─ Chapter Twelve ─ Labyrinth

Callum stirred, opened his eyes and for a split-second had no idea who or where he was. He turned over and felt the soft skin of Folina’s thigh. He got up quietly, went into the lounge and opened the balcony door to greet the fresh Belgium morning.
Bruges was one of his favourite cities. He loved its smallness, the canals, the architecture, the new sights and smells that greet you as you turn a corner. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings. Leonard appeared wearing a dark blue suit, crisp white shirt and gold coloured tie with blue stars on it.

       ‘Morning Callum, sleep well.’

       ‘Like a baby.’

       ‘What you been up to?’

       ‘Visiting the lads and lasses in Glasgow. They are doing so well. What do you need Callum?’

       ‘I want to go deeper than the deepest depths of labyrinthical metaphors. They have become so popularised since the extraordinary discoveries of the 1980s. I know there is so much more to experience. Jorge has been amazing.’

       ‘Is something holding you back?’

       ‘I don’t want to become obsessed. I’m in love with the Creator of these mysterious manifestations but not the labyrinth pathways themselves, yet the lure, the fascination, the challenge of the unknown is so strong at times it unbalances me slightly.’

       ‘Our soul groups will help you but when you feel overwhelmed allow yourself to be absorbed. Trust the Source. You will not go mad. Stay with it as it happens and sense every vibration in your body, mind, heart and soul.’

Leonard vanished leaving Callum calm and alert. He looked towards the Belfort and could hear its soundless chimes echo in his being. It was time to review the article he had been putting off but the deadline was looming and he needed to post it to Florence over the weekend. He opened the envelope and smiled at the note from Charlotte “This is an extract from my new book – what d’ya think Callum? xx”

Myths, monsters and the maze: how writers fall in love with the labyrinth

     From the ancient Minotaur myth to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining … why are mazes so powerful and comforting in confusing times?

     I cannot navigate. My internal disorientation is mirrored by the world’s; perhaps it is even caused by it. We are surrounded by confusion. I am afraid of what will happen. Round every corner, down every false trail, there are monstrous dangers that threaten to consume us. Will we ever find a clear path to lead us through?

     I have never been able to find my way using maps. Turn me loose in a city without a map and panic rises, as if I were a child who had lost the grip of a parent’s hand in a crowd.

     Conversely, I cannot even lose myself effectively. One night in Rome, I set myself the task of trying to do it. I was living in a building in the Borghese gardens, and one evening, leaving behind my partner and his son, who were engaged in some task in which I played no role, I set forth with the express purpose of aimlessness. I would simply walk, I thought, taking random turnings when it felt right to do so. But all I did was wind round and around, covering no real ground, re-emerging frustratingly again and again on the straight and dreary spine of the Corso. Nothing was discovered. There were no revelations, only weariness. Having no destination in mind – no church, no gallery, no park or vista or bar, as we usually had on our wintry, twilit walks, I felt flat and dismal.

     Eventually I turned a corner and came into a square in which stood a church, San Lorenzo in Lucina. Stepping inside, I came across the pale, restrained tomb of the painter Nicolas Poussin. On it was carved a likeness of his own painting, which hangs in the Louvre, of shepherds in some pastoral idyll stumbling on a sarcophagus on which is inscribed “Et in Arcadia ego”, meaning “I, too, was in Arcadia”. The phrase is ambiguous. Who is this “I”? The dead man, who once enjoyed all the pleasures of Arcadia? Or death itself, which haunts even the most beautiful landscapes? It felt, at least, that I had found an end to the walk.

     On the path of my life, in the middle of my life, I know little about where I have been, and where I might go. The path that lies ahead of me is a riddle. But the path that lies behind is indistinct, too: its myriad and confusing turns already half forgotten, the significance of the landmarks encountered along the way misunderstood, misinterpreted.

     Once upon a time, when I was a child, my parents took me to Crete. We went to Knossos, whose remains, discovered a little over a century ago, are not classical, but of the bronze age, traces of a civilisation a thousand years older than the busily literate Athens. The little writing the inhabitants left behind them, a script we know as Linear B, was deciphered in the early 1950s. It was found to consist mostly of lists of goods: the dull unromantic stuff of bureaucracy. It did not unlock the hearts and imaginations of the people who had lived surrounded by an exuberant luxury of faience and glass and crystal, dashingly elegant frescoes and a swirling vigour of painted pottery.

