Imbolc Hare Moon
25 years ago I left the workaday world for home based efforts, but the weekend still has a different, more relaxed feeling. As if things just aren’t quite as urgent. This is thanks to the union movements press for the 40 week combined with early Protestant and Catholic Christianity that tried to reserve Sunday for church.
In a more secular time Sunday has become, for many, a true day of rest with Saturday providing time for the domestic tasks not accomplished during the week.
The notion of a day of rest, a time to pause and consider the week behind and the one ahead, can seem like a luxury, perhaps even irresponsible. The cell phone, e-mail, broadband, and television are available around the clock. In hypercompetitive work settings there is the awful sense that someone might be catching up or that you’ve not done enough. Why not fill up this blank day with that extra effort, the push that might get you ahead.
In music there are rests, the caesura that lets a particular line or run of notes breathe, giving them definition. In winter whole species of animals hibernate and thousands of individuals are doing so right now on this property where I write. Holidays, spread throughout the year, are caesura, as are our vacations, our anniversaries and birthdays. In art, especially sculpture, we learn that negative space defines a work. Without negative space that David would still be a block of granite.
Taoism, perhaps the clearest on this idea, points out that the usefulness of a cup is not its body, but the negative space it contains. Windows. Doors. Rooms. Baskets. Silence.
The effort in our lives is like the cup, the window, the door, it is the body which contains the life, it is not the life itself. Life itself is realized in the negative spaces among our focused efforts. That’s where the laugh comes, or the gentle touch, or the smile, the encouraging word, the hug, the tear.
In my view it behooves us to grant ourselves as much negative space as we can and a day a week does not seem like too much. It is probably too little.
