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Emptiness and order. Spaces that are clean, vacant and found. Stepping into a studio with the willingness to dance and make dances. Longing for studio time, wanting to step into more emptiness to empty.
There is nothing like what a quiet, bare studio can bring. Making the time for myself to go and work by myself in the clearing to see what emerges. Blocking off the time on my calender. Knowing I could be doing work. Knowing the stepping into a studio is the work.
I'm going to the studio more and more often lately for a studio practice. And boy, oh, boy - what an opening it has been to carve out the time. Going to the space with my notebook, dance pants and water, and walking into the room continues to feel like visiting a sanctuary - my sanctuary.
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Where is the negative space in your life? Where is the clear, white opening that has yet to be filled with something known and defined? Where is the blank canvas, the white page? And how often do you spend time trying to fill it?
These are questions I've been asking myself lately. Negative spaces are so powerful. They hold so much, albeit unseen and unheard. And I've come to realize that negative spaces are not just the canvas or blank page waiting to be filled. Negative spaces are also the future, an unknown time, a crack in the wall that has yet to crack, a gap in the rocks on the shore that has yet to gap, for it waits for more water to find hollow.
Dear One, I want you to know this: Allow your life to open up so you have more negative spaces, in your days, nights, months, weeks. Be careful with over-scheduling your schedule and knowing what you're doing with each moment of your life. Know your inner muse thrives on your ability to empty and empty some more. Know that you cannot have space and time until you commit the violent act of creating it for yourself. Yes, deciding to create space and time as an artist can be a type of violence, for you are destroying known things to get to the unknown, you are subtracting some of reality to make room for dreams and making art - necessary intangibles, to be sure.
For me, this continual clearing has become vital. And I think it might be a vital thing for you, too, if you let it be. When I looked up the word empty in the thesaurus I found words like: lacking, devoid, destitute, wanting, waste. So many negative implications in these words. When did emptiness become a bad thing? Why does negative space need to be filled the minute it is determined to be negative? Why is negative space called negative space?
I was fortunate to attend Cyndi Lee's Road to Om Yoga teacher training this past weekend. (I'll write more about it here later.) She talked a lot about 'the gap' in our practice and awareness. The gap being the space or moment when nothing happens and you don't know what you want to have happen. Expectation is dropped. Things go silent. You wait and wonder. After spending three days with her, I feel in my body how important these gaps are. How powerful they are. How they are positives, not negatives.
I've become a restless gap-hunter. Now, I go to the studio looking for gaps, letting the water of my movement flood the space for hour upon hour. And maybe, if I'm lucky, I have some shell of a treasure to take home to prove to people that I'm still hunting, but not in vain.
Be a restless gap-hunter. Go looking for not-looking. Go searching for no search. Open your mouth and hollow.
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