     I can recall moments of this trip with sharp clarity. I remember my father observing that the buildings had been heavily reconstructed, so that, he implied, our experience was a little compromised, less authentic than it might have been. I remember a huddle of giant pithoi, terracotta storage jars so tall that they loomed over me. I remember walking down a stairway into the heart of the building. Here was a bath to be filled with pure water where a queen might bathe, or so we were told. There was a stone throne with a narrow curving back that looked like something out of Narnia, standing in a room painted with gryphons and waving, coiling flower stems. Another room was painted with dolphins flipping through turquoise waters.

     I can remember the guide saying that the myth of the labyrinth started here: the story that Minos, king of Crete, ordered the inventor Daedalus to build a labyrinth to house the half-bull, half-man Minotaur. That the Athenians were forced to pay the Cretans a regular tribute of seven boys and seven girls, who would be left in the labyrinth to be consumed by the monster. That one year, Theseus, the son of the king of Athens, came to Crete as part of this tribute. That with the help of King Minos’s daughter Ariadne, he killed the creature and found his way out of the perplexing building. That Theseus and Ariadne escaped over the sea, but instead of marrying her as he had promised, the Athenian prince left her behind as she slept on the island of Naxos. That when Theseus sailed within sight of Athens, he forgot to lower the ochre sail and hoist the white fabric that would signal to his father that he was alive, so the old king, in his grief, threw himself off the rocks and died. And that the god Bacchus came to Ariadne on Naxos and fell in love with her.

     The guide said that out there on the broad terrace, Minos, or some Cretan king a shade more real, may have sat and watched acrobats twist and leap in the air, cascading over the horned heads of bulls, just like in the fresco of bull leapers here on the palace wall. (Though it turned out the fresco was a reproduction; the original was in the museum in the city.) Perhaps the bull acrobatics – if the frescoes showed us what really happened at Knossos – were the reason that stories began about the bi-formed Minotaur.

     To be inside a maze is to be bewildered or afraid, but it's also to be inside a structure – lost, but only up to a point. The guide admitted that there was nothing you could exactly call a labyrinth at Knossos, but that the intricacy and complexity of the building, with its winding corridors and bewildering floor plan, may have been the basis of the legend, as memory dimmed into myth in the centuries after the palace was wiped out by earthquake, fire and war. I remember how much I wanted these narrow rooms and passages to be labyrinthine, to trap and contain me, to be magical, to be a code, to be something that could be unlocked. I wanted to lose myself in them. This was where it began, my longing for the labyrinth. Even here it seemed just out of reach: a rumour, a trace, a clue.

     We also went to the museum at Heraklion, the city on whose outskirts Knossos lies. I remember the guide who showed us around. She must have been about the age I am now, neatly dressed in a formal brown suit, while we sweated in short sleeves and sandals. At the end of the tour she turned to me and gave me a little envelope containing three postcards – my reward for being an attentive and interested child. One was of the bull leapers fresco. The second was of another fresco, this time of three beautiful women in blue dresses, gesturing to each other with infinite delicacy. The last was of an intricately worked golden pendant, of two bees curving around a drop of honey.

     I never quite forgot about the guide and her gift to me. The postcards were, together, a talisman, a key to a certain place that became harder to visit, in my imagination, as I became older. One day, some years after I left university, I found the postcards again, quite by accident, hidden away in my bureau, in an old cedarwood box: the acrobats, the beautiful women, the bee pendant. In an envelope, too, a piece of paper bearing the name and address, in old, faded ink, of Sofia Grammatiki, who had guided us around the museum two decades before.

     On a whim, I decided to send her a letter. I didn’t really expect a reply. Some months later, though, I got one. It turned out that her son was living in her old flat in the city. She had moved away into the island, to the Amari valley. It pleased her that her tour, and her small gift, had meant something and that I had gone on to study classics. She herself, she wrote, had studied classical philology in Athens many years ago, before returning to Crete and becoming a high school teacher of Latin and ancient Greek, often earning a little extra in the holidays touring visitors around.

     Over the course of the long correspondence that followed, at first by letter and then by email, it turned out that we shared an obsession with labyrinths. Of course she knew all about the Knossian labyrinth of myth, but she was also knowledgeable about the labyrinths and mazes of later literature and landscapes, for she had walked the maze at Hampton Court and the great 13th-century labyrinth picked out in the stone floor of Chartres Cathedral. She used to speculate on why they appealed to her so. “The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has compared the labyrinth to the boundless ocean, the desert wastes and the disorienting wilds of the forest,” she wrote. “These are, yes, confounding and frightening places. And yet the labyrinth is never so terrifying. A maze or a labyrinth has always been designed by a person. This means that another person has always the possibility of breaking its code. To be inside a maze or a labyrinth is to be bewildered, confused or afraid. But it is, nonetheless, also to be inside a structure. It is to be lost, but only up to a point. It is also to be held within a design and a pattern.”

