MapLab: Enter the Labyrinth
A visitor wearing a protective face mask watches a dancer perform the installation piece "Our Labyrinth" at the Lee Mingwei exhibition in Berlin on May 11.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
From the nave of Chartres Cathedral in France, to church courtyards around the Bay Area, to stenciled-on paper traced with fingers via Zoom, thousands of spiritually curious minds have followed Lauren Artress down the winding unicursal paths known as labyrinths.
The author of several books about the labyrinth’s meditative properties and the founder of a society devoted to its teachings, Artress considers herself a leading force behind what she calls the “worldwide labyrinth movement.” That is the small but global community of individuals who seek a sense of inner peace and spiritual connection by coursing through these spiral-like structures. Lately, those seekers are growing in number, according to Artress, who compares labyrinths to “maps of the mind.”