When I was young and in love, an older person gave me a piece of advice. Wagging a finger at me, he quoted from Kahlil Gibran: “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.”
It angered me. I thought to myself, “He remembers nothing of love. He doesn’t understand anything.”
Ever since, I have intensely disliked that quotation. “Spaces in your togetherness?” That’s the last thing I’ve ever wanted. I’ve longed for merging, interpenetration, the intense presence of love, lover, beloved. Completion and annihilation – at a certain point, aren’t they almost completely indistinguishable?
Looking back, I would have to say that my anger and frustration about this quotation had also sprung into being from a very fundamental insecurity. I feared absence because I suspected that I wasn’t lovable enough to return to, that I lacked sufficient gravitational pull once someone was on the outer edge of the orbital… and… gone?
Separations can function as an intensifier. In a mature love relationship, it does seem somehow inappropriate to lose myself completely as I have always wished. In periods of separation, appreciation and gratitude have a place to build up. One has the chance to miss the beloved, and thus appreciate the relating afresh. Reunion can be more powerful than constant companionship. I believe that. And I don’t.
Still, my perspective on this has changed over time. I have less fear of abandonment now, perhaps I’m a bit more trusting. And maybe I’ve seen that it’s possible that I’m a little bit lovable (not for any reason, but just for being me) after all.
Of course, that whole drive toward complete merging and constant mutual attentiveness is propelled by wild infatuation, the semi-insanity of overwhelming desire, the apprehension of and longing for the thing withheld – whatever that may be. There’s always something, somehow.
Strangely, this had something to do with my ideas about the God toward whom I had many of the same feelings and fears. Even in presence, there is absence – and in absence, presence.
What is Kierkegaard’s dash, the spirit within, the internal temple, the fire and water and air and earth, the reflexive meta transcendent, the between – that finally unnameable THIRD thing, or FOURTH thing, or is it an infinite regress – progress? Is it iterative? Are there strange attractors?
Who hasn’t been haunted by thoughts of the beloved? Physical separation and distance allow dreamtime – daydreams and fantasy. Holding the hand of the beloved – in mind and heart and spirit – can be more powerful than holding hands “in person.” Not always, but sometimes.
Both togetherness and separations will happen on their own, in their own rhythms and syncopations and in all kinds of ways.
Physical distance is only one manifestation of this. One may feel absence in presence far more keenly and with a sharper edge. Even after periods of intense intimacy, cocooning away from one another seems to follow rather naturally – even if only to bask in the glow. There is a time to every purpose…
There can never be too much love. There is always more than enough love. So how is it that there is not enough love either? How are these simultaneous?
My fantasy is that if, somehow, I was in the garden (woods, clearing, path, moonlight, embrace…) with my beloved, then we would attain that mystical state of union and attunement with the entire cosmos – by a kind of participatory law. But only in authentic resonance, only in truth. And what does that mean? Total reciprocal and unified resonance is elusive through and over time/space. Episodic events are in some sense eternal – I really think so – but synchronicity works, it seems, in tiny bits, bracketed moments, flying fleeting trails of dots. It’s not fundamentally narrative in structure – linear history disrupts it somehow.
It can only be an illusion to hold on to the ego while mind-creating a universe for its gratification (and pretending to have let go of it!). On the other hand, trying to disappear into the universal mind/spirit won’t work (not even for a mystic). There has to be a there there. There has to be a vector. There has to be something, someone, that experiences – but without owning or having. My place in the cosmos turns out not to be a matter of self-negation, not entirely.
Be here now. Right. But WHO is? What is IS? WHAT is here? WHO is here? What is HERE? What is NOW?
The quotation was shorthand, not legalism. Not authority, but encouragement. It’s less a proscriptive rule and more of an opening to respect, honoring, even the beauty of longing. To drown in someone’s eyes, you have to step back a little.
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
- Kahlil Gibran
With the exception of not eating from the same loaf (all right already, we get it), there is a compelling set of metaphors here. Actually, that’s an interesting bit… considering the communion that it rewrites.
This is the time of separation and revelation – the time of life and movement and process and gaps and complexity. There’s always the space between, there’s always what is created there. But the two create what is there. The space is necessary to that, like paint and canvas and light and vision and body memory. And the time of the collapsing of that space is always very temporary. To try to hold on to the moment and drag it into history doesn’t work, and if it did, that moment – static – would fade and erode like a photograph, an old scratched album, losing its vitality.
Yet here we live in this time, with uncontrollable points of infinity breaking in and out and through it. Once in a while, a sliver of it touches us.
To stand separated and unique – but resonating together, harmonic and even dissonant sometimes.
A moving sea between the shores of the souls, like oceanic temple pillars (although I prefer moongates).
Sacred space alive, in relation, fullness AND emptiness.
The winds of heaven dancing in the between, like jumping synapses.
A beautiful, haunting sound, like eternity.
