I’ve been exploring space as context for the past several days, mostly while working or walking outside, but sometimes in other settings as well. I’ll share a few notes here — mostly just snapshots. The following is from one period of practice; others can be read at my blog.
~*~
It is evening and I have come to the school campus to walk the labyrinth under the trees. Following the winding narrow paths between the rows of stone, looping around the same patch of earth again and again from new directions, I think about how space accommodates form, how every movement and shape plumbs its seemingly infinite potential. I think about how these lines of stone both constrain movement and enact new potential, as our constructs similarly shape and guide our lives: so many ways that space can flower. We seem always to move within limits, but … is there a limit to the forms these limiting borders may take? What richness is available for each new pattern to evoke, for each new pathway to enact?
As I move around the labyrinth, slowly tracing out this space within the larger space of the school gardens, sensing the movements of my body and the play of thought and image “within” me, listening to the rush of cars on the freeway not far away, I notice first a layering and overlapping of perspectives and spaces, which then seems to collapse and somehow become spaceless. Turning a bend on the path, sunlight streams suddenly through the branches of the tree, illuminating the motes of dust hanging in the space under the branches and the watchful squirrels, and I experience the whole scene as somehow virtual, a patterned readout which overlaps with other readouts — other perspective-spaces — without obstruction. I do not have the impression that the surrounding space I perceive isn’t really “there”; rather, the patterned space in its all-at-onceness and givenness seems simultaneously not given, but read out, as the squirrels looking on read out their world, and the trees their own as well.
Best wishes,
Bruce