Spaciousness

Two Cups of Tea at Hope’s Cafe

When I was in high school we had an exchange student from Japan who was amazed at the open spaces of northern Oklahoma, at that time still populated by large swaths of farmland. When we moved to Montana, known as “Big Sky Country,” I was amazed at how vast that expanse of sky is, a seamless canvas stretching in every direction. Before I was quite oriented to that sense of space, a church member commented that he had been to Tennessee and it was quite beautiful. But he said he began to feel claustrophobic with all those trees and was happy to return to his Montana landscape. I was quite stunned because I was still feeling homesick for those very trees that left him feeling closed in.

Yet spaciousness is not necessarily defined by size. Terry and I once stayed in Innsbruck in a small hotel. The room was so compact, so efficient. It was small, yes. But there was no sense of being confined, the design lending itself to an atmosphere of spaciousness.

Spaciousness also encompasses an inner world. In this time of so much clatter and clutter, the current political world fracturing all that once seemed reliable, our lives are at risk of giving way to withdrawal, closing ourselves in, isolating. Yet that withdrawal is different from maintaining a sense of inner spaciousness so necessary to our wellbeing.

Consider this: “Shift your frame of reference. Realise that all you see around you, ­the reality we perceive­, is a small stage upon which you act, and within it is an inner spaciousness that is infinite. Let’s now explore the infinite.

Alex Bennett

The invitation is open to share two cups of tea anytime at Hope’s Café or anywhere you share companionship and conversation.

May we bearers of hope, the “wait staff” at Hope’s Café, for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate