The Path Through the Maze

Not far from the burial ground of unmarked graves that the old Harmonists share with a millennium of Indians, the mystical Rappites in 1820 planted a circular privet-hedge labyrinth, "symbolic" (a sign said) "of the Harmonist concept of the devious and difficult approach to a state of true harmony." After the Rappites, the hedges disappeared, but a generation ago, citizens replanted the maze, its contours strikingly like the Hopi map of emergence. I walked through it to stretch from the long highway. Even though I avoided the shortcut holes broken in the hedges, I still went down the rungs and curves without a single wrong turn. The "right" way was worn so deeply in the earth as to be unmistakable. But without the errors, wrong turns, blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth. And worse: knowing the way made traveling it perfectly meaningless.

--William Least Heat Moon