It was dark. I could hear two voices above me,talking excitedly, a man and a woman.  I could not understand them. I was a little frightened but mostly I felt a warmth and comfort in their voices. Then IT happened. The space. I suddenly felt it slipping over me, around me, like an endless cocoon. Unfamiliar, vast, space.

This experience repeated itself many times in my childhood as I lay quietly in bed before falling asleep. Until one day, as a teenager, in a counseling session, thinking about this experience, feeling it and wondering what it was all about, I realized that of course it was me being born. I never had the experience again.

It’s interesting, isn’t it about space? We sort of take it for granted, never really thinking about it until it is not there, and then it seems it is more about our sense of entitlement to it. But what about the other kind of space? what about never having felt space before? Sort of coming from closed quarters so to speak and then suddenly having more of it than you know what to do with? Or even just completely not understanding space at all. In that case it makes sense that it should be experienced with the awe and trepidation natural to all things new and exploratory.

And maybe that is what it is like when we leave too. When we move from this world to a different one. maybe it is back to space, moving from one space to the next. Space is all relative to be sure and perhaps this time we move from a  different sort of confined space, the space that is familiar. the space we call our world, our bodies and our thoughts. maybe we move from this familiarity into a vastness unimaginable. Maybe it is scary too or perhaps the fear mixes with intrigue and curiosity as we transition into a new relative space.

This morning, once again, I became aware of space. This new space was light and conscious, and again almost unfamiliar. Previously it had been filled, seemingly every molecule with my fathers psyche  and the tensions between that and our own needs. We were residing it seemed in a cocoon of caretaking.

Walking through the house today puttering and doing chores, our space seems vast and rather empty but of course as the cliché goes, full of possibility. A lot like being born. And maybe too a little bit like dying.