Interstices

Sometimes in that twilight space between sleep and wakefulness a voice speaks to me of things I need to learn. Recently it transmitted a word I haven’t used since my days in academia.

“Interstial! Pay attention to the stillness and silence between words and sounds, to the spaces between the grains of rice.” I was pleasantly lulled by the initial abstraction, but that last bit about the rice roused my mind, which then began to fiddle at the edges of the metaphor.

Still, I have been sitting with the message, meditating on interstices, those spaces that the mind tends to (dis)regard as unimportant “negative space” between more obvious or interesting objects. This last month I’ve been especially attuned to the interstices between words: sensing the underlying energy of communication, reading between the lines, listening for what’s left unsaid, and feeling into the weight of pregnant pauses.

When I let the silence expand (or perhaps it is I expanding into the silence), it is interstice no more, but a full-blown field of communication. It reminds me of a time I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. We talked excitedly over our meal, but at some point we both got the sense that the table was energetically in the way, so we reconfigured ourselves next to each other so we could silently take in each other’s energy fields. That was all the catching up we really needed to do.

For decades and decades I relied on my command of language to make sense of the world and communicate ideas. And my work in the Akashic Records has largely been dependent on my ability to translate into words and concrete ideas the more abstract or ineffable energies that come through. Yet for the past few months my practice has been expanding to support silent energy transmissions, and I’m developing a growing awareness of the power of the void. It is Nothing and it is All.

I welcome you to invite more silence into your daily life and notice the depths you can touch in yourself in that space. There is always motion in stillness, a quiet awareness, a shimmering light, but first we have to shift our attention to those interstitial places we aren’t used to looking at, and then we have to get quiet enough to let whatever is there for us step forward.