“Spaces”

By Ron Stultz

4 January 2007

Riding alone in my car the other day, out through open fields with a vast visual view and I realized again, how much I need the feel of open spaces now and again. Spaces: the feel of spaces?

I live, spend most of my time, in a very small office of maybe 10 feet by 15 feet and it is alright. Everything or most things are within easy arm’s reach and it does not feel cramped or crowded but perhaps I feel this way because of all the years I spent in work cubicles, which were even smaller.

I like a lot of space.

Years ago, I was working in Arizona and on weekends would roam the deserts by car and then on foot. In this arid place with little vegetation or vegetation like I was used to in Virginia, it seemed that my awareness, my presences expanded to an extremely large area.

In an elevator, so small and cramped, seems like I and everyone in the car shrink into them selves to make room for all the other souls. In the case of the desert, there were no other human souls and my soul expanded greatly. How large? Perhaps for 50 yards in all direction, in a circle about me. Expansion of awareness, presence? Just felt that the desert knew I was there and I could intimately feel the desert and what it was for 50 yards in all directions. Spaces.

I don’t care for tight spaces. The idea of being boxed into a coffin does nothing for me. So tight on the sides and top.

In a dream, was in a very small tunnel inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt and this tunnel so tight about me, made of stone and so hot in there. I was filled with absolute terror. Terror that the billion tons of stone all around me would fall on me and the heat was like and oven. My vision of Biblical “Hell”, I guess.

So at one end of the spaces scale is the coffin and my pyramid tunnel and at the other end is outer space.

In another dream, alone, away from the earth in the darkness between the stars and unlike the pyramid tunnel experience, did not feel terror, only loneness. The emptiness of the space did not bother me but no awareness of awareness or soul expansion either. I was just there in this vast empty space. Perhaps too much space for my soul or awareness to fill and nothing for my awareness to expand into or around or through.

In between the very small and very large, I have very different feelings in all kinds of spaces. Now and again, I absolutely need to get into different size spaces.  I wonder how a person in prison stands confinement. It is one think to voluntarily keep myself in my office here and another being locked into it without the ability to move freely outside of it. Must drive some people absolutely crazy being locked up.

Big Sky country. First time in the West and experienced “Big Sky” country, so impressed. Earth really was flat with this inverted bowl of blue overhead. Could see thousands of acres and hear its silence. My awareness, soul expanded outward until it more or less dissolved. I was just there, a part of and separate from.

Once while hunting with my Dad, came upon this small pasture in the middle of a thick forest. This quarter acre meadow, all green and sloped up to a single tree of a type completely different than all the other trees in the forest and immediately I knew it was a shrine, an alter, a sacred place: it just gave off that sort of feel. Stayed there a long, long time. Actually would have like to have stayed there forever if it were possible. I think only place I have ever been that gave me that sort of feeling: would stay here forever if I could.

At this moment, my world is only several feet around me. Visually, I can see 2 feet to my computer screen but then I remember being at a stadium concert and looking over 55,000 people gathered to hear music and how incredible it was. Space filled with all those souls. Like the stadium concert experience as so many people, I could get lost in the sea. Know others that do not care for it at all as probably like a million elevators experience for them. Too many people, too close.

I pull out of my driveway here in the city and head out for the country and open road. As I drive through the city and all the buildings and placed trees, visually I can not see very far and the landscape seems empty of a soul. As I travel on, more and more open areas begin to appear and much more visually stimulation. An open field offers the potential for noticing the foundation of an old stone house, a ticket of trees that someone continues to mow around, remnants of and old grave yard, long overgrown with saplings and weeds. I wonder as I “see” these things if by my attention, they are nursed or if they existed at all until I saw them there? More open spaces all around me until finally I begin to see more of the sky in all directions and I feel like I am actually on the surface of something. More open spaces and vast fields, populated by cows or wheat or corn or crop stubble and my eye and mind sweep the horizon. No matter how many times I have traveled the same road, the same way, I always see something new. “How could I have missed that on my last pass through”, I wonder.

The Grand Canyon: would like to be on the rim of the Canyon on a bright clear day all alone. Have been to the Canyon 3 times in my life and never disappoints. Perhaps for most people, there first experience of huge space. Hard to see how anyone who has been there, on the rim of that giant space, did not feel “space”, have the canyon impact them in a very strange way. When I have been there, always with other people around but to be alone, at sunset would be a mystical experience for me.

Cortez National Monument, Arizona. This is a very high place in the southern part of Arizona. It is an easy car ride up to the monument but then a pretty good hike to the very top where one can look out on millions of desert acres. Devoid of trees, one thinks one can see motion on the landscape for miles in all directions. If it is moving out there anywhere, you awareness would catch it. Spent a lot of time on top of Cortez. Another space, place where my soul dissolved and I did not have to be me and was not me, just a part of the larger like some boulder there. The Sun, brilliant in the blue sky, the sky, the vast brown desert and devoid of other humans, human souls. Many, many times, up there alone and liking it. Would climb down off the peak onto some boulders and strip naked and sun bathe. Never planned, just a thought that came to mind and always an honest, clean thought of what I should do. Quiet: so quiet there. All those millions of acres and only now and again, a whisper of the wind.  Coffin, Cortex peak, there is a difference as to its impact on me and who I am. And yes, I think the “who” I am varies by the space I am in. Small space, space filled with people, fields, Big Country, Grand Canyon, outer space, each has its impact and I an impact on it.

So another one of my “and so what?” observations or wonderings. So what if I now aware that I need different spaces now and again to keep me, what? Balanced? Why do I need different size, place, spaces and knowing that I need them, what does that help?

The sea, being by the sea makes me feel lonely. Such a vast, empty space. How the sea is different from the desert, I do not know, but to me they are.

Really have to shut down riding in the confines of an airplane. Too tight, confined: sure it so for most people. People? Wonder if spaces, the concept of different “feels” from different places on animals of all types? Does a pet dog sometimes wish to just run free in the area the size of Montana? Does a pet car long to be placed in a small cage that is nest or womb like?

Never read enough and so I wonder if the need for various spaces is universal among humans and is part of various psychological disorder treatments? Could it be that some mental disorders are the result of a person being in the wrong space for too long? Perhaps they are suite to “Big Sky” but live in a cave or perhaps they do live in “Big Sky” and should be in a city, surrounded, enclosed, tighter?

My body is a space or so it seems to me. My mind seems comfortable in the space provided but now and again, needs to roam free of the visual and auditory and the feel of my skin. Like the physics of the very large and the very small, sure there is more depth to my spaces definition, concept, roaming than I have tried to impart here.

So which would be better? A coffin, all closed and tight or being cremated stuck into a lipstick tube and shot out into outer space?