of time and the river
For nine months, I have practiced walking in presence in Dara Friedman’s River Hill labyrinth at Silo City. A labyrinth–not to be confused with a maze–is an ancient symbol of contemplation, meant for clearing rather than creating confusion. Nestled amongst the hulking grain silos of bygone industry, the site-specific third-acre art work is a living monument mimicking the “meander of the Buffalo River.” Composed of Lake Erie seiche soil, hardy pollinator plants, sweet smelling herbs, black locust logs and granite stones, River Hill dances a spiral pattern away from and back towards a central circle. I have walked it alone, with friends, and with groups of people. Each time, the act of presencing becomes a unique happening.
River Hill was implemented as part of the University at Buffalo Arts Collaboratory’s Working Artists Lab in conjunction with the Lyceum at Silo City. Friedman worked with the Ecological Director of Silo City, Josh Smith, to choose beneficial plants that could survive the harsh landscape with minimal maintenance. Varieties of perennial sunflower, bee balm, hyssop, and mountain mint were grown from seed off-site and then planted by a class of students who worked with Friedman in the fall of 2022.
The labyrinth creates a physical winding and unwinding of space; and Friedman speaks of the “conflict resolution” capacity of the work. She has an interest in Aikido, the Japanese martial art of redirecting opposing energies toward harmony. A practitioner of Aikido fully understands that all opposites are intertwined: peace cannot exist without war and war cannot exist without peace. Each contains and creates the other. In accepting non-separateness, opposition dissolves. Trying to intellectualize this falls short: it must be felt in the body–in the way that the body moves, takes shape, and moves among other shapes in space.
“It’s in the pivot,” Dara tells me. After a couple walks, this is revealed in muscle memory. The path turns the body again and again to face contrasting directions. On the surface, the pivot becomes an opportunity to change perspective, to shift the gaze, to expand the possibility of awareness. But because the path holds to a central axis, there is a sensation of wholeness–maybe even completion?–in the rounding. The geometry of the movement is a spiral, a representation of infinity. A spiral in three dimensions becomes a spherical vortex which is self-contained, circling in and out of its center like a whirling dervish spinning in finite form to find the infinite. The pivot directs a body in turn, in tension, in change.
In February, there was a 60-degree day and I walked the labyrinth in the strange warmth with billows of waking insects, disoriented, hungry for spring. Nothing to feed on but the warmth of a distant sun.
In March, I walked the labyrinth with a friend who loves solitude and silence as much as I do. The wind was raging and we found ourselves walking backwards to avoid facing battering winds. Snot and tears released from spiraling ducts, flowed around nasal conchae; the ear canals became wind-tunnels amplifying the roar.
In April, I walked with a friend who was working through a conflict, a knot that she wanted to untie. We came across a skunk in the path. “It looks like a fancy dog,” she said, with its long hair and pluming tail. We paused and waited as it sauntered on gracefully: a dignified teacher of patience and non-violent self-defense. What’s the rush? Where is everyone trying to go all the time?
“The labyrinth wants to be walked,” Dara says. I know just what she means. Each spin around it seems to create an electrical charge. Is it the eddying air around the walker’s body? Is it the gravitas of each step–or kiss, as Dara suggests, between the sole of the foot and the ground? The subtle aromatic release of yarrow and chamomile sprouting up in the path–in some places as thick and inviting as shag carpeting. I want to roll in it like a child or a dog, to bow down and bury my nose.
Lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets begin to whisper in my mind. I’ve been casually trying to memorize it in fragments. Eliot’s masterpiece contemplates time and space and movement through seasons. That electrical charge of the spiraling growth–is it the reciprocal look of “flowers that are looked at”? Is it “The dance along the artery / The circulation of the lymph” that fuels steady momentum around the huge heart stone that marks River Hill’s sweet spot center–easily seen as “the still point of the turning world”? Oh, it’s all so serious and yet, it’s not. It’s just a dance. It’s just a walk. It’s just being present, not past, not future.
The river is a body. Let this be tangible truth and not metaphor. It contains lives and is a whole life, a superorganism. Beyond that, it resides in the body of ground, the body of the Earth. The withins in both directions become infinite. Nature teaches again and again the story of non-separation, of nesting withins. Isolation is impossible. The only real isolation is in the mind: separation is a myth that we continue to reinforce simply by believing it. The body is a river and the body is made of rivers.
Water is both soft and hard. It flows around everything seeking the path of least resistance and also wears down rocks, reshapes land, and swallows cities. Lake Erie seiche soil was mounded atop Silo City’s rubble ground to create the topography of River Hill. A seiche wave is a standing wave, suspended in stormy conditions, creating a vertical pattern for a period of time. Stirred sediment washes ashore. Be like water, the Tao Te Ching says. Become the crest. Become the trough. Become the tide that is always seeking balance. Shimmy the sediment if you must. Let the moon pull you.
