Pattern for an eleven-circuit Chartres labyrinth. Source: Labyrinth Community Network of Ontario, Canada.
Making a scene
When a Jewish girl plays the title character in an English class scene from the 1971 musical Jesus Christ Superstar, it’s an amusing eighth-grade anecdote. But when that same girl two years later chooses to “accept Jesus as her personal savior,” the innocent teenage choice reverberates for decades. As I write that girl’s story—my story—I am asking, What does it mean for a young Jew to embrace a Christian life (Act I) and choose to live as a missionary on the Navajo reservation (Act II) before turning away from that life to find academic success (Act III)? Now in my sixties, I am interested in her personal agency as she navigates the complex journey from a twice-prescribed life into a self-determined future.
A circuitous route
Our experiences are not as linear as a span of years might suggest. We recycle our wrongs, heal our hurts, and distance ourselves from the same demons over and over again as we grow, change, and exercise personal agency. Sometimes, the path from “here/then” to “there/now” may be a straight line, but it is more likely a wave, a circle, a spiral, or its complex cousin, a labyrinth. A single path may lead us toward and away from the center several times before we reach the deep, meaningful life we seek—a life informed by what we find in the center.
Lessons from the labyrinth
On a recent Saturday in Albuquerque, New Mexico, my friend Jane and I walked the paths of an eleven-circuit labyrinth on the grounds of a local church. The quiet, elevated spot affords views of the Sandia Mountains to the east and of the western skies beyond the city limits. Season and time of day alter the experience of walking sandy paths marked by rocks and stones, as does the walker’s mindset. We may share the question or concern prompting our meditation, or we may enter and exit silently, sharing insights afterwards, if at all. That day, I was thinking about my writing life, both poetry and memoir.
As I walked, I noticed the how the paths oscillate toward and away from the center several times on both the arriving and departing paths. Each rounded turn represents a moment of reflection, a pause between the path behind and the path ahead toward the elusive but inevitable heart center around which all paths revolve. There are no dead ends and only four short, straight paths; gentle rounded turns guide us forward.
Where the pavement ends
Headed back to the car, I realized my story's center, physically and metaphorically. Once upon a time, I lived in Pinon, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation with my one-year-old daughter and then-husband for fourteen months, but now I recognize that my life had already approached and circled that center before I ever knew of its existence. The small town of Pinon is accessible by about thirty-five miles of rutted pavement from Chinle, AZ, to the east; by a graded dirt and gravel road that originates twenty miles south near Kykotsmovi, AZ; and by any number of narrow dirt roads that crisscross the mesas and washes of the Navajo Nation. Houses, hogans, and trailers appear scattered for miles across ancestral land. When we arrived in the early 1980s, Pinon comprised a few homes, two small markets (no grocery store in those days), three churches, a mission compound (where we lived), a post office, a trading post, and a rodeo ground. At the trading post, you could buy hardware, candy, dry goods, weaving supplies, cast iron cookware, and just about anything else you might need or want, including T-shirts. My two favorites? “Pinon: Where the Pavement Ends and the Wild West Begins” and “Where the Hell is Pinon?”
Source: Google Maps, Pinon, AZ
And after we moved away from Pinon, the place and the people I had known there sustained and guided me, though it took years to understand its role in my life. Not all of my choices link back to time spent in Pinon, but living there opened new ways of seeing and thinking without which later decisions and actions would not have been possible.
And graduate school begins
When our daughter was four years old and our son, a year, I attended my first graduate English course at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. The assigned readings and the seminar discussions in Bryan Short’s “Women Writers and Feminist Theory” class blew my mind as I cycled through seasons of marriage, motherhood, and self discovery. My term paper, “Changing Woman, Changing Women: An Exploration of Female Navajo Identity through Myth and Poetry,” led to a Master’s thesis, At Once Gentle and Powerful: Voices of the Landscape in the Poetry of Luci Tapahonso. At the time, Luci was a little-known Navajo poet who would later become the first Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. My life took a new turn, entered a new cycle of choice and change.
Out of the labyrinth and into the memoir
Once my memoir is finished and published, I hope you will read and trust the circular narrative to find out how that secular Jewish girl from Southern California chose to follow Jesus to Pinon, Arizona, and what happened over the next decade when she chose a life different than any she imagined.
And if I write it well, my hope is that you will reflect on your own circuitous path and returning choices at each turn toward and away from the center of your own life-labyrinth.
Thank you for being interested in and part of this writer’s ongoing journey. I welcome your comments. And let me know if you’ve been to Pinon, AZ, lately!
Shalom and Hozho,
Andi
Andrea M. Penner, PhD, writes and finds poetry in New Mexico. Her essays, stories, and poems have been published in literary journals, rags, and anthologies. One of her indie published poetry collections, Rabbit Sun, Lotus Moon, was a finalist for a 2017 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. She is writing a third manuscript (poetry) and a memoir about her long-ago life in Pinon, Arizona (see above).
I am very much looking forward to reading more about the labyrinth! Love this as the metaphor for your story.