     In one email I asked Mrs Grammatiki whether she had ever had the kind of recurring dreams that I’d had – in which a door would spontaneously appear in an apparently familiar building, usually my flat in London, or my childhood home. In these dreams, which I still have, I push open the door and wander through room after room of ancient stacked-up furniture and cobwebbed bric-a-brac, exploring spaces that cannot possibly exist within the flat’s footprint, and resemble the warehouse of some careless and untidy seller (or collector) of antiquities. Sometimes I dream of whole wings and enfilades of rooms, each leading to the next; or of a single twining, corkscrewing passage that winds round into a centre. In these dreams, I feel a mixture of pleasant surprise (so much space I hadn’t known about!) and dread. I was, therefore, less confident than her about the essentially benign nature of labyrinths. I think they have the capacity to terrify. The Minotaur lives there, after all.

     After this, she wrote back: “You are right to make this connection between the labyrinth and the world of dreams. For me it is very strong. Borges wrote that a library is a labyrinth. This is also true – the rows of bookshelves running on for miles, with paths and passageways between them, the classification of the texts working as a kind of cipher that the reader must decode in order to find what she wants. That is only the superficial idea, however. Borges meant that literature is itself a labyrinth, and that every library contains the possibility of infinite places and infinite existences. Open a book in a library and you can disappear into a world, its cities, and its landscapes. All books, in turn, are labyrinths that express the winding shapes of their writers’ imaginations. Each writer builds the labyrinth, and then leads the readers through the myriad possibilities of their tale with a thread like that of Ariadne, guiding them down the paths of their story, wherever it might take them.”

     For Sigmund Freud, the unconscious resembled the dark corridors and hidden places of a labyrinth. Navigating the chaos of that maze – achieving mastery over it, mapping it, finding one’s way out of it – was the work of psychoanalysis, he told an interviewer in 1927. “Psychoanalysis simplifies life. We achieve a new synthesis after analysis. Psychoanalysis reassorts the maze of stray impulses and tries to wind them around the spool to which they belong. Or, to change the metaphor, it supplies the thread that leads a man out of the labyrinth of his own unconscious.”

     The Minotaur’s lair in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women is “crinkled to and fro”, and “shapen as the mase is wroght”. To find his way through it, Theseus must use the “clewe of twyne” that Ariadne gives him. The word “clewe” derives from Old English cliwen or cleowen, meaning a rounded mass, or a ball of thread. Eventually it became our word “clue”. It lost its material significance and retained only its metaphorical meaning. But still, there it is, hidden but present: the clewe is in the clue (and the clue is in the clewe). Every step towards solving a mystery, or a crime, or a puzzle, or the riddle of the self, is a length of yarn tossed us by the helping hand of Ariadne.

     In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, Jack Torrance, his wife, Wendy, and their son, Danny, move to an isolated hotel, the Overlook, so that Jack can take up a job as its caretaker when it closes for the winter. There is an enormous hedge maze in the hotel’s grounds, and a model showing its complex design on display inside. In one spine-tingling sequence, Kubrick transports the viewer from watching Wendy and Danny rushing joyfully towards the maze, to an image of Jack, inside the hotel, glowering balefully over the table-top model, in which his wife and child can be seen as curious miniaturised figures. Watching these few seconds of the film, one has the destabilising sensation of being simultaneously above and within the structure. There is a third labyrinth: the hotel itself. It is “such an enormous maze”, says Wendy anxiously, when the couple first arrive, “I feel like I’ll have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs every time I come in”. Breadcrumbs, as we learn from the story of Hansel and Gretel, are not the most effective signs to leave in the confusing expanses of a maze or forest.

