The Only Way Forward Is Through
It’s 3:03 AM Wednesday morning, and the moon’s graceful arc up through stately oak trees dripping Spanish moss has given me my eleventy-first wind.
I’m momentarily spellbound as the moss reflects a ghostly blue light from the solar LEDs I’ve been carefully spiraling.
I began this labyrinth build at 10 AM, and it will take a full 19 hours to finish the pattern. My hands are aching, I’ve got maybe an hour or two to go, and I am IN IT.
Once I start laying out a labyrinth, it’s nearly impossible for me to stop until it’s complete: The only way forward is through.
This land is beautiful, our campsite nestled up alongside a lake, and the roller coaster of emotions that I’ve been riding is finally evening out. This is the largest footprint I’ve ever attempted in lights and rope — a 50- by 30-foot rectangle — and by early Wednesday morning, I’m finally fully confident that I can realize my vision.
The tension leaving my body as self-doubt drains away opens me up to a flood of gratitude. I’ve been nurturing this seed since November, when I decided to build a labyrinth dedicated to the emotion of resignation for Emergence, and so many people have believed in this vision….
The Emergence Board awarded me my first art grant. My husband Doug held an abundance of space as I navigated both the depths of this emotion and my own creative process. Members of Camp SandWitches chipped in to purchase additional lights and helped me with a test build a few weeks prior to the burn.
We set up in a vacant lot next to our friend Robert’s house. The neighborhood loved it, kids shrieking through it, racing each other, skipping, dancing. Robert lent us his fire sculpture Global Warming to complete the set of elemental stations I set up to help walkers ground before or after their experience.
Members of the SandWitches and Our Test Build in Smyrna
Worried about the length of the build on top of a long drive, I gave myself a travel day, spending Monday night in Folly Beach with Jenifer, who treated me to a beach walk, dinner, and some body work to help prepare for the build. I’m humbled by her generosity. This will be a working burn for her. As a member of the Emergence Board, she’ll spend the bulk of her time serving others, monitoring walkie-talkie channels, driving shuttles, ensuring lamps are lit, and pouring hours into laying down lights with me…
Onsite at Emergence, I’m in awe of my settings. This is sacred ground, and I walk the boundary where the labyrinth will live, asking permission from the spirits of this place to weave this Resign to Rise pattern in and amongst the gorgeous oak trees. I take in the calm lake in front of my tent. I dedicate this space to safe explorations, to connection, to healing and laughter.
And with the boundaries blessed and the space cleared, it’s on.
I alternate between bopping along to music coming from a camp setting up catty-corner from us and cussing a blue streak as I outline the pattern in rope. Jenifer and Journey team up to lay down solar LED strings on the sections of rope I decide are good and walkable.
Physical objects — a camp chair, a bin, stools, tables — match a grid on my digital image, which help me translate they labyrinth’s curves from my phone’s screen to the ground before me. We strive for 3-4 strands at a minimum along the rope, usually more, and preferably coming from at least two different solar panels for redundancy. Journey comes back onsite Wednesday to help me stake down the pattern to keep it in place.
Folly Beach walk, open mic night at Chico Feo, from my tent at Emergence, onsite build in progress, with Jenifer during build
Three elemental stations flank the labyrinth’s entrance from the road: The Air Pod Listens is to the left, and Grounding Patterns and Mist Emotions are to the right.
Across the event, I will find people journaling or napping in the butterfly-laden Air Pod; I feel almost invisible inside it, listening to the conversations of burners coming and going but without needing to react or respond. One lovely human is so taken by the concept of Air Pods listening to her instead of the other way around that she plans to use it as a journaling prompt. Good thing I leave a journal inside…
Some people use the lavender or tourmaline sprays from Mist Emotions, but it’s Grounding Patterns’ Zen sand garden that really pulls people in. I will find stones, trinkets, and new patterns every time I walk by. Someone enthuses as they finish a design: “This? Is the most satisfying thing I have done all burn.”
Deeper in camp, where the labyrinth’s sun spills walkers back out into the maze of the burn, we set up Global Warming, Robert’s propane fire sculpture. Nighttime temperatures dip into the low 40s a few nights, and warmth is welcome.
I shine a “ceiling doily” on one of the most beautiful trees, accentuating the blue spiral. A friend brought a shifting laser light to shine on a ceiling for a gathering last year, giggling about how she puts it out when company comes over: “You know, like my grandma would put lace doilies on her couch!” Ceiling doily. It’s such a fun phrase I can’t think of them in any other terms. My newest ceiling doily also makes an excellent tree doily.
Elemental Stations: The Air Pod Listens, Mist Emotions, Grounding Patterns, Global Warming. An excellent tree doily.
