Magda Cragg, speaking of her partner, the poet Lew Welch said, “He made space around you, so you could grow.”
third space
Rich, fertile space is more important than content.
When I teach, what I think about is how I’m going to create space for learning and magic, not the content. In the larger scheme of things, rich, fertile space is way more important than any piece of information. So if space is so important, why do we continue to focus on the specifics–the subject, the facts, the “thing,” rather than the space?
In his writings, Marshall McLuhan often distinguished between “figure” and “ground”:
“The figure and ground together constitute the totality of what is perceivable. However, it is the figure on which perception is focused. The figure is what appears structured, as the foreground and whereas ground appears as unstructured and background. The boundary between the two appears to belong to the figure, that is why the figure has a shape whereas the ground appears to be shapeless.”
Since our left brains like to name and categorize things, they cause us to focus on the figure and dismiss the background as unimportant. In art, the ground is called “negative space,” and experienced artists know that it’s just as important as the object that is being drawn. In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Edwards writes: “…the negative spaces…require the same degree of attention and care that the positive forms require. Beginning students generally lavish all their attention on the objects, persons, or forms in their drawings, and then sort of ‘fill in the background.’ It may seem hard to believe at this moment, but if care and attention are lavished on the negative spaces, the forms will take care of themselves.”
That is certainly true of teaching. Seems like it’s probably true of life as well.
Natural terrain speaks to us through metaphor
A friend from Montana recently moved here to the Bay area. She’s having a time adjusting to the Bay area, of course, it’s so different from remote, spacious Montana. (After I moved to Montana, I understood more clearly what “Big Sky” country means. The mountains are so huge and dramatic, they make the sky look VERY big.) She now lives near the ocean in San Francisco, and the ocean has a very different energy. The mountains, she says, “made me feel secure and grounded. I felt safe living next to the mountains.” Here, she says, the ocean is wild and exuberant. She doesn’t feel so safe.
The natural terrain speaks to us through metaphor–WILD, EXUBERANT, GROUNDED, SECURE, BIG and so on, are all metaphoric qualities that we feel and understand through our natural world. The terrain has meaning and depth to it, beyond what we can see on the surface. The terrain of where we live is constantly “working” us on so many levels. Like my friend, the mountains in Montana also made me feel safe, but maybe I left Montana because I needed a different metaphoric energy to work through me. The Pacific ocean makes me feel the flow of life. It keeps me inspired and renewed.
Metaphorical threads
I brought small pumpkins into Monday’s class at the Sophia Center. I had everyone close their eyes and hold out their hands to receive their pumpkin, so they wouldn’t immediately know what it was. Holding/touching something with eyes closed is evocative—we don’t immediately rely on our mind to recall pre-stored ideas about the object. We can have an experience without words or thoughts. With eyes closed, students noticed the smooth, heavy roundness of the pumpkin, and images/memories of mothers, mother’s bellies, and mother earth came up in the group. Despite their small size, the pumpkins were heavy, and the ensuing writing and discussion were also rich and heavy, grief even came to the surface for some. There IS something about fall that’s sad—the ripeness of late summer is over and leaves are falling. In my own garden, the cucumbers that didn’t make it this summer are rotting, the lettuce and broccoli have gone to seed…
The shape, texture, and weight of the pumpkin worked each of us metaphorically, influencing our thoughts, writing, and conversation.
I have noticed during the past year, that there seems to be a “higher energy” that works through my groups. It’s an energy that exists in the realm of feeling, image, and metaphor. It feels to me as if the group is weaving together a tapestry. Each student is contributing his or her own voice to the tapestry, and as various voices are added to the mix, rich, metaphorical threads emerge from the group as a whole. These metaphorical threads create a space that’s richer than I could ever create on my own. It’s bigger than me.
In their noteworthy book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate how metaphors are the basis of how we think and learn. In particular, we use metaphors to help us understand mystery and experiences that are difficult to understand. When we’re exploring something new we have to use metaphorical language, because we don’t already have a pre-determined understanding of it.
