Less Time, More Space

 Posted on my 35th wedding anniversary

I remember exactly where I was fifteen years ago when I first heard a spiritual teacher use the word spacious. I was standing beside an enormous desk in a tiny room, more of a hallway really, talking on the phone to a rabbi in Seattle. I knew immediately that the experience of claustrophobia, of imprisonment, was at the root of all my struggles. Ventilation saved me. Not literally opening the window, but oxygenating the narrow capillaries of doubt and fear so that I might be able to see what's out there.

As a child, I experienced a dash of both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. I was visited by nightmares featuring enormous indoor spaces like the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there was nowhere to hide. At the same time, it was hard for me to breathe in small places, the filthy bathroom up the crooked stairs to the attic of my father's antique store. The comfort zone of my personal geometry originated in the five-room New York City apartment where we lived, neither vast nor cramped. It took decades to inhale and exhale into the world outside of that apartment, that family.

Even now, I am preoccupied with space. The outer space of nebulae photographed in the infrared and spiral galaxies in the ultraviolet. The inner space where, on the far side of the somewhat arbitrary boundary of my skin, my memories and intuitions lie in wait, as immaterial as the solar wind. In the middle distance, all the rest of it, the space between you and me, the space between my house and the one next door, the vast space across the Arctic tundra, the Gobi desert and, most remarkably, the subatomic space between particles. All that emptiness we can't even see. The great discovery turns out to be that what's out there is mostly nothing. No walls to close in on you. No fences to separate you from your heart's desire.

Time is a tyrant. It goosesteps through all this nothingness, staring straight ahead, a bit of a bully. Time makes things happen, whether you like it or not, while space just is. Without time, without decay and mortality, space is the Garden of Eden before the picnic. Growth, awareness, suffering, art are all a function of time. In this science fiction movie we call life, we are called to tango with time in empty space. The universe continues to expand. There is more and more space, but the number of chapters remaining in my particular book of life continues to dwindle. There is less and less time.

One way I manage that is to tango backwards, back through history and, better yet, prehistory, so that time is liberated from the hourglass, so that I can experience its elasticity. Human civilization has been around for a nanosecond, a sliver of space-time, only a little more than 5,000- years. Machu Picchu, Chinese porcelain, Venice, fish tacos. We are all infants in the light of geological time. Scientists tell us the Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. I swim in that temporal spaciousness when I go down into the limestone cave in my basement. My house, an 1884 two-horse barn, sits on a limestone shelf. The rock is what remained of the coral after the salt water receded in western Massachusetts. This part of the world, scenic with haystacks and church steeples, was once under the Atlantic Ocean. It was more like Buccoo Reef in Tobago where we snorkled at the turn of the millennium. The fish were chartreuse and aquamarine. The creatures in the basement are grey and brown. The ocean has retreated, leaving only the limestone and my amazement, the caress of the spacious.

Now, with the clock ticking on my sojourn on the planet, the practice of extending my vision in both exterior and interior space-time has become increasingly healing. I understand when a friend facing surgery goes to the beach to visit "the blue doctor." The ocean is ancient and panoramic. Like a Victorian consumptive, I breathe better in salt air. The distant horizon dissolves the artifical boundaries I have created. Going to the ocean is like breaking out of jail. But I don't need to get in the car to travel. I practice contraction and expansion, an accordion pleated way of being. Inhale. Exhale. I breathe in and focus on what is directly in front of me. Purple phlox. I breathe out and hear the prehistoric ocean rushing through my house. Both geometries stretch my awareness, opening me to the long view, backward and forward, and the wide-angle shot, this way and that.

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