Tiny Spaces
I’m still thinking about space. Although yesterday it was about emptiness. About clearing away things to give yourself room to breathe, to focus on what’s important. To stop making noise so that when you do make a noise it’s a noise worth hearing, words worth repeating, sounds worth singing. Maybe even decluttering, finding the wall behind all the pictures, so that you can put up new pictures and keep on living.
Today as I think about space it’s the space in between, where no space appears to exist. A bonus space where you can go when the world appears to be closing in. There’s a lot of it no matter how close two things are. If you think back to your junior high math days, you may remember you can always divide a number into smaller and smaller bits, and it will never disappear. Which means the space between two things is infinite. You can always look closer and closer and closer. And there will always be something to see.
I think that’s how great art is made. The artist can see an event or see the world, and look in between, can see the connections, tease them out, bring them to light, explain them so that they can be seen by mere mortals without the time or skills to know how to look. Can see the world and the things in between as a small child might see a mud puddle, or rain, or a frog--with delight. Exploring the infinite, on a sea of endless possibilities, all to bring back a song, or a book, or a poem. So that we’ll know what life is like if only we knew how to look.