I’m still piecing this together, but I am starting to get the sense that the metaphorical threads are where the “higher energy” is. Through the rich realm of metaphor, we as a group are creating a higher-level space. I’ll keep you posted.
Creating space for Spirit to speak
I’ve always been interested in the idea of creating space. For years I had a note attached to my computer that read, “Create Space for Spirit to Speak.” If we don’t have the space for it, we can’t do anything new or creative because our life is already filled up. A simple example is writing–one has to create space (physical, mental, emotional) in order to write something new. In graduate school I was fascinated by a book titled Free Spaces: The Source of Democratic Change in America. In their book, authors Sara Evans and Harry Boyte talk about how political movements are formed by having “free spaces” (voluntary associations from churches to social clubs to civic groups) where people can congregate, connect and talk with one another.
And while I’d been interested in how the creative process happens in everyday life for a long time, the research for a metaphor course I taught last spring opened up a whole new world for me around the subject of aesthetic space in everyday life. Aesthetic Space is a parallel world of deep beauty that is already there, but except for rare moments of heightened clarity, we don’t normally tap into it. The research for this course gave me both a language and a way of thinking about what I am now calling aesthetic space. (Aesthetic space somehow seems more appropriate right now than the term creative space. I have also sometimes used the term third space, which came to me by way of Charles Johnston in his book Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenge of a New Cultural Maturity.)
From this research and an intense dream I had following the completion of the course (see below), I came to the realized that aesthetic space does not involve geography or linear time. Aesthetic space is another world that exists parallel to everyday life. To experience this world, we simply need to shift our focus. And I believe this is our future as humans–beauty is what we are evolving into. Social change isn’t going to happen by way of our intellects, trying to figure out a better solution for global warming and other vexing issues. (It was Einstein who said that our problems would not be solved with the level of thinking at which they were created. Carl Jung said something similar.) Beauty brings us into the heart, which has a deeper wisdom and knowing. I believe that beauty is our way toward a higher evolution.
There may be many reasons why a course on the “psychology of metaphor” opened up this new world for me. A metaphor links two unlike things together in a way where we are able to get a new perspective or understanding about the matter. When we are in aesthetic space, we naturally see those deeper connections and relationships between diverse things. And the mystery is–this aesthetic space where rich metaphors and connections live, is always available to us. From my perspective, it’s another world we just need to tap into.
A couple of months after the Metaphor class ended, I had a powerful dream. I was in the basement of the house I grew up in, I stepped out of the basement door into our backyard, and at that moment the dream was no longer ordinary. Magnificent, pulsing, glorious energy was vibrating in everything around me–the trees, plants, animals, but also the clothesline and houses. Every single thing was alive with beautiful dancing energy. I became lucid in the dream at that moment.
After a few moments of gazing in wonder at this sight, my body was pulled forcefully away toward distant forests and mountains. As my body got closer to the forest, I saw that the forest was actually a huge piece of cardboard (like a billboard). There was nothing BUT cardboard–I could see that the forest was actually a photograph on cardboard, but there was no end to it. I freaked out, because my body was being pulled at a tremendous speed and I was heading straight toward the cardboard–I was going to crash into it. And just at the last minute before I crashed, my body was zipped into a train tunnel that was going through the cardboard forest. After recovering from my near miss, I looked out the train window–the train was traveling through a tunnel, but there were some windows in the tunnel, and out the windows I could see the beautiful dancing energy again. The beautiful, vibrating life energy was still there–BEHIND the cardboard. The profound lesson of the dream was obvious to me–it was showing me that what we humans (like me) see when we look at anything is only the photograph on the cardboard. We don’t see the pulsing beauty that lies BEHIND the tree, or the house, or the grass, or the person. Our ordinary, everyday world is like living in a world of cardboard photographs. But there IS something more to see. We just need to wake up a little more to see it.
If you’re interested in exploring aesthetic space in more depth, check out my Creative Space and Metaphor class at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Saturday December 13th, from 10 am to 4 pm. Call Book Passage to sign up.