MENU
What if the pauses in life are not empty?
What if silence, uncertainty and the spaces between stories are not problems to be solved, but thresholds through which something new is quietly emerging?
Weaving together story, sacred geometry, the Summer Solstice and lived experience, this reflection explores the Meeting Place where body and mind, stillness and movement, longing and creation meet.
Recently I came across a phrase that stopped me in my tracks.
An unwritten space.
I loved it immediately.
Not because I knew exactly what it meant, but because I recognised it.
An unwritten space. A pause between stories. A place where we do not yet know what comes next.
As we approach both the New Moon and the Summer Solstice, I find myself reflecting on these spaces in life. The moments when something has ended, something new is stirring, and yet neither has fully revealed itself. The old map no longer seems quite so useful, but the new landscape has not yet emerged from the mist.
Most of us know such places. We may not call them unwritten spaces, but we recognise the feeling. We find ourselves searching for answers, wanting clarity, longing to know where we are heading. We rush to fill the silence, explain the mystery, decide what it all means.
Yet I am beginning to wonder whether there is something precious hidden within these pauses. Whether uncertainty is not always a problem to be solved. Whether silence is not, and has never been empty.
Many years ago, I wrote a poem called The Meeting Place. Reading it again, I realise I have been circling this mystery for far longer than I realised.
Where lives the Meeting Place between All Things?
The quiet space, it holds the key
Where all that was and is to be,
The stillness and the pause between
The black of night and dawn is seen,
Or is it where the land meets sea –
A breathing edge of mystery?
It is a question that feels particularly alive to me at the moment.
The New Moon is a Meeting Place.
The Summer Solstice is a Meeting Place.
Dawn and dusk are Meeting Places.
The pause between one breath and the next is a Meeting Place.
Silence itself is a Meeting Place.
In sacred geometry there is a shape known as the Vesica Pisces. Formed by the overlap of two circles, it appears throughout ancient art and architecture as a symbol of creation, emergence and birth. What has always fascinated me is not the circles themselves, but the space where they meet; the overlap, the threshold, the fertile space between. It is here that something entirely new comes into being.
We are so often encouraged to choose. Mind or body. Science or spirituality. Sound or silence. Stillness or movement. Masculine or feminine. Nature or civilisation. Right or wrong. Yet life itself rarely seems interested in such divisions.
The river requires both banks.
The tide requires both sea and shore.
Day cannot exist without night.
Sound gives meaning to silence, and silence gives meaning to sound.
The Vesica Pisces reminds me that the most compelling and mysterious part of the image is neither circle. It is the Meeting Place itself that draws my attention.
Not as a compromise between opposites, nor as a blending of one thing with another, but as a living threshold from which something entirely new can emerge. Nature offers countless examples of this. Mycelial networks beneath the forest floor weave together trees, plants and soil in relationships far richer than any single organism could create alone. Life seems to flourish most abundantly in these places of connection, exchange and emergence.
As I was writing this reflection, I remembered a photograph I took many years ago of Chalice Well in Glastonbury. The image now illustrates my Story-Well webpage. Looking at it again, I laughed out loud. There, within the design of the well cover itself, was the Vesica Pisces.
It felt like one of those magical moments Life occasionally offers; a reminder that the threads are often present long before we consciously see them.
The body knows long before the mind understands.
Perhaps this is why the unwritten space feels so important. Not because nothing is happening there, but because everything is. It is the place where life is quietly gathering itself into a new form; a threshold, a pause, a kind of womb in which something is becoming.
Where lives the Meeting Place between All Things?
Amongst the pages and the words
Of writer’s prose and poet’s verse,
Upon the breath of songster’s voice
And in the artist’s palette choice –
It springs to life upon the verge
Where colour, form and beauty merge.
An ancient Tibetan story I will be sharing at this year's Solstice retreat begins with a widow-weaver whose eyes caught sight of something beautiful.
It was the loveliest of paintings. A white house surrounded by a garden, flowing water, birds and lush meadows. She fell in love with it immediately.
“How I wish we lived in such a place,” she said.
Her older sons laughed. But her youngest son replied:
“You can make it real, mother. Weave it into one of your tapestries.”
For many years I thought this story was about imagination becoming reality. Now I wonder whether it is really about recognising something before we fully understand it. Perhaps the body knows long before the mind understands. Perhaps that is why beauty moves us before we can explain it.
Why the tender touch of a loved one can crack the heart wide open.
Why a story can bring tears to our eyes.
Why a single sound can stop us in our tracks.
Why the gongs can carry us to depths and heights within ourselves we may have forgotten were there.
Why a painting in a market can change the course of a life.
Something in us recognises. Something in us re-members. Not remembers. Re-members. The body re-members. The heart re-members. The soul re-members.
