More and more these days, recreational mazes are popping up here and there. They come in various types: hedge mazes, mirror mazes, water mazes with squirting jets, etc.

However, one type of maze in specific focuses not on getting one lost (or getting one wet), but on the experience of traveling the maze itself. This is the painted labyrinth.

A painted labyrinth is a design, possibly in mosaic tile or carved wood instead of paint, that is laid down on a floor for the purposes of walking it in meditation. Since the pattern of the labyrinth is merely two-dimensional and has no walls, one can see all the way to the end of the labyrinth from anywhere in it. However, since in such designs the journey is not merely half the battle but all of it, this is of little import. Instead the goal is to climb the ladder of the spirit on the ascent to enlightenment.

Now when one comes to the first clue, one has to ask: what is the significance of this in light of the three 'M's? Where is the fourth 'M'? The second clue is no help, only a statue remaining behind to point into the distance, so instead one must ponder the first clue again in the light of what Jeff said as the waters lapped around his boat in a meditation of their own. Something is fishy here.

Since recursion across meta-levels blurs the importance of everything --- each tree preventing one from seeing the forest, but not always the same forest (and those trees that vanish soundlessly are more important than the sounds of those that merely fall) --- how does one detect the handiwork of Ifni? Where does Jonathan the seagull pass to when he flies not over the wall, but through it? How does one know when to see the hand of the User in the structure of the Program? Do angels sweep us into the bit bucket when we die, or do we reside somewhere in archives waiting for the Great Software Overhaul that never comes? What does it take to make one's life into legacy code that even God is afraid to delete?

Maize mazes do not help us on this quest. Plowed under (by the farm) at the end of the season, they rise again like John Barleycorn (the Lazarus of beer), but transformed and unrecognizable to the previous generation who are themselves reduced merely to husks of their former glory. Even when the geometric patterns laid into the fields are of extraterrestrial (dare we say "supernatural"?) origin, their cant is unreadable without a view from on high. Symbolically, these "crop circles," "field lines," and "plot arcs" encode either our past or our future. "Signs," however, will always require multiple Viewings in order to decode the Hidden Meanings, those stealthy Sneakers that skulk on the Outer Limits of our Perception like underpaid Telescope-Cleaners at Setec Astronomy.

Perhaps, when Diogenes tires of his sore feet and stops to clean his lantern, he'll turn its bright light upon the handwriting on the wall, washing out the shadows in Plato's cave in favor of illuminating the rock-solid reality underneath. Until then, we can only complete Prot's third task: stay here, and be prepared for anything.