The Gaps

Annie Dillard writes:

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have not ‘gone up into the gaps.’  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 for the first time like a once-blind man unbound.  The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery.  Go up 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.  This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon.  Spend the afternoon.  You can’t take it with you.

Can you see?  There is a reason to believe in God.  We have to break out of our grinding routines and look around, look up, look in the ground beneath our feet.  There is life all around.  We should dare to introduce ourselves to strangers. 

Can you see?  Stalk the gaps.  It will take some effort.  You will have to risk by thinking, seeing, feeling, learning.  You will be submitting to change, because when you are paying attention there is no way to remain who you were.  This is the currency of your life.  You were meant to spend it!