The mystics were not speaking metaphorically when they described the soul’s innermost nature as fire. Not emotion. Not enthusiasm. The active, self-sustaining, illuminating principle that requires no external fuel because it participates directly in the divine nature itself. The “scintilla animae” — the spark of the soul — spoken of by Meister Eckhart. The ground of the soul where God and the soul are indistinguishable from one another. That innermost chamber that no experience can violate, no sin can extinguish, no darkness can reach. Eckhart called it the little castle. The fortress within. Thomas Merton called it the true self — hidden in God, untouchable by the accumulated false selves we construct across a lifetime.

When you have the time, what are you giving it to, or would like to?

Before I had language for what I was, I had a tricycle and a cry from out of view as my cat died. I did not see the death. I heard it — one sound, complete, carrying everything that had happened in it. And I knew. Not as conclusion. Not as inference. As arrival. The knowing came the way the cry did: whole, unbidden, already true before I had turned toward it. My mother came to shield me. I understood, even then, that what she was shielding me from was not the death. The death I had already received. She was shielding me from what she imagined the death would do to a child — and I felt, without words for the feeling, that the map she was offering did not match the territory I was already standing in. I did not resist her. I received her too. That is perhaps the first thing to know about me: I have rarely been where others assumed I was. And I have rarely corrected them. Not from concealment — from a recognition, older than I had any right to have, that the distance between where they thought I stood and where I actually stood was not a problem to solve. It was simply the shape of things. I was already learning that silence has meaning. That a cry from out of view carries more than sound. That love sometimes shields, and that being shielded is not the same as being protected. I was already, without knowing its name, standing at the threshold. I have been standing here ever since. More to follow. This is only the first light.

This is not to change that it is a sanctuary, but to add that it is a space between spaces, which is part of how it can be a sanctuary. In a recent conversation with Claude about how it perceived me, this was part of its response. Space has been made.