The Space Between

It’s in the space between one thing and another thing where life’s defined. Those times of transition, where we gather pile a ceremonial cairn of what got us to this point, and turn toward the next. Dorothy and her retinue in Oz needed to make a harrowing pilgrimage to end up on that dais, only to watch in disbelief as what she had believed with all her heart would be the method of her transition floated away without her.

Only in that moment of heartbreak – the space between the hope of the previous moment and the promise of the next –   could she see the bubble of transition, and where it needed to come from.

“Click the ruby slippers 3 times and say …”

I just published a post at Prairie Eden’s website, where I talked about this little window of transition our perennial gardens are going through this time of year in Colorado, mentioning that for the designer of physical space, it’s often the space between things that’s more important than the things themselves.

I recently made my own little pilgrimage of sorts, though I didn’t look at it that way when I planned it. It was simply an adventure – a bicycle ride from Monterey, California back to Colorado where I live. The first 2/3 of it I rode by myself, and the last third with a friend. I’ll be blogging about that ride quite a bit in the upcoming weeks and months, and have posted a summary from which I’ll link to all the other posts as I write them. So far, I’ve only published the summary and first day.

When I arrived at Monterey, I dropped my rented car off at the airport. That point of transition between the drive out and the ride back stands out clearly in my mind. I turned in the keys at the Hertz counter, and got my bike all arranged and packed up. After a quick stop in the mens room, I dropped the jeans and t-shirt that I’d worn on the drive out into a trash can, and rolled my bike out through the sliding doors of the airport into the California sunshine.

I remember looking around a bit as I dropped those traveling clothes into the trash, wondering if the action would look odd to folks. Nobody was looking. The moments of transition I was moving through only had significance for me – not for anybody else. To everyone else, I was just a strange guy wheeling a bicycle through an airport.

I think spaces of transition in our lives are like that most of the time. They consume us as we’re transformed by them, but to those around us, we’re just a strange guy with a bicycle…