TOPSHAM

Many have stumbled across the curious stone work, labyrinth and prayer wheels that are components of the prayer garden made by Summer Street resident Ann Carroll.

The prayer garden, designed with seating incorporated into its peaceful construction along the banks of the Androscoggin River, is also surrounded by prayers to the earth that Carroll added that were left by visitors as part of her initial vision.

Carroll said visitors have been nothing but respectful of the space that she opens to complete strangers.

“I had, for a long time, wondered how to take the spiritual dimension of the ecological crisis into the marketplace,” Carroll said.

Eight years ago, Carroll attended a workshop with other environmentalists. It was there she got the idea to create five large prayer wheels like those of Tibet. There, the wheels are in the marketplaces and “whenever people go by, they just spin the wheel so that all the prayers go down the river and across the air.”

She wanted to weave together all of the spiritual traditions into the prayer wheels.

She bought barrels that carried maple sugar in Vermont and spent 16 months in a friend’s workshop making the prayer wheels with help from her son.

She painted them all with dots used in the Australian aboriginal paintings as a sign of respect to indigenous peoples.

A teacher of both eastern and western philosophy, she’d gathered information on spirituality for many years. The big challenge was how to weave them all together.

“If we don’t, all of us, wherever we are spiritually, if we don’t realize as the indigenous did that the world is sacred, then we will continue on destroying,” Carroll said. “It’s really a sacred task of all of us.… We’re in this together.”

There is a prayer from the New Testament and other prayers hail from Judaism, Buddhists and the Native American. Every wheel contains the words of a contemporary poet to include a current aspect. With dots she’s portrayed spiraling trees and their roots, and a spiritual dance.

Each wheel represents one of the five elements of traditional Chinese medicine.

The first element is gratitude.

“Because without gratitude, you won’t be sorry for what you’re doing,” said Carroll.

The subsequent prayer wheels are repentance, forgiveness, going forth and reverence.

The wheels turn using other cherry wood wheels that a friend gave her.

She was prepared to construct prayer wheels that would need to be transported to market so the public could have access, but realized the Androscoggin Riverwalk Trail, which winds along the river and down Summer Street, would pass right by her house once built.

One may wonder why she’d give up prime real estate along the river with such an amazing view for such a public venture. But looking at the prayer garden and the raging river pouring over the dam in the background, “This was a dump. This has been used as a dump,” Carroll said. “There was nothing here but trash.”

“You could not see the river from the sidewalk here,” she said. “It was totally trashed. We built the house and all the gardens.”

She spent a whole summer digging out the trash. A friend spent one summer with her casting concrete for the stone which was very hard work. She used sauna tubes to cast bicycle sprockets and placed between the stones gathered in Maine. The base of the center piece containing plants and flowers is an old train wheel someone gave her years ago.

As hard as she tried to cover all the major spiritual backgrounds, she’d miss a lot, so there is a mail-type slot by the prayer wheels where people can drop their own prayers. There are flags in the garden now with those prayers people have given and there is an area with flags of prayers written by children, so the garden remains a growing entity.

One boy wrote, “I hope the oceans and rivers stay blue!”

Next she decided to build a square Navaho labyrinth that people could walk.

Carroll described it as “a very beautiful form, as all labyrinths are.”

Often you enter with a prayer you leave in the center and then you trace your way back out. She spent a whole year gathering stones from all the Maine beaches to make the labyrinth.

“It’s always about getting to the center which is a little bit like life,” Carroll said.

dmoore@timesrecord.com