I met with Megan from the Merri Creek Management Committee down at the Labyrinth on Wednesday. I walked partway through the labyrinth with her to show her how it was all one path leading to the centre and talked about the various things that I think about when I walk it: how when you seem to be really close to your goal early on, you’re actually quite far from it; how when you are on the furthest edge from the centre, you actually don’t have far to go; how people who seem to be walking the opposite direction from you can actually be heading towards thesame goal.
She thanked me for letting her experience this for herself, reiterated that the MCMC had no idea the labyrinth was there, really, and certainly no idea it was so used in the community; I reiterated that it wasn’t just our group and that I had no idea what the extent of usage was, that I was inferring it by the fact it got weeded and that items were put into the gifting bowl I had left there (the irony of that was that while we were there at Harper’s naming, a woman on her own and a group of three I’d never met before came to use it). She said the MCMC definitely wasn’t weeding it and that she didn’t know who had sprayed the fennel either.
She reiterated that there is a longterm plan for a wetlands there and asked again whether we’d be prepared to move the labyrinth. I said it was doubtful after so many years of walking the energy into the ground (it turns out Tracey, the woman I hadn’t met until Friday, knows Wendy Rule, who was one of the people who made the labyrinth, and she agreed that moving it wasn’t an option). She said that the MCMC had put the big wetlands plan on hold (I think as a result of this discovery, but that wasn’t clearly stated) and that they would welcome our input on designing a wetlands plan for the area that incorporated the labyrinth. I said we’d very much like to be involved with that and that we’d like screening plants between the labyrinth and the path. She thought that would make sense. She also mentioned that different groups "adopt" different parts of the creek and surrounding bushland and that we would be very welcome as "custodians of the creek" as they call them.
So, who’s up for forming Friends of the Merri Creek Labyrinth?