I've been looking over old notebooks. I have a lot of notebooks. I hoped there was useful information in them, like diary entries about previous New Year's Eves. I apparently haven't written that sort of thing down very often. I write down dreams, I scribble numbers to help balance check registers, I take down a phrase that catches my ear and I plan article ideas. It doesn't actually make for illuminating reading. Notebook writing is not pretty--it is life half-digested.
So I can't check my memory against a memoir from the time, but I want to talk about New Year's Eve a few years ago. I'm guessing it was either the crossover from 1997 to '98 or '98 to '99. I remember I felt I was in a fairly good place in my life, glad for all that had happened to me and confident about the future. St. Louis' celebration of First Night, an alcohol-free family-oriented party, was in the convention center downtown. I believe I was working at it (I did so several years), assisting in the booth set up by Taproots School for the Arts. I helped kids make little accordion books with colorful covers and ribbons holding them together. All my fellow volunteers and I spent our evening in assembly-line work, cutting ribbons, hunting for glue sticks, reciting our "this is how it's done" spiel to 3000 children every hour. (I may be exaggerating.)
At a break in the book-making I wandered the convention center. Artisty things were happening all over. There was a drumming group that attracted a large crowd in the main hall. A woman dressed as the Snow Queen frosted glittery confetti wishes on eager small ones. I remember Bill Christman's Guilt-O-Rama wasn't up that year and I was disappointed. It was an artist's take on the Catholic ritual of Confession; you went through it, confronted your dark side in various ways (most of which involved neon), and when you emerged out the other end you got your hand stamped: "Forgiven." It was great.
There were performances going on in various rooms, singing groups, jazz bands, probably a little theater. Much of it was loud and raucous especially with all the children running everywhere. And then to counter this there was a Peace Labyrinth. A large room had dim lights and signs requesting silence and on the floor, marked with masking tape, was a design copied from the floor of Chartres Cathedral. (You can see it here.) Again there was a connection to Taproots--the fellow who makes these labyrinths uses the school as a work space to construct canvas ones, and I've assisted putting down the masking tape for a few of these meditation tools over the years. This particular labyrinth, if walked at a leisurely pace, would take about a half-hour to complete--meaning, walking to the center and back out again. On my break from the bookmaking I wandered into the labyrinth.
The discipline of it is quite unusual. The path, after all, is just masking tape. If you walked in a straight line across the design, you'd get to the center in less than thirty seconds. Instead you make yourself stay in the lines as you fill in a full circle--sometimes walking half the perimeter, sometimes taking 180-degree turns every few steps. You get tantalizingly close to the center only to find yourself drawn back out again, and then as soon as you think you'll never get inside, a final turn gets you in.
At First Night there were thousands walking the labyrinth over the course of the evening, all at different paces--teenage boys racing each other, older women pausing contemplatively at every step. A costumed character was in there with me as I was pacing the spirals. He had a long white beard and a sash proclaiming the year swiftly leaving us. (The New Year's Baby was nowhere to be seen.) I quickly decided what I had to do. How often does one get a chance to do this? I caught up to him and shook the old year's hand. "Thank you," I said. "I really enjoyed it."