From the road, the labyrinth ushers walkers into the bricks of yellow and green that form the top of the well, before sucking them down past the purpling earth and into a blue maelstrom.
The tightening blue spiral represents the hopelessness that resignation brings up in me, and, as a double spiral, just when you think you can’t go any further, it reverses direction, spiraling out the opposite way you’ve come in.
This can be such a disorienting experience that I’ve wood-burned a sign to place here:
The Only Way Forward Is Through
So many times over the next few days, I will watch walkers pause when they get to the center of the spiral, glancing around and wondering whether to trust the path.
Then they lean over to read these words illuminated in a ghostly blue glow. They step forward. They find their way through.
If they persist, they will spiral out, edge up the side of the well, and emerge through the body and wings of a phoenix. Resign to Rise.
And at the top of the bird’s beak is a sunburst with three exits, marking where the labyrinth becomes the maze again, and I must make choices about where to head next.
One exit leads into our chill space, one to Global Warming, and the most commonly used one is an “exit through the gift shop” that takes walkers through the Dinosaur Petting Zoo installation right next to us, where dinosaurs of many shapes and sizes are available for adoption. A parked forklift gets decorated with a green tarp and clever dino head to direct foot traffic. We take a blurry camp photo in front of it — a full party platter of SandWitches.
I get clearance for a short drone flight Wednesday night. I don’t take it up far because of the overhanging trees (and to ensure I don’t accidentally photograph anyone without their consent), but I am able to capture aerial shots of the labyrinth’s three main elements: the well, the spiral, and the phoenix.
My intention this burn is to rekindle my creative spark. To work through a soul-crushing spate of resignation that has me hiding, raging, and denying my gifts. Engaging with this emotion teaches me so much. Like my realization during our IRL Circle Share on Thursday evening that I only seem to find resignation after an emotional blow-up from where I’ve tried to break through and failed. Spectacularly.
Sometimes currents can’t be shifted, and it’s like I have to get wet before I’ll realize it. The struggles I put myself through, splashing and thrashing through a range of attendant emotions before I can even feel resignation!
Rage. Injustice. Anguish. Shame. Humiliation. Grief. Contempt. Hatred. They’re a salt burn catalyst, and I wish that I could find catharsis without doing quite so much harm to myself and those around me.
My bulleted lists of how I coexist with resignation, how I move through it, and how I shake it off are enriched by the introspections of others Circle, by collecting stories of resignation from other burners across the duration of the event, by stumbling upon others explaining this labyrinth to their own friends in their own words. I will return to these again and again for insights and guidance.
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Numbing
Fiction - Getting lost in a maze not of my making
Cultivating resilience - Nourishing needs and fulfilling calculated wants
Directing energy - Becoming mindful of where energy is flowing and evaluating optimal paths
Yoga
Music - Creating a soundtrack for the moment
Taking comfort in this phase - Seeking and redefining what comfort means
Napping
Identifying, establishing, and maintaining boundaries
Developing an awareness of time
Seeking equanimity
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Seeking catharsis - How can I find emotional release without damaging relationships?
Communicating where I’m at - Being honest about my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state
Participating in Circle Share
Physical exertion - Building, gardening, roller skating, dancing, breathing
Massage - Letting go of tension
Surrender - Naming the circuses and monkeys that are not mine to manage
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Creating community - Apologizing, expressing gratitude, meeting someone else’s needs
Holding space
Recognizing change - In myself, in others, in the world
Feeding hope - Giving more oxygen to agency than hopelessness
Redirecting energy into creative activity
Volunteering, protesting, pairing belief with right action
Creating the world I want to live in
One human tells me about a drawn-out extrication from an enmeshed friendship, drawing upon an acceptance of time and a recognition of change to get through it. Many reference surrender or letting go as an alternative to resignation. I hold space for stories about death, about becoming sober, about the loss of lovers, the loss of mobility, the loss of rights.
At the crossroads nearest our camp, I overhear someone explain the labyrinth’s premise to a whole group on walkabout together. Popcorn, they volunteer their own experiences with resignation. I pause, drinking in their impromptu Circle. As the group turns toward the labyrinth’s entrance, I sidle up to the burner I’d spoken to earlier that day, grinning as I’m introduced around. I give them a tour and answer questions, delighting as their sober stories shift through curiosity, wonder, and into inspiration.
I find three other humans with labyrinth tattoos, and our connections are so brief for the depth of conversations I sense we could have that hope to find them again in the default world to pick up where we left off.