     Young Danny, however, is a true labyrinth-walker. There are famous tracking shots of him riding his trike in loops through the various floors of the hotel, the wheels smooth on the rich rugs of the palatial halls and then bumping and rasping on the parquet. He explores the building’s every inch and discerns its hiding places – as well as, it turns out, its bitter memories and hauntings. Ariadne-like, Danny is alert to the dangers of the place, and at a crucial moment gives his mother a knife, in the same way that the Cretan princess gives Theseus a sword. Danny and his mother will need it, because Jack has become a monster. The boy will finally outwit his murderous father in the snow-filled hedge maze by faking his own footprints, walking backwards into them, allowing them apparently simply to stop, then darting into a side alley and covering his tracks. His deranged father, by now a wild Minotaur, is deceived by these false clues. In his last moments, trapped and defeated in the maze, he simply bellows.

     The film itself is a labyrinth, for it attracts interpreters who wish to decipher its apparently arcane and secret meanings. There are those who believe that it is an allegory of the Holocaust, others who contend it is really about the genocide of the Native Americans, others who believe it is an occluded confession by Kubrick that he faked footage of the moon landings, others still who say that it contains references to the precise date of the Mayan apocalypse. It is not hard to see why. Kubrick loads his scenes with details, with “clues”: there are significant-seeming objects and numbers and curious visual anomalies (disappearing pieces of furniture, changing props). I find it striking how similar the Overlook appears in its decor, its stately halls and long corridors, to Knossos as reimagined by its 20th-century excavator,

     The narrator of Henry James’s story “The Figure in the Carpet”, a critic for a literary journal called The Middle, is convinced that a novelist, Hugh Vereker, has buried an “exquisite scheme”, a “little trick”, in all his works. If only he tries hard enough, he believes, it can surely be decoded. In an encounter between the novelist and the critic at a country-house party, Vereker teasingly tells the young man: “To me it’s exactly as palpable as the marble of this chimney.” The critic asks: “Is it a kind of esoteric message?” Vereker replies: “Ah my dear fellow, it can’t be described in cheap journalese!”

     His expression reminds me of an exchange at the start of James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, which begins, like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, with a prologue that claims the story has been transcribed from an old manuscript. In this case, the narrator remembers an occasion, many years earlier, when friends of his at a country house party were in the mood for telling chilling stories. One of their number, Douglas, recalls that at his home in London is a manuscript, written by a governess he used to know, detailing certain disturbing events that occurred while she was caring for two children on behalf of their absent guardian. It is this story, written “in old, faded ink”, that will form the main narrative of the novella. One of the friends asks whether the governess had been in love with the guardian. “The story will tell,” the narrator says. But he is sharply contradicted. “The story won’t tell,” says Douglas, “not in any literal, vulgar way.”

     The scheme can’t be described in cheap journalese. The story won’t tell – not in any literal, vulgar way. The warning, in both cases, is against a reading of a story that attempts to smooth out mystery or ambiguity. You can appreciate the design of James’s subtle spirals, his lovely labyrinths, but don’t expect them to translate into some glib meaning, to be delivering “an esoteric message”. As Borges remarked of the ambiguities of meaning in The Turn of the Screw, “People shouldn’t know [the explanation], and perhaps he didn’t know himself.”

     In “The Figure in the Carpet”, the narrator and his friends become consumed by the project of discovering the “secret” of Vereker’s books. One of them claims to have cracked the code, and is about to write an article that will “trace the figure in the carpet through every convolution”, but he dies before he is able to do so. The narrator finds himself trapped in Vereker’s puzzle, “shut up in my obsession for ever – my gaolers had gone off with the key”. Vereker’s last novel is called The Right of Way: the artist forges ahead, leaving the interpreters flailing around in the labyrinth.

     Borges once said, of James and Kafka, “I think that they both thought of the world as being at the same time complex and meaningless.” For them, no pattern. The story will not tell.

     You are, on the whole, with James and Kafka. But still, is it not possible to live in the complex and meaningless world? The labyrinth is something that you cannot help entering. Once inside it, you have no idea where you are, you feel lost, you are robbed of a sense of direction, but perhaps that does not matter. You will never see the whole design, but you can live with that. There are terrors within the labyrinth but there is also love. The centre may not be where you think it is or where you want it to be. But humans desire pattern and shape and design. They spin thread, they tell stories, they build structures. There is meaning to be made, meaning to be excavated.

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     In her last email to me, Mrs Grammatiki wrote this: "I sometimes imagine that Daedalus, when he designed his labyrinth, must have re-created the ridges and convoluted folds of his own brain in the form of a building, as if it were a self-portrait. Do you not find that an image of the human brain resembles a labyrinth? And if Daedalus’s labyrinth is a diagram of the brain, it is therefore also a symbol of the imagination. It represents the manner in which humans make associations, one thought following another in a long procession, from the edge to the centre to the end. Stories have this comfort to them: they have a beginning and an end. They find a way out of the labyrinth.”

