On a day when more of us are systematically removing ourselves from public spaces, Christian Wiman reminds us that “all love demands withdrawal.” Giving others their space is not a novel way of demonstrating care. What’s new for most of us is negotiating the majority of our relationships at such a remove. Already, though, I have seen some intentional, beautiful, and creative examples of closeness growing without physical proximity, and I hope you are seeing some, too. Wiman also says that “all love demands imagination.” Let’s redeem the time imagining new ways of being with and for one another.

Wiman continues…

846A Window Right by Friedensreich Hundertwasser

We must create the life creating us, and must allow that life to be —

and to be beyond, perhaps, whatever we might imagine.

I, too, am more (and less)

than anything I imagine myself to be.

“To know this,” says Simone Weil, “is forgiveness.”

 

It is an air you enter, not an act you make.

It is the will’s frustration, and is the will’s fruition.

It is to wade a blaze one night that I once crossed

— a young man, and lost —

to find a woman made of weather

sweeping the street in front of her shack.

It is another country.

It is a language I don’t know.

La por allá, la por allá, I repeat in my sleep.

The over there.

 

– from “The Parable of Perfect Silence” by Christian Wiman