Monte the Mountebank, upon hearing of my desire to move through resignation, selects a potion of equanimity for me. It’s a barely sweet, mellow honey mead he’s brewed himself. It’s officially Spring Equinox, when light and dark balance, and I’m on walkabout following a welcoming ritual at the Temple of Equanimity. All encounters seem to be invitations to balance.
Warming my feet by the fire, rejoicing in Kaz and Cynthia singing hilarious songs in camp, exchanging bellows with labyrinth walkers — “The only way forward is through!” — a wonderful Creature exits the labyrinth, eyes aglow. “That was amazing. It was absolutely the feeling of resignation. I had to abandon myself to the spiral. I didn't think I could make it through, but I did!” The group loves the playfulness of the phoenix, how the colors shift more quickly. “Now I want to walk it backwards to see if it feels like surrender!”
Creature’s friends groan. “Again?!?” Creature is emphatic. “Yes.”
The beauty of a processional labyrinth is that all entrances can be exits. I watch the crew head back down the firebird’s gullet. Down, down, down into the spiral. Reversing direction, and using all that energy to rebuild their world brick by brick. The group gallivants back, exuberant. This time, the person who’d groaned the loudest is the most excited: “My feet are tired, and I had to surrender to walking it again. But this time, I knew what was coming next. I could see the spiral before me. I knew I’d change direction and get back out of the maze again.”
Creature pauses their friend to explain the difference between a maze and a labyrinth: “A maze is full of yeses and nos, but a labyrinth is all yeses.” This creative delineation between multicursal and unicursal warms me. It makes me feel all the yeses.
Astropoda, Effigy, Temple of Equanimity, Tree Star City, zip yer burn, Tiipii of Tranquility, Bad Advice Booth
A statewide burn ban during the event means that we will be unable to set the art burn “Astropoda”, the effigy, or temple ablaze. Burners tell me about the moment they resigned themselves to this news, why they understand it, what they plan to do instead.
There’s a keen sense of community at Emergence. This is not the first burn I’ve attended where a burn ban blocked the main events, but it is the first burn where I witness open acknowledgement of the emotions this brings up in the designers, builders, firefighters, and support staff. The city doesn’t riot. Hugs are doled out. People dance off the energy, build a zip line near Tree Star City, set up sound healing circles. They continue to decorate and congregate at the beautifully built structures.
Effigy fire conclave performers are invited to take 2-3 passes with multiple props since we ARE the burn. And another conclave is set for temple burn night, when I’m scheduled to volunteer as part of the human perimeter. Our campmate Kimmie rallies live drummers for both conclaves. “Ratchet shenanigans” are planned for camp Fire Therapy.
So many firsts for me this burn…first art grant, largest LED installation, first Circle Share at a burn, first zip line, first time dancing in effigy fire conclave, first invitation to play chacapa during a sound healing, first time spinning fire outside my own camp, first time clambering into one of Tree Star’s multi-person hammocks, first time watching the Temple while standing perimeter…
What a sweet, intimate, heartfelt burn.
Speaking of firsts, I also recorded my first yin yoga flow, designed to accompany Resign to Rise. I submitted it to complete a 50-hour yin yoga certification with Devi Daly, and I found myself practicing it often in the days leading up to Emergence.
This flow is tailored to soothe overwhelm and awaken an inner fire. I designed it to process emotions, with specific invitations to help shift from passive resignation into active surrender.
Buried in blankets around the fire, assuring my campmates I am “cocooned, liquifying, and getting ready to emerge,” I assert in my best Monty Python accent: “It’s a natural process!”
And so it is. I play the yin yoga recording Sunday morning of Emergence, reveling in how my past self knew exactly which poses I’d need the most right now, sobbing through the poignancy of the invitations:
When you feel like time has stopped — that further change is unlikely or even inconceivable — the only way forward is through.
Change is possible. Inevitable, even.
Step through the portals of your practice and notice something change. Could it be you?
Resign To Rise
Emergence | March 20-24, 2025 | Near Charleston, SC
When you feel like time has stopped, the only way forward is through. When you feel change is unlikely or even inconceivable, the only way forward is through. When you feel powerless, trapped, and drowned at the bottom of a well, the only way forward is through. And up. And ablaze.
This processional labyrinth pattern is not a maze, with false turns and choices. There's only one way in and one way out. Step through the labyrinth’s portals and notice something change. Could the phoenix be you? You may feel lost, but you have been on the right path the whole time. Come for the lights, stay for the metamorphosis.
Walk this labyrinth built of rope and solar LED strings, which lights up as the sun goes down. This labyrinth pattern is one of 87 created by the artist Charms to process each of the emotions and experiences in Brené Brown’s book “Atlas of the Heart”.