(Valley Below)

 

The white and grey cat sits on the wooden ledge in front of the windowsill. Outside it watches the wind race over a morass of tangled brown grass sticking up through patchy snow. Eggs fry as they're dropped onto the skillet. The smell of butter perfumes the air. It's still grey outside in the early morning light, but it's warmer today than the past few days. Frozen earth has turned to mud. Inside the fire whips and flits as the wood stove breathes through the metal pipes. Soft pink and baby blue hues glow low in the sky. Somewhere a dog is barking. Faint mechanical sounds rumble from the refrigerator in the corner of the room. In the small village below, people start up their cars and drive off to work. The work week is nearly over. Tomorrow friends and lovers will meet to celebrate a fleeting feeling of freedom. For forty-eight hours they will be unencumbered. Not totally, of course, because there are still those things which must be tended to in order to sustain the style of life we live; laundry, shopping, errands, childcare, cooking, cleaning, etc.. But whatever little leisure time there is to soak in during these short winter days, people will seize it.

Around me now sits a deep silence. A sort of void space. Many traditions throughout time and culture have described the concept of the void differently. In some cosmologies void is silence, in others darkness. For some it is emptiness, stillness, womb, death, timelessness, spaciousness, nirvana, peace. Whatever thing pervades those primordial waters, it's clear that the void is not nothing. It's full of potentiality. It's the substrate from which all possibilities emerge. It's the liminal space at the top of the inhale and at the bottom of the exhale. The void is not the abyss; you can miss the abyss, but you can't avoid the void. 

All things come from and return to the void.

As the sun traces its arcing trajectory today through the chalky blue, beings all over the world will mirror its path. They'll wake and slowly forge a trail through the day in their own arcs, only to sink into dark slumber at the sun's farewell. In dreams we reenter that void space. We inhabit the in between. The logical, thinking mind is not master in this realm of ether and mystery. Something more ancient is, something more vast. The body and soul knows what dreams may come, but the mind does not. We spend one third of our lives in the infinite waters of this cosmic dark, and, by the time we die, understand very little of it. Maybe because that world serves as an important reminder that not all things in this universe are for us to understand, or to know. Some things are to remain forever unknowable, forever obscure. 

"Your heart is like an ocean, mysterious and dark."