It’s a little embarrassing for me to admit, but I learned about labyrinths from The Dude. In a 2011 interview with the Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Galloway, Jeff Bridges described the grass labyrinth he’d cut into the lawn of his Santa Barbara home. Not a maze, Bridges emphasized; a labyrinth, which gives you the freedom to wander a long, winding path yet still arrive at a central goal, no matter the number of twists and turns you take to get there.
“In a maze it’s, ‘Which way do I go?’ You want to get lost. But with a labyrinth, there’s a pattern,” he said, excitedly grabbing the reporter’s notebook and drawing one. “You think you’re constantly getting close, then going farther away. But you know you’re going to get there in the end.”
The point of such a thing might not be immediately evident—Dude, just show me the way to the center; David Bowie’s waitin’. But the purpose of a labyrinth isn’t to confuse or frustrate; the exact opposite, actually. “It’s a walking meditation. … With a maze, you’ve got to make all these choices. With the labyrinth, the only choice is to go in or not,” said Bridges to GQ writer Caity Weaver in 2017. Asked about its origins, he went full Lebowski: “I think it’s one of those things like pyramids, you know? They just showed up all over the place.”
That includes Las Vegas. The Valley has nearly a dozen such labyrinths, most in unlikely locations. One is in the southwest, in a courtyard at the San Martin Campus of St. Rose Dominican Hospitals; another can be found at Blue Diamond nursery Cactus Joe’s; yet another is in Henderson’s Reunion Trails Park. (If you want to find one close to you, check the sidebar or visit labyrinthlocator.com.) Some are grassed in; others are made from arranged rocks or simply painted on concrete. But they all come to the same thing—you wander around for a bit, then you reach a goal.
Labyrinths date back some 4,000 years. The term itself is ancient Greek, though labyrinths have been found in Hindu and Hopi lore, and there’s a labyrinth inside France’s Chartres Cathedral that dates back to 1200 A.D.
Most use them for prayer—a literal embodiment of the path to salvation—but a growing number of 21st-century users utilize them to clear their heads of stress, or arrive at the answer to a question that’s been gnawing at them. It might sound crazy, but the process of slowly walking that twisting path, sometimes pausing to take a deep breath or to consider the road ahead of you, really does help to loosen the knot of your brain. Back when I had a labyrinth practically in my backyard—at the currently closed Huntridge Circle Park—I’d make a regular routine of consciously bringing a dilemma into the labyrinth, considering it as I made my way to the center, and walking out with a solution to my problem.
Like all meditative techniques, finding a Zen experience in a labyrinth is entirely up to you; if you want to jog the whole thing, or simply walk directly to the center and bust out a TikTok dance, the labyrinth won’t break, or kick you out. But you will be missing out on some legitimate health benefits that go beyond the mental.
In a 2014 article for WebMD, writer Karen Leland spoke to doctors who noted a slower heart rate and reduced blood pressure in patients who’d made labyrinth walks a part of their routine. So few of our daily activities are slow, deliberated; we drive too fast, eat too fast, think too fast. A labyrinth encourages you not just to slow down, but to trust that the world will still exist when you reach your goal.
Before I go, I’d like to tip my hat to another of my role models, former Las Vegas Weekly columnist Stacy Willis. In a 2015 column called “Of Labyrinths and Vertigo,” Willis spelled out some of her reasons for needing some calm (“missing spoiler alerts, double-entendre emoji, guileful trolls, Donald Trump and #disruption”), and revealed that her first few attempts at walking a labyrinth pretty much failed (“I had a hard time staying inside the lines, and may have skipped a few rows here and there.”)
Then, finally, she found her footing. “It demanded patience. Discipline. More patience. Breathing.” And when she reached the center of the labyrinth, she was astonished to discover that all the noise in her head had quieted. “In that silence, I found a nanosecond of balance,” she said.
You might find yours, too, if you abide by the turns of the path. Y’know, like The Dude.
Local labyrinths
• Cactus Joe’s Nursery, 12740 Blue Diamond Road, Blue Diamond, cactusjoeslasvegas.com.
• Grace in the Desert Episcopal Church, 2004 Spring Gate Lane, graceofsummerlin.org.
• Reunion Trails Park, 44 Chapata Drive, cityofhenderson.com.
• St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, 1399 San Felipe Drive, Boulder City, standrewbc.org.
• St. Rose Dominican Hospitals: San Martin Campus, 8280 W. Warm Springs Road, dignityhealth.org/las-vegas.
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