Sometimes I feel like I’m at a sudden still point between waves of motion and change. Like right now as I sit in a floral chair in my living room, staring out at the just-cleaned kitchen counter and still-stuff-piled-on kitchen table while the dog sleeps in the corner and the cat sleeps in her clementine orange box. But of course the whole notion of a still point is just a notion. Life is famous for tossing one damn thing after another at us, but beneath all the damn things, everything is always in motion and all is perpetually changing.
Still there are these in-betweens: the wisps or room fulls of spaciousness that, as I get older, feel more real than the packed whirls of activity and action. Pay attention, I’ve been reminding myself for years. Cherish this.
It is easier to talk about what surrounds the in-betweens because that kind of stuff has names and lots of language to delineate it from the unscheduled, the quiet, the open-palm time that’s also on tap. For the last few weeks, I could speak of oral surgery, Passover, eating a Havana chicken sandwich with a friend, walking across the field with Moxie the dog, loading the dishwasher, opening the mail. I could point to wonders around me: the first budding lilac, the light on the porch in this photo, a great breakfast of Matzo Brei (friend matzo, likely an acquired taste), and the cool joy of cold water when I’m thirsty.
But to speak of the in-between is to speak in between language. Then again, that’s why we have poetry. “Language does what it can’t say,” William Stafford once wrote, and he also wrote something in his poem “Bi-Focal” that I continually ponder about the world happening twice: “once what we see it as;/ second it legends itself/ deep, the way it is.” Maybe the in-betweens are when we catch up with life as the way it is more than the ways we name or see it. There’s grace in such meetings.
Then again, maybe it’s in-betweens all the way down to and past the last breath of our life. One of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, which begins with “I felt a funeral in my brain” (none of her poems were actually titled by her) ends with these lines:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down — And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing — then —
That word “then” and the long dash are both in-between things pointing to what happens when we finish knowing, and then —
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