The disappearance of Sebastopol’s Labyrinth of Life
The 34-year-old labyrinth was removed for safety reasons after years of neglect
If you’ve walked down by the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center recently, you may have noticed that the Labyrinth of Life has disappeared. The sign is still there, but the labyrinth is not.
The labyrinth was built in honor of several teens who lost their lives in the late 1980s. Their names—as well as some who died later—are set into benches that surround what is now a scrubby grassy area.
In truth for the last couple of decades, the labyrinth had been in process of disappearing all by itself, sinking into the earth, overgrown with grass, but over the summer the actual bricks that made up the structure were removed by the Community Cultural Center for safety reasons.
“The community center was concerned with their youth activities that sometimes occur on the lawn, said Kenyon Webster, a board member of the Community Center. “You know, whether it would be safe, with these embedded bricks sticking out of the lawn and so they determined it was best to remove them.”
Webster was also the director of planning for the city of Sebastopol back in 1989, when the labyrinth was first installed. He remembers that it was primarily a volunteer project, headed up by Lea Goode-Harris, who went on to create a labyrinth design and construction company called Creative Labyrinths in Santa Rosa.
Sebastopol’s Labyrinth of Life was the first labyrinth Goode built. She laid it out based on a labyrinth design she created. One of the teens honored by the labyrinth was one of her son’s friends, who was killed in a car accident.
“It was one of the first public installations of a labyrinth in Sonoma County,” she said. “It was also the first public installation of the Santa Rosa Labyrinth design, which came through me … and has now been built around the world. The design is not found in any of what we call the historical archives of labyrinths,” she said.
Webster reached out to Goode-Harris when the center was thinking of removing the bricks, and she agreed it was probably for the best.
She’s learned a lot about building labyrinths in the intervening years and said she’d do it differently now.
“What I know now that I didn't know then is that bricks and sod for that area does not work – because of gophers, because of maintenance. That type of grass just grows right over the top of the brick so fast, so the maintenance is huge on a labyrinth like that. With a little more hardscape, it would be doable,” she said.
Webster said that the community center would be open to having a new labyrinth built in place of the old one, and Goode-Harris said she’d donate her services to design it. The problem is money for construction.
“We are open to ideas,” Webster said, “but the community center is financially strained like all the other nonprofits in town, and we don't have a budget for something like that.”
And with the city budget so tight, funds are unlikely to come from that source either.
As willing as Goode-Harris is to create a new labyrinth, she’s also willing just to let it go.
“Not everything has to last forever,” she said philosophically.
She wrote a lovely blog post about the removal of the Sebastopol labyrinth on her website:
“Labyrinths provide us with a path to practice change. Some labyrinths have withstood the passage of time for thousands of years. Others are here for just an afternoon, drawn in the sand at the edge of the ocean. Many modern labyrinths were meant to last for years, but because of unforeseen circumstances their time is shorter than intended. And they once again help us to practice letting go and giving thanks for the time they are with us. The Labyrinth of Life at the Sebastopol Teen Center reached such a place of letting go, and is at the end of one chapter and the beginning of another chapter that is yet unknown.
We can easily forget, as it is something we cannot see, that once a labyrinth is placed on the ground with intent and walked by many, the energetic imprint remains even though the physical features may not. And the love remains.
Change, loss, and letting go opens the space for something new and an opportunity to be curious.
If you find yourself at the center of the empty space of the Sebastopol Teen Center Memorial Garden, open to that space, the ground below, the sky above, to the energetic imprint of the labyrinth, and to all the love that continues to ripple out into our community, as we each follow our path into life.”
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