Minding the Gap

As any writer worth a darn, I try to pay attention to the surfacing themes in my life. We find these themes all around us, and sometimes they spin a web around each other in ways that simply cannot be ignored. Over the last few weeks I've been repeatedly seduced by the idea of the gap. In fact, these days I seem to find it everywhere I go. In yoga, the space between inhale and exhale is referred to as the gap - like an ocean wave cresting and then, after a suspended moment, rolling on to the shore. In good storytelling, "the substance of the story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity." (Thank you Robert McKee).

I am a person who is not easily satiated. I want big doses of life in all of its paradoxes, and find myself balancing a pastoral setting with the cacophony of culture, a desire to eat what I grow with a lust for wine and chocolate, solitude with community, the honor of mothering with the need to write and write and write something worthy, a safe solid place in my heart for those people and places I love most deeply with the push -the itch- for a new challenge and a new direction. In order to balance this insanity, I must sometimes live in the gap between each, to breathe, to take stock, to be grateful ... content.