       Folina entered the room, bleary-eyed.

       ‘You’re busy already?’

       ‘Yea, Charlotte had taken some extracts from her new book and weaved them into a thought-provoking article. I promised I would send her some comments which I have just written – here, have a read if you like.’

       She made some coffee then sat in a white leatherette cocoon chair suspended from the ceiling to read. Children could be heard playing outside in their gardens. The occasional horse and carriage could also be heard on the cobbled streets in the distance. Bruges was stirring from its slumber. Folina read it twice, slowly.

       ‘She paints a perfect context to explore labyrinths, doesn’t she.’

       ‘What word stood out to you?’

       ‘Key.’

       ‘Me too. Theresa de Avila dropped by and said, as she often does so quietly and respectfully, “key” while I was half-way through.’ Commented Callum. These brief contacts had been happening with increasing frequency over the past two years.

       ‘Brother Lawrence drew beside as I was reading and said that labyrinths are an archetype for many emerging themes that Spirit is awakening us to. We must listen and pay close attention. He reminded me about changes to the Andean foothills I had noticed during my last trip home – colours, contours, clods of earth and clouds hovering above. Perhaps Labyrinths are the keys to unlocking some of the secrets that have been kept hidden, at least to unenquiring people, for thousands of years.’

       ‘It’s such a privilege to be on this path with you Folina and how our paths are merging.’

       ‘Shall we go for a trip on the canals today?’

       ‘Yes, we could have a picnic. Shall we ask Jorge to come too.’

       ‘Yes, of course.’

       ‘You know he will decline.’

       ‘Yes, its all part of the human game.’

       They then had yet another discussion about how people confuse labyrinths with mazes and discussed the chart that Charlotte had included with her article.

	Labyrinth		Maze
Meaning	Has a single through-route with twists and turns but without branches. It is unicursal.		Is a confusing pathway that has many branches, choices of path and dead-ends. It is multicursal.
Level of difficulty	Is not designed to be difficult to navigate. It may be long but there is only one path.		Is a puzzle and can be designed with various levels of difficulty and complexity.
Entry &  exit	Usually has only one entrance and that is also the exit. There is just one path from the entrance to the centre.		May have different entry and exit points.

 *

       Folina’s main task when she was in Perú was to complete a multi-layered photographical aerial survey by helicopter of the Nazca Lines at five different altitudes. She also followed some strange markings that seemed to point due East towards the Andes and found a much smaller group of lines that entranced her. Again she took photographs at the same five altitudes according to a scalded down grid.

       On returning to Lima she developed all the photographs she had taken in a special room in the basement of one of Lima’s universities, devoted specifically to the study of the Nazca civilisation and its bewildering geoglyphs. Unlike the extremely well-funded American research projects this study was funded totally by the foundation that Folina and her soul group had established five years previously with a group of indigenous Peruvian scientists. There was a growing imperative for secrecy. James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, that was set in Perú was published in 1994, had caused a huge stir, despite the fact that it was regarded as a work of fiction. In fact it contained some very profound truths and the Peruvian Government was worried that hundreds of new age tourists would flock to the country in search of nine ancient scrolls about the secrets of the universe and how we should live. Thankfully, several soul groups coordinated a ring of steal around Folina’s research facility for protection, encouragement and support. Again, Brother Lawrence was a frequent visitor and had long discussions with Folina, totally unbeknown to her research colleagues – all experts in specific fields and chosen carefully by Folina and her trusted contacts.

       The photographs were carefully trimmed and laid out on a five-tier clear glass frame that stood on a solid white base, according to the altitude the photographs were taken. Surrounding the frame was a circular tiered stand to enable the team to look at the photographs from different angles but in relation to each other according to height. There were over fifty specific areas that had been photographed at the five altitudes, nearly 300 in in total. This was painstaking work. The additional photographs that Folina took were in a separate locked room that only Folina and the research director had access to. This was laid out in the same way with a smaller circular viewing stand. Never before had a group of experts from different disciplines had such a multi-layered perspective of the Nazca geoglyphs. The results were, actually, plain to see, even to the un-trained eye. They became even clearer when the photographs for each area were then displayed side by side from the ground looking up through the five levels. Alvaro Hernán Garcia, a famous cartoon artist, who had seen several of the scrolls referred to in The Celestine Prophecy, created sketches of each area based on his observations of the photographs. He talked to Leonardo de Vinci several times as he went about drawing what his eyes, mind and spirit had seen and represented them in a range of formats: pencil, charcoal, chalk, crayon, pen, water colour and oil sketches and paintings. It took him four months to complete the first ten drawings that had been highlighted by Folina and the team.

