Making Space for the Void
Musings on the place before beginnings and a yoga class for levity, in body heart and mind.
‘I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.’
Rilke
A few years ago, my daughter was going to meet her then-boyfriends mother for the first time. She was nervous in the way that everyone is, when it comes to meeting parents. But she was particularly so because she was a year or so out of university and struggling, a little, to find her feet. She knew that most conversations, old and new, always came around to the question of what she was- now that she was free from the structures of an education- doing with her time. And as yet, she wasn’t sure.
When the time came and she met the mother, the topic inevitably came up. It is hard to define ourselves apart from our endeavours, though of course we should try. My daughter started to answer but fumbled a little, struggling to articulate the various things she was interested in, and what she had begun to experiment with. Whether the mother noticed her discomfort or not I don’t know, but at some point she gently interjected, ‘Ah, she said, ‘ you are in the fertile void. How wonderful.’
The beginning of anything, be it the steps beyond university, the start of a year, the embryo of a project, even the first flicker of love, is always a place of deep uncertainty. In the rush to define things- so that we might take the first more obvious step, or answer the question of ‘What now?’ in a bold and resolute way- we often miss what is a more quiet but essential part of any process. The very necessary prologue.
Everything we do - every idea made manifest, every project we embark on, every decision we make, every act of creation or tending, every meal we cook, even every sentence we utter or write- has its origins in a place long before anything is visible. The real beginning of anything is the quiet that comes before it, in which nothing is said, nothing is written and nothing is decided.
In the rush to answer the call to definition, the worlds and our own, we often don’t allow ourselves the time in this place of uncertainty. It might be that we don’t even know that anything is happening, so hidden from the realms of our more obvious thinking those first sparks usually are. But even if we can sense that something might well be brewing- a change in direction, the embryo of an idea or a major life transition- the necessarily shaky ground can be a difficult place to spend time. To avoid the inevitable feeling of vulnerability that ‘not knowing’ brings up, we can rush to make things somehow concrete. Sometimes serendipity is on our side, the impulse is a good one and the idea is somehow fully formed from the outset. But more often decisions that come from the shallows of our thinking are often ones born of the parts of ourselves that are terrified of the unknown, and so we end up with something relatively easy and comfortably contained because it feels safe. And certain. And the ego likes certain.
Like seeds in the ground that need a certain darkness and quiet to properly germinate, the best of our ideas usually come from places that are subliminal and they need to stay there for a good time to take on any explicit form. I have been doing a lot more writing in the last six months and one of the things that has struck me is how much of it happens when I am not sat down and doing anything that looks like writing. There is no particular pattern but ideas will usually spring up as fragments and snippets and often out of seeming nowhere. If I try and turn them into something too soon then I usually only get a few sentences in before I hit a wall. But if I leave the idea where it is, unexplained and hazy, anything weighty will start to become a little more cohesive and seemingly of its own accord. The shape will happen in the moments that I am not expecting it. It might be when I am asleep, infiltrating my dream world but more often it is when first awake, and still in the liminal and potent place that exists at the cusp of waking. But it can also be when I am out walking, and usually without anything to write on. And the same often happens when I am in the bath- I have regularly had to call out to anyone within earshot so that they can bring me a pen and paper so that I could stay urgently still and catch a more fully formed thought before it flees. The location doesnt seem to matter but the state of mind does, and the common thread is times when my rational and overthinking mind, the one that wants answers and surety, is quelled just enough for the real thinking to emerge from elsewhere. And that elsewhere is an altogether deeper landscape.
The poet David White speaks of this place as an internal horizon line, one that he poetically describes as ‘the space between what we know and what is waiting to emerge’. It is rarely an entirely comfortable place to be. This frontier can often feel quite troubled at first, like two opposing waves crashing up against each other, but it will be a part of the cycle of our living whether we acknowledge it explicitly or not. And whether we like it or not. The first sentence is never the beginning of a story and most stories are born of discord. When we start to recognise how essential this place is, when we cultivate a willingness to sit with any discomfort when all we want to do is escape into certainty, when we insist on answering any questions with a simple but heartfelt ‘I don’t know’, we give this ‘fertile void’ the space for its own fertility. And from that place, a place of quiet depth but also breadth, the very best of us will likely start to arrange itself.
YOGA CLASS THIS WEEK - Tuesday 27th January 9-10am GMT
I am still in Australia but teaching on Zoom at a UK friendly time. I am no lover of technology, but it is a modern world marvel that we might be 12,000 miles apart and still seemingly in the same room for an hour of practice together and last week felt very special, to see so many shining faces from so far away.
The four sessions that I will do from here are all around the idea of finding our centre, and this week we explore the concept and feeling of levity, in body and heart and mind. It feels like a good thing to explore as we approach the end of January.
To book onto the class and join live, or receive a recording that will last you a week click here.
Definitely liking the idea of the fertile void!