I spent yesterday morning in the lovely retreat house at the Tearmann Spirituality Center in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, with the MBSR group I am currently working with. A quiet morning of sitting meditation and walking, and space in the wide expanses of the mountains and the forest. We tend to get consumed by the activities we do, the words we say, the thoughts we think, and the things we have. Our minds get drawn there, and not to the spaces before and after that hold them. What if the gaps were more important? What if we practiced focusing more on the spaces around moments, nurturing them and making wider the gaps within and without? These are the home of the spirit. They nourish us, widening the heart and giving life.
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — universe.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
photo, Glendalough, pixie from he