       He noticed how many lines connected with each other at different points. It was almost as though some magnetic force was drawing them together the higher the altitude became. Alvaro was a student of Maria Celiste and he could hear her frequent comments as he pondered the next movement of his hand. Alvaro said to Folina that “She and Leonardo are the true artists here, I am simply their vehicle to portray what they see in the best way I can. Sometimes my eyes and hands do not feel my own yet I am in complete control. It’s a most wonderful experience.”

       The resulting pictures had a common theme – a swirling vortex, not unlike a tornado, but full of connecting lines that pulsated, swayed, joined and separated to rejoin again as the vortex became wider and wider as the funnel ascended through the five altitudes. It was a labyrinth, a swirling incredibly complex vortex that radiated a majestic beauty and energy that words cannot describe!

*

       Folina’s dream that night was standing in the centre of one of the areas she had photographed. The sun had just set, its dying arc sinking below the distant town of Palpa in the midst of the Nazcan desert within the Pampas of Jumana. A slight breeze started to move the loose dry sand and the thorny bushes nearby. Folina breathed deeply and exhaled several times. Her heartbeat slowed. He spine tingled. She was moving through the air, gradually speeding up into a wider circle. She was flying in a Labyrinth. She saw history, geography and mathematics evolve in front of her eyes – the greatest show on earth. Befawn was present as were angels, glowing living orbs that spoke with each other, unicorns and other beings she had never seen before. It was fantastic and Folina did not want it to end. She flew out of the labyrinth, higher and higher until earth was a glorious globe below. She was suspended in a lovely soft blanket of darkness that was deeply comforting. She saw many huge labyrinths swirling from the surface on all continents. She chuckled to herself as it defied all the science she knew. The vortex-like labyrinths slowed, shrank back towards the ground and merged with each other. Planet Earth is a labyrinth. Planet Earth is a living spiritual being. It truly is Mother Earth!

       Instead of waking up Folina continued to move deeper into her lucid dream and started to learn things that she could never have imagined. The Labyrinth, for she knew that now the Earth Labyrinth must be spelt with a capital “L” spoke with her in a commanding yet loving young women’s voice that was kind of familiar to her. They talked for hours. When Folina was set down back in Perú she decided to wake up. It was about 5am. She walked onto the veranda of her desert cottage, sat in her favourite chair and speed wrote over 75,000 words that described her living dream in great detail and expressing her emotions and the conversation she had with the Labyrinth. Secrets were revealed to her. She closed her leather-bound journal and sighed with pleasure. It was 7.15am and she was peckish.

*

       ‘What is it Callum, you look distracted.’

       ‘Your amazing dream has focussed my mind and provoked me to review all I thought I knew about labyrinths. I never imagined they could play such a significant role in everything. I suppose I should not be surprised but, for some reason, the truths you experienced have been staring at me in the face for a long time yet, for some reason, I could not see it.’

       ‘It is part of the reason why we are together, my love.’

       ‘I know, I pinch myself every day.’

       Their canal boat drifted along its lazy, slow passage through the still clear water. They were in an oasis-like bubble of peace and quiet despite the many tourists thronging into the picturesque city. Callum’s had skimmed the water as he lay in their private boat beside Folina. Sundays are created for rest and their canal trip and picnic was just what the doctor had ordered.

       ‘I wonder what all this means?’

       ‘We only see a part Callum. We would be overwhelmed in this form if we saw all of the big picture. Our brains can’t process all the information – yet. Maybe the evolution of humanity will mean that we learn to use all of our brain’s power. Of course we know that those that claim we only use 10% of our brain is a myth and scientifically incorrect. It fluctuates hugely and we don’t yet have the measuring tools to measure usage. Despite the many advances in brain science we have little idea of the brain’s capacity though it must be true that we could do and be so much more if we truly and literally put, not just our brains, but our minds to the problems this world faces.’

       ‘You should have been a politician – you would be great.’

       ‘That’s never going to happen, not in this form anyway.’

