It is as if our conception establishes a living interval which at once uniquely distinguishes and (thus) unifies the polarities we understand as birth and death. This connection which distinguishes as it unifies is not a possession unless one represents it to oneself. Only then can it be misunderstood in the way we are generally trained to see, think, and believe. But this is to take the wrapper for the gift, and then to become afraid of losing it. A tragic confusion at best.

In language that is closer to the reality, this interval is a dynamic expression of universality as personality. We might imagine it as a cascade of developmental conversations between birth and death, a process which actually becomes the -shared dimension- of life — a transcendent domain ‘in-between’, in which we, through living, creatively participate.

We are trained to imagine this interval as a life, my life, the ‘span’ belonging to me. Something we must personally preserve. A matter of temporal extent. And, to be honest, I usually think and feel this way. But I must suggest that, like the mind, a life is not something one can possess. And its ‘extent’ has many domains of instance that are not simply temporal.

This life is not the result not of possession, but of -relation-. And in this process we creatively distinguish (and thus unify) each other, the world, ideas, words… we are the creature who creates a gap by its arrival which it crosses with its attention and participation.

Our lives are expressions of this participation, and in this sense, are like the calls and responses we find in musical phrasings. Or prayers. They are invocations, appeals, negations, denials… they are arguments and rhapsodies, narratives and analyses… happening in the living language that is our presence, here in the between, of birth and death. Together, for a moment, in the strangest and most beautiful of predicaments.