Space

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

This week the theme at Mama Says Om is "space". The word emerges full blown from the Latin noun spatium which means simply area or expanse and makes no assumptions about what lies within the space in question. We define our world in terms of spaces used and unused, full and empty, loved and loathed, tended and ignored - inner space and outer space, wide open spaces and closed in spaces, work space, living space, thinking space, personal space, meditative space, sacred space. . .

This morning I find myself thinking of creative expression and the spaces which are integral to it in all its many forms, the spaces between individual words written on a page, between one click of the camera shutter and the next click, between one application of brush to canvas and the one which follows.

Mostly I am thinking of words. The stories, songs and tales which are such rich and poignant expressions of human spirit and creativity are exquisite when we view them in their entirety, but there are other and greater revelations to be experienced when we begin to look closely at their elements, the individual words of which they are composed, the punctuation employed and the spaces between the words.

The words and spaces which form our language are little works of art or theater, tiny plays or compositions, each descriptive of a feeling or perception, a physical sensation, an encounter with the wild, an interaction with other beings or with existence itself, and what we are not hearing, saying or writing is just as important as what we are hearing, saying or writing. Silence is as meaningful and expressive as speech, and often much more so - there are times when the spaces between the words are more eloquent than the words themselves will ever be. There is a profound causal relationship between what we communicate in words and what we do not (or cannot) communicate in words.