Ariadne continues to guide me forward – I’m still clutching her thread as it leads me through unexpected twists and turns in my life. When I started this blog in 2007, my life revolved around our work with the labyrinth symbol and all the places we visited in our labyrinth travels. Some of those adventures led me in new directions, and some I now find were simply spiralling me around so I could revisit familiar territory.
We travelled to Sweden numerous times over the years, usually in search of labyrinths, but in the process I found myself drawn to one particular 14th century Swedish woman, Birgitta Birgersdotter, who became not only a saint, but is now the patron saint of both Sweden and Europe – Saint Birgitta
I am returning to Ariadne’s Thread again, but with a shift in emphasis as I follow a reimagined Ariadne who has patiently led me to a new passion and purpose for my later years. Perhaps that’s all Ariadne ever wanted for me, for any of us. Perhaps she is an archetypal force, a goddess, who helps us change our lives just as she changed her own, the Ariadne who matured into a goddess and was not always the young girl who handed a thread to Theseus.
Jeff and I are no longer the people we were when we travelled frequently, leading others on pilgrimage while enjoying our own adventures. I don’t want to lose my old posts (every now and then they still turn up as useful to someone, and sometimes that someone is me), and changing the name and the url isn’t convenient right now, so I’m just allowing this site to change along with me.
I am now in the midst of a deep dive into the Middle Ages where I am researching Saint Birgitta’s extraordinary life, including her pilgrimages to Trondheim, Santiago, Rome, and Jerusalem. I hope my research becomes a book, but for now it is a passion that is opening my world in new and unexpected ways. Is Birgitta connected to the labyrinth? Probably not, but as a wise friend noted, I am on a spiritual journey with her that is not a straight line but a convoluted route through layers of time. Perhaps, she suggested, the journey itself is a 3D labyrinth. I hope you enjoy Birgitta as much as I do.
My old blog, Walking in the World, has also been subsumed into this one. If you want to see only those posts, you can search for that category in the sidebar.