Who sends the mind to wander afar? Who first drives life to start on its journey? Who impels us to utter these words?
…
What cannot be spoken with words, but that whereby words are spoken: Know that alone to be Brahman, the spirit; and not what people here adore.— Kena Upanishad (Mascaró)
The spirit is that which can have no resting place.
— Merleau-Ponty (1948, 75)
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 for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords 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— a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
— The Annie Dillard Reader (p. 422). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
to live in the gap
between the moment that is expiring
and the one that is arising
luminous
and empty— Laurie Anderson, Heart of a Dog
The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes, but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.— Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)
… and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
— Ecclesiastes 1:6