number of co-incidences have happened in and around discovery of Lands End Labyrinth.

This labyrinth is off the beaten path and built by one person, Eduardo Aguilera, in hopes that people would discover them on their own. …sounds familiar.

He had built another labyrinth in the Marin Headlands, at an exact spot that I would discover later the same day. When I stumbled upon the spot, immediately I was inspired to gather stones and begin a labyrinth outline in the earth… yet I was out of gas. Exhausted. Spent. Yet still inspired to return and do it properly.

San Francisco and Toronto, both share well known public labyrinths attached to churches in central locations initiated by formal networks of people: Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and Trinity Church in Toronto

Find myself realizing that I may be Toronto’s Eduardo Aguilera.

But now left with a question I cannot answer from here, where does the Land End in Toronto?