Sunset Labyrinth at Sunset Beach . . .

. . . Sunset occurs at a 'liminal time' of day . . .

. . . somewhere I have read about "Double Liminal." I drew and walked a labyrinth on the Foreshore at both sunset and sunrise as part of my exploration of the Labyrinth and Liminality.

experimenting with Liminal Space

The Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress described walking a Labyrinth as a "liminal" experience.

In social and cultural theory, Victor W. Turner defined 'liminality' as moments 'betwixt and between' fixed cultural categories.

The beach of an ocean can be classify into categories.
The foreshore is the area of the beach between the average high and low water marks. It is covered and uncovered as the tide migrates. The seaward side of the foreshore is the nearshore, which is below the level of the low tide. Behind the foreshore is the backshore, it is above the the level of the high tide.

Symbolically then, because it is between the nearshore and the backshore, the foreshore can be used to represent liminality, a 'betwixt and between' place.

I walked my first Labyrinth . . .

. . . at St. Paul's Anglican Church, on Jervis Street, in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia.

Then I attended the Pilgrimage and the Labyrinth Facilitator Training in San Francisco, at Grace Cathedral,
with The Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress, founder of Veriditas. There I met Robert Ferre, Master Labyrinth Builder, at his workshop on Labyrinth Building and walked the Labyrinth at Lands End (above photograph).

During the summer and fall of 2008, I began to experiment with the Labyrinth and "Liminal Space."

The process I developed to do this was drawing labyrinths in the sand, on the Foreshore of the Ocean, at places such as Spanish Banks and Sunset Beach.

A Labyrinth at a wedding on Gabriola Island, August 2009

walking a labyrinth

. . . for the past couple of years, I have been exploring the Labyrinth and "liminal space" or "liminality."


Labyrinth or Maze???

Jeff Saward describes a labyrinth as a design that has one path and a maze as a design that has choices in the path.

Robert Ferre uses the following criteria in his definition of a labyrinth:

1. a continuous path
2. one path, one centre and one entrance
3. the path has no intersection or choices
4. the turns create a back and forth pendulum motion