Burnet Woods Labyrinth

MyGen Profile GeneratorThis is a page to remember the Burnet Woods Meditation Labyrinth, a sacred art project that lasted for over a year and a half in Cincinnati, Ohio. Burnet Woods is a 90 acre public park in the middle of the city. The slideshow above shows some of the stages of my development. My PICS section is full of images, organized into chronological folders. I was created to be a temporary art installation, constructed from locally found natural materials. I will now be slowly consumed by the woods.(This slideshow below is for slower computers, it is missing some accompanying text. If you click on the pictures, the words will appear. The top one may also be unavailable if too many people are watching it at the same time.)A labyrinth is a coiled winding path, walked slowly to a central point as a tool to focus the mind. Unlike a maze, with complex exit choices, you leave by simply reversing your direction and following the same path back to the entrance. Traditional labyrinths follow formal geometric patterns. I curved around trees and wandered across the landscape. There were nine meditation areas inside: one large center and eight smaller ones aligned to the cardinal and intercardinal directions.When I first began, I was made just from sticks and most people walked by without even noticing me. As more people came to visit, multiple extensions were added to cover the entire open area of my grove. The path continued to be lined with fallen branches and cut logs. On several occasions, the tree near the front dropped huge limbs without hurting anything inside, making a natural front door. The entrance location was chosen before the first limb fell.Eventually, stones began to be added to mark confusing turns in my path and to serve as seats for meditation. They quickly turned into art. Some stones marked the seasonal rising or setting locations of the sun on the local horizon. These alignments could also be symbolic. The main line of standing stones was set up along the Southwest to Northeast axis. These two points represent the light polarity of the winter solstice setting sun and the summer solstice rising sun.Before I was closed, I had at least 125 major standing stones or rock piles inside. In earlier phases the entire path was stone lined. When I was closed, these sculptures were all collapsed and piled up into five huge funeral mounds that made a cross pattern over the landscape.A few people may have randomly started me but the Labyrinth is the product of anonymous communal effort. People were encouraged to bring natural objects to add to the design. Each of the hundreds of rocks inside, from palm-sized to person-sized, represents the effort of a visitor to add to the ever changing experience. The piles of small rocks were accumulated gifts. The stones that were too large to be carried by one person were slowly flipped or rolled by passing visitors. Huge boulders slowly walked uphill to be added to me, often across the park.During the spring and summer, I was hidden but my front door was obvious. After the leaves fell, no one could tell where to start. During a storm, some limbs fell around the outer edges. They were too large to move. They became the first panels of an elaborate fence that completely encircled me, woven together like netting from the park's waste trimmings.