Reverend Ref +

LABYRINTH

In my never-ending quest to shake things up (pardon the pun if you've just read the earthquake post), get people to color outside the lines and do stuff clearly visible to show this town that our parish is alive -- ALIVE I TELL YOU -- oh, sorry, just a little Gene Wilder flashback, I approached the vestry Monday night about the possibility of creating a permanent labyrinth on the lawn of the church.

To my surprise, not only did they think it was a good idea, but they were actually excited about the prospect and even offered up some ideas for it; such as using these small solar powered lights to light it up at night, planting flower beds at the switchbacks and such. Wow. Who knew?

The place I have picked out is large enough for a 40' d. labyrinth, providing I use 18" pathways and a 7' d. center. It will be on the south lawn and the entrance will be, conveniently, accessible from the sidewalk on its east. There are tons and tons and tons of mining slag just sitting in piles waiting for someone to come along with a good use for it. The plan is to visit a slag pile and use appropriate sized rocks to lay down and create this thing.

What this also means is that yours truly will be doing alot of manual labor this weekend. Hopefully my efforts to get in shape will have paid off. And luckily we have a parishioner who is about 33, in good shape, owns a pickup truck and said yes when I asked if he would help. Everybody say, "Yeah God!"

I went down to the Ace store today and bought a dowel (to mark the center), twine (to lay out the circles), and spray paint (to determine where the rocks go). Friday I'm going to lay the thing out in paint. Saturday, Rick and I will load rock, haul rock and place rock. With any amount of luck, we'll get it done in one day. I'm not holding my breath. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'll be breathing fairly hard. But who knows. Stranger things have happened.

The next step will be to publicize the thing. At the very least, we might get some people stopping by and asking questions. And I'd be willing to bet that this will be the only labyrinth in the State of Montana.