Granular space

[Harrison Owen]

Granular spaceGranular space in the Big Open. I like it. Although to get the full impact, I suspect we really have to talk about space/time, especially when wandering through Montana and North Dakota. It is not just space, but rather space flowing in time -- on a very different time scale than our daily lives, but time none the less. And Yes we may experience it as "timeless" -- or space standing still -- but you are so, so right. It is all in motion. Coming and going in a very big Now. Poetics for sure, but I also think we have the opportunity to experience the same seemless flow of time/space every time we Open Space, and our capacity to fully appreciate that Open Space is directly related to sensing the time/space flow. I guess an experieince such as you had Ralph is so overpowering that you really can't miss it -- as all too often we may miss the same experieince in the hubbub of the standard OS. Thanks!

Harrison 
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
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USA
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website www.openspaceworld.com
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  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ralph Copleman 
  To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU 
  Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 10:55 AM
  Subject: Granular space


  Back to an earlier train of thought...

  I always thought I understood what we meant by "Have a granular day".

  To me it's about slowing to feel grains of experience one at a time, and not to let time and life slip by so as to miss many fine (and important) distinctions.  I think of it sometimes as squeezing bits of sand through the hourglass one by one, and carefully.

  I have just come home from a 500-mile bicycle ride through remote parts of Montana and North Dakota (USA).  This completes the second of my two-part odyssey of riding my bicycle across the country (which is very, very, very, very big).   There are wide stretches of central and eastern Montana that provide the opportunity to ponder "granular" for long periods as one pedals, pedals, stroke after stroke, mile after mile after mile.  The landscape remains the same as it endlessly changes.  The buttes, the prairies and the crumbled landscape they call "Missouri Breaks"make the same changes all the livelong day.  The wind and the water of the eons have written the book on granular, this is for sure.

  The "wide open spaces" as the American West has often been called, are still there.  It's no longer the frontier of previous times, but the locals still refer to the region as "the Big Dry", or the "Big Empty", and even the "Big Open".  It's granularized open space alright, but it is not still or unchanging.  I had the thought, as I rode along, often in solitude, that open spaces of all kinds are changing all the time, that "expanded nows" are not static.  They're dynamic in a sort of stillness.  Space, like time, unfolds, like music over the measures.  I can, if I pay attention, hear the melody and feel the grains.

  Ralph Copleman

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