Walking with these thoughts of the river–of water–I enter River Hill from the sunny side during the driest May I can remember. Two standing dead locust logs mark the threshold. Are they dead? Ear to wood might tell another story. Can the infinite nesting be heard in the matter leftover from life? “O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark, / The vacant interstellar spaces.” (Eliot, again.) Death, the shadow side to every moment of life. The space around a star that allows its shine. The rests around the notes that create music. These seemingly stark separations are interwoven ensuring that death is not the end and birth is not the beginning but one moment in entirety, a circling whole.
In late June and July, the hyssop, mountain mint, and bee balm along the path begin to swell and flower. In the periphery, Amorpha fruticosa and Rosa virginiana are beginning to reach and flourish, as are mulberry, spicebush, basswood, serviceberry–some with protective caging. Silo City’s ecological steward, Josh Smith, has been in relationship with these acres for ten years and is a necessary guide for successful plantings. Josh is my husband, so I watch his relentless, iterative process up close. People who grow and love plants know well how to work with uncertainty. They navigate elemental balance-seeking with the same focus as a yogi or a martial artist. The resulting summer pollination feast is joyful to watch with proboscis nectar suckling and bee limbs heavy with pollen. This eager communal vibrancy destroys any self-centered thoughts.
In July, I walked with a group of yoga practitioners from the Himalayan Institute in Buffalo. Each got a palmful of yarrow seeds to disperse in the path to help fill in some of the bare spots. White flowered yarrow, also known as soldier’s woundwort, is a well-known healer of deep cuts and was historically carried by soldiers and warriors in a medicinal pouch. The herb is both warming and cooling, warming to speed and support the body’s healing response and cooling to numb the pain of it.
“The labyrinth is a container,” Dara says. I think I know what she means. I walk, able to forget about direction, yet not able to get lost. The pattern holds me and I let it. It is a practice. Unlike sitting in meditation, the body has something to do but is also given the opportunity to forget motivation and planning. There’s no striving, no fear of inadequacy.
Matthew Sanford, a brilliant yoga teacher whose body is paralyzed from the chest down, talks about how pain needs boundaries. He is referring both to physical pain and emotional pain. If we can’t see the edges of our pain, it is too overwhelming to fathom. Upon injury, a child immediately seeks a reassuring hug, wrapped arms make it possible to wrap the mind around the experience of pain in the body. It becomes measurable and contained rather than sprawling and unending. If pain is boundaried, then it can be seen more objectively as information. Perhaps counterintuitively, it becomes less personal by its containment. Only then can the experience of pain become a teacher.
In a workshop, Sanford said, “You can’t go forward in realization without limitations.” Layering this thinking upon the patterned ground of River Hill, I wonder about expansion and containment not as opposing forces but as arms of an embrace. Rounding the curves and switchbacks, the buffering placement of stones and logs, I am hugged by moving in the landscape. Time is a mother, someone once said. Someone also once said, “You spend half your life running away from home and the other half going back.” It is the natural order of things. First you inhale, then you exhale.
As a filmmaker, Dara Friedman has a fine-tuned yet playful sense of time. There is something captured and controlled; but within this, there is an exploration of organic movement and a complex challenge to duration. In some of her film work, she overlays asynchronous sound with triptych rhythmic imaging. In viewing, the mind seeks cohesion, thus slipping into a medial space of wonder and pursuit. The experience becomes a wordless poem. A vibrational thin space. When editing film, she said, “Two arm lengths of a film strip is the length of one slow inhale and exhale.” This is the presencing of art: the breath beyond material confines that creates the happening.
She speaks of focusing her camera on the sun for her 2022 film Mandorla, which embodies “a form of neolithic sun-gazing that compresses deep time and the momentary.” The sun would gradually ease out of frame: “It wanted to exit stage right.” How is it that we forget the curves of the landscape and the pull of gravity in the world we inhabit? Nature is not flat. It is not straight. It is, as Alan Watts says, wiggly or wobbly.
Experience is the only teacher. Of this, I am certain. Each year, the August and September burst and wane of the last growth of our region is accompanied by the wild geese beginning their departure. They may appear to be flying in a straight line, but rest assured, it is curved. Nature shows us over and over of cycles, of spirals: doing and undoing, winding and unwinding. These nine months of walking River Hill’s coilings have revealed straight paths to be a source of confusion, short-sightedness, and unnecessary urgency. But don’t take it from me: feel the happening in your own body.