Merri Creek Labyrinth update

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?