Long before the mind can explain what is happening, something deeper is already weaving the threads back together.
Where lives the Meeting Place between All Things?
There, heart meets mind in sweet embrace
And eyes light up a darkened face.
Round-raindrops fall from clouds of dreams
As thoughts increase and swell to streams –
With smiles we play as magic springs
And feelings soar on Eagle’s wings.
Over recent years I have become increasingly interested in the relationship between silence and stillness. Not because they are the same thing, but because they seem to belong to one another.
Silence is not the absence of sound.
Stillness is not the absence of movement.
Some of the deepest stillness I have known has emerged through movement itself. Through dance. Through walking. Through swimming in the sea. Through allowing the body to follow a rhythm older than thought.
Only a few days ago, whilst attending a movement and sound gathering, I was reminded once again that stillness is not something we manufacture. It is something we arrive into.
The pathways that lead us there are rarely straightforward. Silence may open the door, but so too can movement, story, music, laughter, grief, beauty, or a moment of simple presence in which we stop trying to direct life and allow it to reveal itself.
What seems at first to be many paths may in fact be part of the same living conversation. Perhaps that is why we so often rush to fill the pause. Not because the pause is empty, but because it is alive.
Silence asks something of us.
Stillness asks something of us.
The unwritten space asks something of us.
It invites us to trust what we cannot yet see, and to sense the deeper currents already moving beneath the visible world.
Just this week I found myself seemingly tossed and turned through a storm of thoughts, feelings and fears. The temptation was to escape them, solve them, understand them, make sense of them. Instead, beneath the noise, I discovered something quietly waiting. A simple recognition.
I am the ocean.
I am not the storm.
The storm was real, and so were the feelings that accompanied it, but neither represented the whole story. Beneath the turbulence I sensed something deeper, a steadier current that remained untouched by the maelstrom above it, like an anchor holding fast beneath the waves.
Perhaps this too is part of what the youngest son understood.
The journey that followed was far from easy. It carried him through loss and uncertainty, through fire and across an icy lake, confronting him with impossible tasks and aided at unexpected moments by mysterious helpers.
Yet the dream did not become real despite what Life asked of him. It became real because of what Life asked of him.
The river was woven from tears. The flowers were woven from blood. The beauty of the tapestry could not be separated from the life that had been lived in its making.
There is something profoundly reassuring about this.
We live in a culture that often celebrates the finished tapestry whilst forgetting the weaving. We admire the flower and overlook the winter. We praise the harvest and forget the planting.
Yet life itself seems to understand something different. The dream becomes real because of what Life asks of us.
Not because suffering is somehow noble, nor because hardship is something to seek, but because life itself is participatory. We are not spectators in the unfolding. We are participants within it.
Where lives the Meeting Place between All Things?
There life expands to something new
There was one once, and now there’s two.
Each moment morphs to our desire
A passion burns, re-lights a fire
And there upon a path to tread
A journey springs to life instead.
That feels important somehow, particularly at Solstice.
We often think of Summer as a season of flowering and abundance. Yet every flower has emerged through darkness, uncertainty, weather, patience and time.
The rose does not bloom despite the winter. It blooms because it has passed through winter.
And the Lotus, too, offers its own quiet teaching. Rooted in the mud below, it rises through water towards light. Each evening it closes and returns. Each morning it opens again. Not once, but over and over. A continual conversation between stillness and movement, darkness and light, descent and emergence.
The Rose and the Lotus may appear very different, yet both seem to speak of the same mystery. Neither bypasses the conditions from which it grows. Neither seeks to escape life. Instead, each participates fully in the journey of becoming.
Life itself seems to move in much the same way.
Perhaps this is what the Fire Horse has been teaching me this year.
How to participate more fully in life whilst remaining in relationship with my own heart and soul, my own longing. How to withstand the intensity of emotion, creative expression and passion whilst staying anchored in my own authentic calm. And how to listen for what is already calling, whilst opening to what quietly wishes to emerge and allowing Life to have a vote in the weaving.
As we approach the New Moon and the Summer Solstice, I find myself returning once again to that question.
Where lives the Meeting Place between All Things?
Rumi’s field is where we’ll meet
Beyond Life’s rights or wrongs to greet
Each other, and then side by side
We’ll hear Life’s rhythm on the tide
And where a stillness bridges space –
Between us grows, the Meeting Place.
Perhaps the Meeting Place lives in the overlap between silence and sound, stillness and movement, knowing and understanding, dream and reality. Perhaps it lives within the unwritten space itself.
And if we can resist the urge to fill that space too quickly, we may discover that it is not empty at all.
It may be where Life becomes audible, where the answers we seek quietly emerge from the silence and stillness that have been flowing through us all along, where the body re-members, and where the dream begins to weave itself into reality.
