Meditations in a labyrinth

With hands firmly planted on a ladder of branches, I lift my heavy, buckled boot and hear it arrive with a clink at the next rung. As I swing methodically upwards through an earthen tunnel that glows a warm ochre, I tilt my head backwards to inspect a cone of moulded clay just past my current destination, with bottles of different shades embedded in the walls, shining with light of different intensities. I'm looking for the exit, but I've pledged allegiance to the path.

When soft skinned artist's hands led me to the room where I began, a German voice spoke words into my ear just before my blindfold was removed. She said, "Go slowly. It's about discovering yourself.", and with that I was plunged into darkness, my mind blank and yet buzzing, my senses relaying only the feeling of a cold, smooth coin in my left hand. Coin enters slot, runs reel, unlocks door that upon opening sends me crawling, sliding downwards, new door after door, spread throughout mixed-media madness in rooms of endless mystery.

One is fashioned like a giant vagina, and as I passed through it I wondered about the spiritual rebirths I'd read people experience in here, and whether my time immersed in this unknown territory had changed me thus far. Besides being in a new country, new city, staying with strange new people, I was in a bar, in a maze, uncertain of my exact geographical location. Suspended in a void, drawn upwards and mapping my progress by the changing texture of the wall as I stare through a new square with each step.

There's a room unlike the others. The light is bright white and flashed wildly into my eyes that had grown accustomed to the dull, throbbing reds I'd been bathed in. I think it's the exit and feel conflicted about opening the next door. Is re-entry to the social world is nigh? And besides, how did I come to be crouched here, blinking madly at a cage of light in a scrap metal adventure land?

David Bowie had some part to play. This was of course the city I'd heard of where creative juice overflows and he'd spawned records that impregnated generations with heroic hope, and because I had no specific travel plans other than transcending my former self, I figured a place where an artist of such influence (over the world and I) could reinvent himself through changed understandings of music, personality and expression seemed fitting for some transcendence. So Bowie had led me to this city, but to this labyrinth of eye-widening wonder? I guess that was the universe.