Post by Gill Dawson

What if the labyrinth is not something we escape, but something we are called to understand? Walking through an exhibition of the work of the Dutch artist and printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher, I found myself captivated by his impossible worlds, stairways that rise only to return to their beginning, birds becoming fish, order dissolving into mystery. His images seem to whisper that beneath the surface of ordinary life lies another landscape altogether, one shaped by paradox, symbolism and the unseen patterns that govern us. At The Metis Institute we are drawn to this same territory. The psyche rarely moves in straight lines. We revisit old stories, encounter familiar figures in new guises and discover that what once felt like an ending was, perhaps, a threshold. The work of psychotherapy is not to flatten the mystery of human experience, but to enter it more deeply, to descend into the labyrinth and return carrying something of value for ourselves and for others.