Gaps

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen



The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between the mountains and cells the wind lances through, the narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe.


Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard