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The Space Between: A Prayer or a Song


There is so much that remains invisible without the prompt to notice it. We cannot see what we’ve never been nudged toward. If the vocabulary has never been taught and the example never shown, our pathways are limited, our vision narrowed. The unknown remains as such. Looking into the same landscape holds us differently yet holds us together. Is there a desolate desert out there or worlds within worlds, flowers unfolding at precisely the right time and right direction, the ancestors of bees and the bones below and the way they all point at one another. Through them, there is place. They’re always asking something of one another, they’re always alert to the question.

 

I think the threads of what-is-possible and what-is-present are ever-alive unto themselves and beckoning. I wouldn’t doubt that the spaces between feel alone when we walk right on by. Their edges can only begin to be felt through a sort of softening and a quieting. There is so much to sift through to arrive there. We can be shown by another, human or animal or plant or by the phenomenon itself. If we place attention on the spaces between things, something emerges from them. Most don’t take the time to try, it’s too slow. But patience bears fruit and it could change the world. If we are unskilled, we might mistake the world as made of bodies and beings that sort of circle one another, brushing past without much regard or overlap, acting independently and separately. I think this way of seeing is what makes thousands of people sit in an airport, singly and far from one another staring into the void of the phone. If we refine our view, we might see that there is a hunger in the space between us, begging to be noticed and just as alive as the others. Not only begging to be noticed but begging to be recognized as the fascia; the way that sound travels and unites us, the shifting sands of collectivity, the feelings that we recognize but rarely speak aloud. It shape-shifts and wanders, it walks and it rests. It offers us the same dreams at night but we’d never know unless we said something. Perhaps all of us dreamed the same dream and we’ll never know it. 

 

If someone hasn’t taught you yet, the space between will teach you. You simultaneously must drop your guard and what you think you know. You must locate the feeling of the subtle and invite it, without grasping onto it too much. Like remembering a dream, like getting to know a new lover, it’s not to be held too tightly, claiming some kind of knowledge. With gentle patience, emergence. I worry about what is missing, about what has never been visible to us, or what is becoming eroded, obscured. I’m in awe of what appears so eagerly with intentional invitation, what can be found and rewoven again. How the world is already awake and breathing, responsive and resounding. And sometimes it’s the parts of the world that move the quickest that almost distract from this, they’re too obvious, too loud. I want the slow and the in-between, I want to be surprised by what I didn’t see before. I want to know what the space, claiming at first glance to be empty, says about connection, about distance, about change. About how we’re linked, anyway. 

 

Today I watched the landscape reveal herself by walking in hundreds of straight lines through the Mojave, not to get somewhere but to see. Noticing the beings that create the whole and the way they paint a picture of subtle change. The texture of the sand shifts with some slight elevation, the color different with some distance. Perhaps, a space where a tortoise lived some years ago. A plant community here that was not over there. The black-throated sparrow calling — differently here than they do back home; a larger expanse of the in-between. Tiny magic rocks found in small dispersed deposits; somewhere back in time, they found their way, landing in different arrangements but through similar processes. We are never so different as we might believe, somewhere on the surface of things. Some shape has been formed between us that informs us, that shapes, in some way, the world. It moves with its own life, dancing with the other infinite spaces between. There are so many of them, these links. The basins between ranges. Black night sky between stars. Landscapes formed through communication and through silence. We aren’t so far away, we aren’t so different, you and I.


** thank you, Julie, for the title :)

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