Writing Spaces: The Gap

 

The empty space which dwells now where the tree once was—the haunted space, uneasy with recriminations and with dread, heavy with loss, mourning, fraught with remembered days and skies and moods, passing seasons, passing travelers, hopes past, love holding on, but just—exactly there, we enter into the sacred, echoing precincts of writing.

 

"The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one else on the farm gave it a thought, he would at least do his best to, even though he suspected that his child’s words and child’s deeds didn’t make much difference. It had stood there before he was born, and would be standing there after he was dead, but perhaps, even so, it was pleased that he stroked its bark every time he passed, and sometimes, when he was sure he wasn’t observed, even pressed his cheek against it."

—Karl Ove Knausgård, from A Time for Everything

 

Said to be 300 years old, this famous tree was cut down with a chainsaw by a vandal on 28 September, 2023.  RIP compassion and love and gentleness.

 

 

image:  Sycamore Gap, The Fabulous North

Writing Spaces: October

Spaces between . . . summer and fall (rising, falling), the light and dark, the trees and their deep (soaring) clarity- and mystery-laden interstices . . .  Places in which the writer gladly dwells.

 

image:  Helena Miozga/ChingYang Tung