A Lifelong Relationship with the Maze

At 11 years old in Chappaqua N.Y., I walked out of the house after several days of a heavy snowstorm to find the lawn covered in four feet of fluffy white snow. It was a pristine winter wonderland almost up to my chest. Even at that age I was a burgeoning young artist from a long line of artists, so my baseline and focus was, and always had been, on art and its creation as my primary communication tool. I immediately saw this fluffy white lawn as a canvas, and thought nothing of jumping into the snowy mass to start a creation.  

Walking, I had the immediate impulse to use the winter’s bounty to create a maze trail. I began stomping down the snow, packing the side walls, and designing as I went. I went quiet and meditative as the design began to take form. I created dead-end swirls, loops, traps, and a concealed path. In the design I found connection; this act of creation was as much art as a maze. After several hours, there was a four-foot-deep maze cut into almost an acre on the front and back lawns. 

Later, looking down from my fourth-floor bedroom window, I could see the maze stretched out in all directions. The blue-gray shadows in the snow added a powerful dimension to the maze as the day progressed. It looked awesome, and in some ways ancient like a carving at Angkor Wat or Mayan temple glyphs. The detail, the rhythm, the pattern, was memorizing.

I’ve been wandering in the maze ever since.

What has become most interesting to me is that while a maze is art, it transcends the normal viewer experience because it is an interactive work of art, a game you participate in. Over a lifetime, I have found there is much more depth to the art of mazes than I ever could have suspected as a child. Mazes are a story steeped in human history, psychology, myth, religion, spirituality. They are likely man’s very first invented game.

When I was 11 I did not know what was to come and what it would take to advance this art. 

The patterns of trails in the snow felt comforting, as if I had tapped into a design that had a covert visual and spiritual communication. I connected deeply with it on a spiritual level, seeing more in it than what I had created. The maze felt important, part of the primordial art of early man, the geometry of the universe, or an intelligent game design that has a reason for being other than art. 1 + 1 equaled 3. 

Far later what I would eventually learn, after creating hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mazes, was that in fact I was on the right path. Mazes do have a basis in historical fact and myth. They date from our very earliest days of lucid thought. Before man built cities and civilization he explored, seeking new knowledge and answers. We have always sought to solve the maze.