The (very spacious) view from my former life as a field biologist in the Mojave Desert.
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As long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with deserts. I spent several years working and traveling in dry places around the world, each desert teaching me as much as the last. There is so much I love about them, but there’s always been one attribute that speaks to me more than anything: massive, abundant space.
Spaciousness is a rare and essential quality. It feeds something within us and in our world that nothing else can. There's a reason humans have sought out deserts as places of spiritual discovery and refuge for thousands of years: in openness, we find room to connect with what matters. When our nervous systems feel spacious, we are kinder, clearer, and more awake to sensation and suffering and beauty. Bodies that cultivate spaciousness - whether outer or inner or both - are tremendous gifts in our compressed-feeling world.
As highly sensitive souls, noticing the need for space and helping to cultivate it comes naturally to us. Space is both one of our most essential nourishments and one of our most potent gifts. When we feel spacious and unencumbered, we can exhale, relax our grip, and let go into life. The incredible capacity we have to feel and create gets to expand, allowing us to offer others and our world an uncommonly attuned presence. But if we feel compressed - through lack of time or space or from demands that drain us - we can feel like we’re fighting for air instead of sharing our gifts. In order to do what we do best - see with clarity, feel with courage, sense with gentleness, create with integrity, and act with heartfelt alignment - it is essential to understand and respect our inherent need for space.
Deserts have taught me that when spaciousness is one of the deepest gifts we have to give the world, we have to limit what we allow into our lives. Deserts are experts at doing this. Many desert plants will actually secrete substances from their roots that keep other plants from rooting too close. In a land where water is scarce, knowing your boundaries is vital for individual plants as well as the whole ecosystem. In fact, the gift of spaciousness that the desert gives can only happen with respect for its limits. When these limits are not respected and the desert’s resources are over-used or over-extracted, the entire chain of desert life begins to unravel. We have to respect what we cannot give in order to give what we can.
As we open into this first full day of a new season, I invite you to consider: what nourishes inner and outer spaciousness for you? Can you gently tune in to your particular nervous system's needs around space? What are the natural limits your life is asking you to honor? These calls toward spaciousness might be something big or something small and daily. It's often most approachable to start with what's here: taking the slower, less-hectic route home from work, feeling your breathing for a minute on your lunch break, spending your free afternoon in nature, or taking a few minutes cultivating a somatic practice that encourages inner space (see below).
My prayer for you this month is that you will find your own version of spaciousness, create nourishing ways to claim the limits of your life, and recognize that your limitations are also the source of your greatest gifts. May you honor yourself as the spacious, gifted, sensitive being that you are.
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