Into The Gaps

Because I had said yes to an adventure, I was a small, lone human walking along an empty road at 3 a.m. I hadn’t been sleeping anyway. Now wind encircled me…howling gusts of rowdy winds. I seemed on the verge of being lifted or knocked over, but I felt oddly exhilarated. The landscape looked mysterious in its muted predawn palette, mostly drained of color, but vaguely blue, and the sky was silver-gray, hazed with dust and lit by a broken moon. The trees were swaying, leaves trembling, and right before my eyes, an owl suddenly swooped upward and extended its white wings like an angel. I felt fully, intensely alive.

Soon the light of the gatehouse glowed ahead, and I waited there for my co-adventurer Diane to pick me up and drive us to the airport. We were going to surprise our friend Robin with a goodbye hug before she boarded her 5 a.m. flight for a move across the country. It was a grandiose and sentimental gesture, the kind of thing one never forgets or regrets. Robin and her husband Jim have been constants in my life for decades, and their move is a significant event in what seems to be a season of transition for us all. Jim was already on the road, traveling solo, somewhere in the Ozarks by then, and in a few days, he and Robin would meet up in their new home to begin their lives in a very different setting, enviably near children and grandchildren. There had already been a series of good-byes, but a loving send-off at the airport would be a tender ceremonial touch, a pause in the pocket of the present, in a time that needs this dearly.

It's been getting to me. I have chosen hope as my message and I’m hanging on tenaciously to the railings, but seriously, could it be any worse? The lunatics are in charge, and the degree of complicity and acquiescence are stunning. Daily declarations generate disbelief and disillusionment, outrages accumulate, new threats loom, and caring folks everywhere are experiencing a collective sort of trauma that is making us ill.

It’s taking its toll, but I’m refusing to accept it.

Maybe sometimes it’s a matter of slipping out into a morning you might have missed, of honoring a friend, of putting up a barrier and entering the equally valid reality of wonder and replenishment.

I am thinking of something Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“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.”

It’s amazing how a good writer puts words on something you’ve known but didn’t know how to say. I understand now that intermittently entering the gaps of this extravagant and outlandish world will be my salvation, and that what exists in the gaps are as actual and tangible as the quotidian rest of it. Despair cannot stand against reverence and awe.

It happened more than once last week, in paradoxical juxtaposition with my hand-wringing anguish. There was an impulsive walk with Carey at dusk, up a steep hill against the Gaviota gusts, and we watched a rocket launch with two little girls whose long yellow hair blew about like ribbons and whose laughter was a song. There was a bounty of apricots, a glimpse of a bobcat, country-style visits with neighbors on the road. Suddenly the hills are brushed with red grass, and the landscape is a Bierstadt painting in the golden hours, and I found a message from my father, his voice still real across the years.

Along with the new aches and frailties of my aging body have come insights about people I have loved, my mother in particular, and revelatory lessons gleaned in retrospect from mistakes I made, suddenly as crisp and clear to me as notes on looseleaf pages dropped on the floor. Read the world, is what everything is saying. It is bigger and smaller than you thought.

These are terrible, scary times, and the ugliness is a contagion. In the past week, I have been the recipient of hateful accusations from a stranger and from a former friend, and maybe it’s just bad weather, the sting of passing squalls, but a reminder that not everyone sees what I am seeing, although it appears very clear to me. The animosity can throw us off balance, but it’s wise to be aware of it, and stay our course. I realize too that contradiction is the habitat of our species, and we coexist with horror and heartache even in our most ebullient moments.

So we might as well dive into the gaps. Say yes. Discover a morning you might have missed. And if you love someone, why not make it lavishly known?