Personal Essay: Intimate Space by David Sparenberg

By David Sparenberg ​

"Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are".
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                                 - Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish Philosopher

I am a human member. My home is of intimate space.  I live between Earth and Sky. I am between land and water.

The ocean-world that cannot be crossed in a single day, a single night, or even in a single lifetime, starts and ends at my bare feet. Unbroken rhythm washing the singing sand surges between my toes, bubbling beneath where I stand, under my soles.​

Mountain which cannot be climbed in rational and waking hours, belonging to dreamspheres, from base to snow-topped summit, lifts before my eyes and towers far above me. That mountain that carves me in its image, sits like a great stone giant, sitting while ascending through millennia—cloud gathering at summit.  Mountain is a sentinel of Earth’s dream, yet never, never have I seen mountain slopes and peaks-geological in motion! I’ve seen changes alone at an alpine tree line and in caribou tracks and trailing wolves.

Everything about me is formed in the betweenness of a specific place with needs and purpose. And am I not reflected in this weight and vastness at eyesight level and wingspan hands?  Not existentially thrown but as given as the givenness of identity’s shared and shaping context!

A living person, breathing, dreaming, working my garden, seeding, I was born below the sign of Gemini. It is not out of character that my home is in a Gemini location, a locality not satisfied to be land alone, not content to be only water, horizontal without vertical or to be vertical without wide and summit-signatured horizons.

I am a human member here, dwelling in this intimate space. A presence alive between life and death, between living and dying.  A presence between give and take, embrace, reciprocity, holding in the moment eternity longs for, and letting go. Between the fiery splendor of the sun arching sky of sometimes rainbows and hidden stillness of filigreed, fingering downward roots restlessly in search of watery oases. 

Ocean departs between breaths and does not leave its place a single moment. Trees stretch in two directions. Tree branches bear colonies of moss, vivid green communities, like busloads of uniformed school children, high and higher above the often rain splashed ground. The sucking fertility of saturated, native soil.

I live like this, here and now, between myth and history, dwelling on the mystic cusp of ancestral memories. In and out, backward-forward, between forgetfulness as conscious renewal and the unconscious obligations of continuum through remembrance  

Everything that is lives in betweenness. My home is of intimate space. Forms and forces, hymns, and furies out beyond, reside inside. I abide. Betweenness bespeaks of who I am. The language is intimate.