       They both laughed and drifted into another lovely silence – the sound of the water massaging their souls. Their driver had found a secluded spot near a wood for lunch and pulled over and moored. They opened some crisp white wine from a chill bag and ate a beautifully prepared lunch then they leant back against an old willow tree, smiled at each other and linked hands.

       ‘You are lovely Folina. I love the way your hair dances in the summer breeze. Your eyes are like soft lanterns of love that guide and beckon me.’

       ‘You are a sweet-talking academic my darling.’

       ‘Why the hell not; we are, after all, fully paid-up members of the mutual admiration society are we not?’

       ‘Indeed we are; I wish we could stay here longer but we have to be in London on Wednesday to meet with Eleanor and Val.’

       ‘It will be lovely to see them. What time is our train?’

       ’10.30, quite a respectable time eh?’

       ‘First class?’

       ‘Yes, I thought a little bit of spoiling was within acceptable parameters.’

       They giggled.

       ‘That is so not how you usually speak.’

       ‘Who cares!’

       He kissed her passionately on the lips, they gathered their things and signalled to their boat driver they were ready to go back.

*

The three of them had such a funny return trip to London on Eurostar. They were sat near a very large man in an ill-fitting cream suit. He had a very full beard and wore gold-rimmed glasses. He had hearing aids in both ears and seemed oblivious to any noise. He farted very loudly and Folina could hardly contain herself; she stared out of the window at the French countryside, gnawing at her hand in a feeble attempt to stifle her laughter. Folina’s laugh was infectious and Callum and Jorge were soon in the same predicament, not helped by the foul smell that drifted their way. All three got up and walked to the end of the carriage. They stood just outside the entrance and roared.

       ‘Why do we find farts so funny?’ exclaimed Folina, still chuckling.

       ‘I have no idea,’ said Callum.

       ‘We were out of control, my stomach aches with laughter.’

       ‘Let’s go back,’ suggested Folina.

       They took their seats, relieved that the man was asleep. All three of them were on the verge of dropping off when the man farted again and also began to snore very loudly. Once more they tried to contain themselves, trying desperately to suppress the raucous laughter that that would surely burst forth at any moment. Folina spoke to Callum and Jorge without using words – peaceful, relaxed, allow Spirit to take your laughter, breathe deeply; subside... rest. All three were asleep in seconds and did not awake until the train was approaching London.

       The London streets glistened following some rain earlier. People were rushing to and fro. Most seemed in a terrible hurry to get somewhere – fast. Jorge waved to a cab who spotted them, they did a U-turn and were soon on their way to Knightsbridge. The cab pulled into a crescent and then into a quiet cul-de-sac where a large Georgian house greeted them. It was the only property in this secluded spot. Callum paid the driver and they walked towards the house. Folina lifted the handle of the black wrought iron gate. The front garden was ablaze with pink and red roses. The small area of grass was immaculately manicured. Bees busied themselves gathering pollen. Jorge rang what sounded like an antique bell and the door was soon opened by a young, serious-looking butler wearing striped dress trousers and a tailcoat. His white-gloved hands invited them to enter.

       ‘Please leave your luggage here, it will be taken to your rooms. Mrs Goodheart and Ms Heyes are waiting for you; please, follow me. The butler led the way to some oak double doors which he opened with a flourish and gestured to them to enter. Eleanor and Val were outside on the veranda surveying the beautiful lush garden, a welcome oasis in England’s frenetic capital. The butler’s task was not quite complete; he walked across the large room to the veranda, cleared his throat just enough to attract the two women’s attention outside and then announced “Mrs Condor-Hankenson, Mr Jorge Perez and Mr Callum Clayton-Cumberbatch.”

       They hugged, kissed and greeted each other.

       ‘Blimey’, said Callum, ‘it reminded me of home when we had formal dinners!’

       ‘His father died a few months ago so he has taken on the mantle of head butler, actually sweethearts he is the only butler! His father had been grooming him for years. He loves to put on a good show – a throwback to a different era. He is eighteen and actually has a wicked sense of humour when his hair is not slicked down and playing his butler role.’

       ‘Whose place is this Eleanor?’ asked Folina.

       ‘It was my uncle and aunt’s. It was the only house they allowed themselves to keep. It belonged to my uncle’s family, left-wing aristocrats who were renown philanthropists. They gave millions away and did so in a very careful and spiritual way. They owned a portfolio of over fifty very large properties across the UK, Europe and North America. They sold them all, made wise investments and just kept this place as their home. They died within three days of each other four years ago and left everything to me. Welcome to my home. It doesn’t feel like my home but it does have a special place in my heart. I have asked Keith, our butler, cook, gardener – the everything man that for the rest of our stay he can put the role of butler aside and just be himself. His boyfriend is staying and both will join us for dinner this evening which they will prepare.’

