Spaciousness

There is a word that follows me these days – spaciousness. It is expansive and airy and ebbs and flows with breath. It is new for me, so I look at it, dissect it at times, wonder how it is shaping me.

It is also showing up in my relationships, as I talk to people and wander in and out of their orbits.

In my old life - before my sabbatical - I pushed through the world. Pushed through with a ferocity of going somewhere. The walls were narrow and tall and often enclosed me. I had access to only certain parts of me, to those which reflected off of those walls. And I pushed hard. To get it all done, to dot my I’s and cross my T’s, to the tips of my toes, in pursuit of perfection. And yet, that shell of me was thinning. The walls were encroaching. I was going faster and faster, growing more and more numb, and shrinking within those walls.

April 2023 / M.C. Escher Exhibition at the Museo degli Innocenti, Florence

[It is of course the birthing metaphor; you cannot push out new life without expanding to let it out.]

And then I stopped pushing.

So here I am on this wider, more open road. This road of breaking entanglement of a particular form of the mind, of strengthening my relationship with oneness, and of cultivating intuition. And the experience of spaciousness keeps following me. Listening to sound and the resonance beneath the sound and the echoes that surround it.

Before, everything felt like a micro-struggle. I didn’t even know it to be a struggle, but it was. And now I see those struggles with a bit more lucidity. It was simply that I kept bouncing off of those rigid walls.  

Here, there’s more room. I feel it in my dreams and in my waking and when the driver in front of me stares at their phone as the light turns green. Spaciousness.

Every morning since we moved into this house over a decade ago, my neighbour hacks. Snorts multiple loogies, expels all of the mucous that has been building overnight, with such a ferocity that if I weren’t intimately familiar with his morning ritual, I might think he was experiencing a medical emergency.

A moment, a fork in the road. To recoil in disgust, brace for it, close my ears to the morning’s cacophony of bodily eruptions. Or in the spaciousness of these late summer days, to chuckle at the absurdity of being human, knowing something about the man next door, even though I do not know much about him besides the hacking. The familiarity of the sound, the intimacy of our street. The hacking that sidesteps the structures we all have erected around us. The secrecy of what happens inside a house, spilling out onto the street, less contained, missing a button.

But spaciousness also is not impermeability. With this spaciousness, I also find myself more porous. I wander in and through emotions, becoming temporarily displaced by the waves, wondering if in fact the spaciousness I felt – just a few moments or days ago – has indeed constricted again. But then the wave washes away again, an opening, a sort of re-remembering.

In this spaciousness, I found myself watching a video of Ram Dass speaking on intuition:

But the problem that I ran into was that the doorway to the intuition is through the human heart. I was trying to leap into cosmic love without dealing with emotionality. Emotionality was a little too human for me. And what I experienced was … that I had used pushing away my humanity to embrace my divinity. And then I wanted to be intuitive. But the intuition – the impeccable warrior intuitive action has to come from a blending of humanity and divinity. And until I could accept my humanity fully my intuitions weren’t going to be fully in harmony with the way of things.

So that is the porous path I am on. Connecting more deeply with the beating of this life’s heart and the timelessness of formlessness. And all of the moments which present themselves, which drift and temporarily displace - the confluence, the moments - on this stage.

A slo-mo moment from this past weekend - my son and I, watching the sky through the water’s ripples and back again.