INTO SPACE

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If home is where the heart is, then space is where the soul is. Not space space. Just space, the outside of the inside. As we progress, we trade space for room. With much finesse, we squeeze our modern plastic lives into boxes. Home. Office. Store. Gym. Inside them we live, work, sleep, bread, and feed until our hearts get heavy and our souls skinny. Self-domesticated kings of the smallest corner of the universe, we hide inside our makeshift womb in a fetal curl and snip away at the umbilical cord that connects us with our surroundings, mother nature and father space. The more we advance into the direction we call forward, the more we distance ourselves from an outside past when the world was our living room, the night sky our ceiling, and no barrier between us and the cosmos’ farthest star.

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The inside is sterile and sober, a rectangular place to sit and lay while our spirits and muscles wither away. It is full of predictable sameness – same temperature, same light, same plot – but otherwise empty, and we seem empty in it, our best approximation of the world a window in the wall and a draft that reminds us of wind. Cowering at the seams of space, everything awaits right outside: incoherent installations of coincidence that make our senses pop and our consciousness tingle, intelligible associations and unimaginable exceptions, asymmetrical chaos and arbitrary change, prickly friction. In the vastness of a horizon we find meaning, in the fluctuations of a busy street we find answers, in the liveliness of crisp air we find fresh molecules to suck on. The hurricane of outside stimuli translates to a tsunami of feelings inside us – when we make our way into space, space makes its way into us. Anyway, I sure feel mighty snuggly while writing this, inside. But maybe tomorrow I’ll go out, into space.

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