       Callum and Jorge were walking around the drawing room admiring the large oil paintings, antique furniture and many other objets d'art. The more they looked the lower their jaws dropped.

       ‘Wow, wow and more wow; Eleanor this is absolutely fantastic!’

       ‘I believe so but, in the end it’s just stuff isn’t it?’

       ‘Yes, I know it’s easy to be drawn in by the exquisite beauty of all this stuff but, of course, I agree, it’s just stuff. The thing is it is tastefully presented; not cluttered, ugly or pretentious – just pure class’, said Callum in a slightly and familiar distracted way.

       ‘Eleanor and I saw you laughing on the train. It reminded us of that scene in Revenge of the Pink Panther with Inspector Clouseau, played by Peter Sellars - someone farted in a lift and they could not stop laughing. It took many takes before Blake Edwards, the Director was happy.’

       ‘You did not intervene’ commented Jorge.

       ‘Why should we have, it was so much fun to watch you all!’ said Val.

       ‘Eleanor, I know I have so much to learn about our psychic links, astral travel, verbal and nonverbal communication etc. We are just scratching the surface of potentiality aren’t we?’ enquired Folina.

       ‘Indeed we are, for now, whatever now is (she said with a wry smile) – it’s simply a phase as we adjust to life in our soul groups. This is the reason for our meeting. We will not be alone, of course. Any member of our soul groups may contribute so we must be open and continue to remain open to that possibility. You may find a quickening of your sensitivity to their presence in whatever form they take or communicate. Val’s work on wisdom and discernment is becoming increasingly important in this regard and is keeping us all balanced and in step with the Source of Life. I sense that we are going to learn a profound lesson in the next two days and it is this – soul groups, esoteric writings, ancient scrolls, beings from other worlds and existences, astral travel, labyrinths, psychic links and communication – all of these are just tools, signposts to help us live our Divine nature in our current human form. They are not ends in themselves; they are expressions of love from the Divine but they are not the Lover of All There Is. They can be fantastically beautiful and totally out of this world , the planet we breathe on we call earth, but they are still a mirror-like image of the real that is in every person and animal that has ever lived. Labyrinths are indeed an ancient archetype of pretty well everything as I know Callum and Jorge are discovering. You are both constantly re-examining and adjusting your thinking about them. They are bigger than you and you are bigger than them. I have no idea why I just said that – hey ho.’

*

It turned out that the main learning of the two days was precisely what Eleanor said during the first hour of them coming together. In fact the following two days turned into a test. There was no communication from other members of the two soul groups or any other soul group. There were no specific experiences that they had become accustomed to. The test was to be with each other without anything apparently obvious happening at all. This did not sit easily with any of them. They were used to beautiful things happening. Not this time. They needed to acknowledge and understand the strong pull of the cultural context in which they were living in their human form. They are a product of it, despite the profound realisation of being a Divine human being. The two days deepened their bonds with each other and they grew in wisdom and discernment. Although it may have been a test, a game even, they accepted that it turned out differently to what they thought and embraced the lack of the miraculous and Divine revelation they had anticipated. Their response to embracing what appeared to be a barren time actually prepared them to dig deep into the Source and realize they did not have to do or say anything in order to experience true love. It turned out to be a time of preparation for the mingling of minds, missions, hearts and souls across the soul groups which would shortly enter a new phase that would have far-reaching consequences. They were becoming visionaries, modern-day prophets. Eleanor’s closing thought as she wished her guests a fond farewell was an old woman’s quote on vision. “Vision”, she said is “foresight with insight based on hindsight”. Think about it. Let it seep deep within you all.

       ‘Remember, we will look, listen and feel what really happened when Jesus walked on this Earth over two thousand years ago. This will equip us to live our lives as Divine beings in the present and shape the world of the future. I use words about time but time, of course, is irrelevant, it is just a necessary illusory “fact” that humans believe they are caught up in. It debilitates rather than empowers. It entraps them in the form of their minds – our mind when we let it. Eckhart Tolle is a modern prophet who walks his talk, who genuinely lives in the now which is all there is. Go dear friends. See you at Castlethorpe for the unveiling.

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