Organs and Labyrinths

I figure since New Orleans is pretty much one of the best cities ever, I should dedicate some past due blog time to it.

Here, a little story just for you:

Yesterday after work I biked over to Trinity Episcopal Church on Jackson Avenue. Bike rides through the city have become strolls through nostalgia- thick, deep, and clingy nostalgia that matches the tone of the city in the summer. I passed the Superdome on Poydras-and instead of remembering Step it Up or the Home Show, I remembered graduation. I remembered embracing drunk friends in the morning, and saying goodbye to them in the afternoon. The CBD- my law firm days. Corner of Jackson and St. Charles: Zulu after the craaaziest lundi gras of my life- covered in gold paint, catching a coconut, finding my dearest friends on the same corner. But enough of this, onto church!

So Trinity has one of the finest organs in the nation. There are over 5,000 pipes and it took installers almost 3 months to build the thing. On Tuesday nights, some genius with a foreign name plays the organ while interested persons come to walk the labyrinth. Have you ever walked the labyrinth? It looks like a celtic knot, but it comes from the floor of some 11th century French Cathedral. They built one in Columbia, Missouri outside Boone County Hospital. It sits on top of a hill, so when you reach the center--where you meditate, pray, etc--you look down over Stevens lake. I walked it two and a half years ago and have loved it since.

The entire ceremony was terribly pagan. Here we are, in some giant Episcopal church, with dozens of candles glowing in a circle around an ancient labyrinth. The organ music was the perfect opening tune to a B horror movie about a cult in the woods. Sometimes it got so creepy that I would have to walk faster to get away from the damned thing. Apparently its beautiful.

As for the walking itself, I might as well have been doing Tai Chi. In fact, for awhile during the slow, walking meditation, I did the cat walk (the tai chi walk with your heels first). It's all about breath, about shedding current thought and connecting with the divine. How wonderful.

So around we went, five of us in this labyrinth, and after about 45 minutes you pop out, and just like that, you leave.

As I was exiting, I was caught by the shaky little lady who had been, with some difficulty, lighting candles before the ceremony. Although she's aged, she has dark hair and wore a bright purple shirt. "Is this your first time?" she asks, in the most splendid French accent I've ever heard. We proceed in conversation- and each time she says "lab-a-reenth" I am overjoyed by her Frenchness. (I realize now the the only French I have known in my life have been men- go figure. Their accents, I now realize, do not even compare to that of their female counterparts). Her name is Manu. How perfect?

and, there you have it, an hour of my summertime life. mwah.