The capacity to move to new paradigms of perception is the creative possibility in human life and, to the anthropomorphic imagination, it is the basis of the concept of divine forgiveness. (In Hebrew) It is called tehiya, the waste space between clarities. In another version of Rashi's text, the word used is mash-heh -delay, a time that stands still, as it were, when the flow is retarded and a freedom is granted for contemplation. God gives the righteous time-out-of-time, like a still in a film, in which a different sense of being-with and being-in the crisis develops. This is the irreducible word, colorless, transparent, for being; simple survival, the gift, the interval between the named, the placed-that exile-in time in which selves are born.
-Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Nietzsche says that for Heraclitus all contradictions run into harmony, even if they are invisible to the human eye. Lyric is transparent-as hard to see as black or glare ice. The paved roadway underneath is our search for aesthetic truth. Poetry, false in the tricks of its music, draws harmony from necessity and random play. In this aggressive age of science, sound-colored secrets, unperceivable in themselves, can act as proof against our fear of emptiness.
-Susan Howe
Solitude is very different from a 'time-out' from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.
-Henri Nouwen
