The Sacred Space Between Things

The morning I was lucky enough to be in this photo was the same morning that my sister, who was in a different boat,  claimed to have smelled the breath of a whale.  Proximity is a funny thing, especially if a 300,000-pound creature is the object of your attention.

Earlier this week, Nature Conservancy land manager Chris Helzer--whose mom, Sue, taught me to listen to every bird--was in Lincoln to talk about a year-long experiment he'd conducted with a single square meter of prairie.  More accustomed to the sweeping view of someone who works in the grasslands, Helzer committed to watching closely the life within that square meter of wild space.  The 110 plants and creatures he encountered in that sliver of land profoundly affected him.

In the past few weeks, I've been pondering the space between things, specifically in terms of journalism.

The daughter of a newspaperman, I grew up in a three-paper family--nibbling on the Lincoln Star and the Omaha World-Herald for breakfast and snacking on the Lincoln Journal just before dinner.  Even then, there was talk of what was missed in an a.m. or p.m. publication.  Which one had the leg up on the other?  And yet, each, with that built-in pause required from a printing press, had the benefit of the space between things.  In turn, journalists could reflect on the news before they packaged it into 600-word stories.

Our current 24/7 news cycle robs us of the space between things, that important place where discernment comes alive.  Where wireless and 4G networks take the place of clunky machinery, journalists lose touch with the gatekeeper days of old, and end up spending their days regurgitating rather than reflecting. 

. . . which is why, if we aren't careful, following the news can feel like trying to read a book while going down a waterslide.  I suspect the journalists writing that news often feel the same way.

And yet, like that morning when the whale broke the waters with its tail, I see signs of hope on the horizon.  A recent lunch with two former students was punctuated with talk of their favorite news sources--the New York Times and The New Yorker--and how disappointing it is when they come to the end of a riveting 3,000-word essay.  Hardly the stuff of empty-minded, easily-distracted Generation Whatever They Are.

Then, there's CNN, which no longer offers live reporting of White House briefings.  That act seems defiant now, but it was once the norm, building in a pause between what was said and what is reported, so that accuracy and facts frame the reported story.

In a time when it seems that all we are breathing in is the whale's breath--our perspectives warped and worn--we should seek out and encourage those sacred spaces, where discernment lives and our eyesight again grows strong.