| Building the Labyrinth |
Loretta Forquer and Camilla Smith, seriously to consider the possibility. They
began to prepare the land.
They shared the idea and the drawings with Sister Pat McCabe, OP, who as a former Math and Science teacher, tackled the geometry of building a labyrinth in the meadow. Sr. Jane bush- hogged the land and then volunteers helped her rototill. Sister Jane wanted the paths to be three feet wide to accommodate the mower and that determined the scale of the labyrinth. It was decided to place log benches in the turnarounds to create spaces for rest and meditation.
Sister Pat recreated the design on paper with different colored yarns and glued on buttons to represent the placement of benches. She bought clothesline and colored markers to duplicate her design in the meadow. As the time came to do the work, she divided twelve volunteers into teams, assigning them to each of the four quadrants, and the foundation of the Shepherd’s Corner Labyrinth,
measuring a half mile in and a half mile out, was built one Saturday in the Summer
of 1997.
On the following day and for many days after, volunteers came to rake mulch and compost into mounds beside the path. Sister Pat had recently moved from a place where she had a large garden. With the aid of the volunteers from the Columbus Academy, her garden was dug up and transplanted to the earth mounds in the labyrinth. For the next several weeks, volunteers arrived with plantings from their yards and the path was lined with wildflowers and perennials.
The end result was a labyrinth 120 feet in diameter, with a walk of 1/2 mile to reach the center (and to get back out) along 3ft wide paths among the wildflower and grasses. The Labyrinth at Shepherd’s Corner was designed to be a place of transformation, a journey that offers sacred space and an opportunity to rediscover that we are spiritual beings on a human path.
Excerpted from:
'An Earthen Path' by Marcia Willson Bohley, The Word from Shepherd's Corner. Vol.7 , No.2 . June, 2002