SPACES WE LIVE IN RANGE FROM SMALLER TO LARGE

I find it incongruous that although I love big places such as high mountains, wide prairies, the great vaults of the starry heavens, I find such comfort and coziness in small places. Yet, like most everyone else, I seem destined to spend most of my time in what I call the middle-sized places, from the porch to the garage, from the garage to the grocery store, to town to keep some appointment, or to some other not-very-far-away point then home to the middle-sized again. Of course, I'm talking about physical spaces.

There is a corner in an upstairs (often called the attic) room where I can sit on a low chair, back to a wall, with the steeply slanting roof almost touching my head. The place is not orderly. Tall boxes of ragbag scraps surround me so that I'm in a little space and would be hard to find. But there is this chair and nearby a low shelf of old journals and favorite books. When there, I feel that I have come apart from the world. No one can interrupt my thoughts, read my mind, interpret my expression. I am alone with me. I can "have it out with myself," with the only sounds being that of the squirrels scampering across the roof, or, if raining, the soft soothing patter.

Without any effort, I can pick up and re-read an old well loved passage which I already know by heart, but re-reading it takes me back to the first time I came across it and the thrill is still faintly felt.

Recently I came across a book of poems that fell open to Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Renascence." It awakened an old thrill -- not the words, which I hardly understood then, but my presentation of the poem in Junior College to be tested for Drama Society eligibility. I was center stage, alone, dressed in a dramatic black dress with wide lace sleeves. The clock on the west wall said 3:00 P.M. I knew I had only 20 minutes, which didn't leave much time for pauses or gestures, but I made it, and also the Drama Society. Ah, sweet still faintly felt thrill.

Again, in spring and summertime, I have created a small circular space between the spirea, forsythia and mock orange where I can be alone, pick off a single blossom and look down into the smallness of it, trying, like Holmes, to understand it. Once a bumblebee came to suck the sweetness out of a blossom I was holding in my hand. Little thing but big deal!

Yet, as I said, I love the tall mountains, the big fields and, even now, there's never a clear night but that I go outside and look at the vast starry skies. I feel that I'm on speaking terms with Orion, Cassiopeia, Big Dipper. My eyes, dimming with age, see that the end star to the right in Orion's belt sometimes winks at me, a long wink before it opens up again!

My eye doctor doesn't ask me about the stars, just whether I can read this bunch or that bunch of letters.

I wonder what Freud or Adler would make of this little-big "space" situation. Would they say it was brackets holding in place the common, middle expanses that we deal with most of the time? That if we broke through to live in only the little spaces or pitch our tent in the middle of a Kansas wheat field or on top of old Rocky, we'd be picked up and forced to live in the one-size-fits-fall space with coils of barbed wire for a fence?

Wait! What was it Millay said in the poem which I now more fully understand? Pressed in on all sides, her physical space and view that is, she screamed with the suffocation of it.

Then, visited with the view of all Infinity, past, present and future, she screamed again, to God, who brought her back to live in the familiar places where the earthly spaces we live in are no wider than the heart can make it, the heavenly space no higher than the soul can make it. As she so poetically puts it, "But East and West will pinch the heart that cannot keep them pushed apart; and he whose soul is flat -- the sky will cave in on him by and by."

REJOICE!