Julian Summerhayes

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

As I reflect on my writing here on Livejournal and elsewhere, I'm struck by how often I refer to holding a space for something or no-thing to emerge.

I think of areas like:

silence
listening
communication
understanding ego
the ineffable nature of life.

What is this space?

Is it physical?

Or something else?

At the risk of being tendentious or unhelpful, it's whatever it needs to be. 

If we're trying to engage in meaningful conversation and to cross the Rubicon between where we are (bad) to where we need to be (better — not perfect), we'll find a way (hopefully) through grace, love and patience to hear the other person into speech. The liminal space, given our extant circumstances, could lie between and encompass a Zoom call or mobile conversation or, social distancing permitting (no discretion allowed!), in the same locus. 

But actually, to even talk about the space elides some of its magic. No, I don't mean fantasy-type magic. I mean the undeniable sense that something special, often beyond the ken of our current understanding is at play.