A baby cries. Her busy mother is unable to pick her up – right away. The cry intensifies. It fills the empty space around the infant with a pressing urgency. The mother rushes to finish her chores. The baby whales become more intense. This emptiness – it teaches the infant to tolerate frustration. And when her mother picks her up it shows her that she can trust, that she is loved and that the empty space is her teacher.
This empty space follows the baby as she grows. Either she learns to embrace and understand it or she runs – filling the space with chaos, noise, distractions, addictive behaviors – anything to fill the void in which she (and all human beings) live.
What is empty space? It is the deafening quietness that hangs, that hovers around us. We feel it in those still moments as the motion of daylight drops, peels away and we are left lying naked, unmoving, silent before sleep overtakes us or as we awaken to the tangerine glow of morning.
If we can learn to embrace these empty spaces, we gradually discover the quintessential magic and teachings contained in this silence. And when we embrace these teachings, we can have an incredible impact on the world.
There is a passage in my novel The Gossamer Thread where the main character Feather is left lying in Isabella’s diary for many years, forgotten. All of us experience this feeling of abandonment, neglect and loneliness at one point or another–and the empty spaces become black holes that tug at our psyches, draw us into what could become a deep depression. Within this passage, the diary has traveled with her owner, Isabella to Johannesburg, South Africa during the Apartheid years . Feather becomes privy to radio broadcasts where she hears news of Nelson Mandela being imprisoned on Robben Island. As she lies in the diary, she begins to draw parallels to her own imporisonment and that of Nelson Mandela:
Like Mandela who would remain in Robben Island for eighteen of his twenty-seven-years jail sentence, confined to a small cell with the floor as his bed and a bucket for his toilet, Feather lay for months on end between the empty cold pages. Mandela, forced to do hard labor, was only allowed one visitor a year for thirty minutes and only permitted to write and receive one letter every six months. But he never gave up, somehow believing that one day he would be instrumental in creating a new democratic South Africa. Inspired by Mandela’s determination and strength, Feather began to feel a renewed sense of purpose and conviction about her mission on earth.
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Lying in this quiet place, Feather realized that part of her mission was to help human beings find this treasured still point of silence. And once they had rediscovered it (for originally that is the place from which we all came) her task was to direct them toward delivering a message of peace and freedom—to respond to the call from the rabbi pinned up against the firing wall, to assist the political activist forging the road toward liberty for all races, to not sit idly by like her brothers and sisters and watch the blue-green planet spin and gyrate toward its death.
Feather thought: We must be active in our stillness. We must meditate and reflect and then act upon our reflections. We must understand our role on earth and never take it for granted. We all possess the power of the gossamer thread, the ability to weave opposites together. Yet, like the thread, we are sheer, delicate, fragile—our minds and bodies susceptible to negative, harmful messages, to damaging and destructive diseases. And thus, we must be easy on ourselves.
It was at this moment that Feather relaxed, that she stopped wondering when Isabella would open her diary, when someone would rediscover her, for day-by-day and thought-by-thought she was finally discovering herself and her purpose. Each idea that she produced renewed her, making her delicate mind and body strong and robust, ready for whatever came her way.