Interstellar Interstitium
where light moves, and what I know from watching it
There is a luminous web of light that hovers above and moves through all things. It stayed in my thoughts long enough that I had no choice but to acknowledge it and clear my schedule to let it take form through my hands. Life had offered me a few years of consistent work that gave me the guts to take an entire summer off to make it. I drew nine shapes on a piece of paper and sent them to a laser cutter, picked out harmonious shades of thin acrylic sheets, and began stitching thousands of shapes into a tapestry of light. It was the most transcendent feeling. My table felt like an altar. My job was to show up and weave light until it was done. I had spent the eight years leading up to this joyful summer noticing light move around the world, and now it felt like time to create something that was the culmination of my research; to let everyone in on this kind of presence, to share the fruits of what grew after so many years of listening with my eyes. I released the work in a solo exhibition full of sound, light, and awe. In the presence of this tapestry, people loosened their jaws, let time wash over them like a sheet.
During the summer I worked on the installation, synchronicity brought me articles about the interstitium, a “new” discovery (in Western medicine at least---in Traditional Chinese Medicine it is known as the San Jiao)defined as a fluid-filled network of spaces in connective tissue that supports body-wide communication and could play key roles in disease, immunity, and regeneration.
It is a system of in between spaces, and it is everywhere.
Reflecting on this experience a year after it left my hands, the interstitium looks just like what I made, like I took a magnifying glass and expanded this fluid-filled system of in between spaces and asked it to fill an entire room. Making this work was such a pure experience for me, one of flow and acknowledging some numinous energy that kept asking me to use my hands to make something tangible. Though the work has moved along in the world, it introduced me to some mystical thing in real form and left me with a changed consciousness.
Close your eyes. Imagine a sparkling web of light hovering some close distance above you. It is soft, weightless, and fills you with a willingness to offer it your vulnerability. What a relief it is to be in such presence. It might enter your ears and ring you like a bell. It might reignite you or carry you off some light-filled place only you recognize. Open your mouth to take a breath and it can reach down into your belly, removing all blocks between you and whatever is meant to leave you. It’s like a celestial chimney sweep. I can describe this because I have seen it.
More than once, I watched light move down from my head, through my heart and into a friend’s body. But first, it showed me the sparkling edges of her as if to say, this is where she ends and everything else begins. Watch me move through her and notice where I get stuck.
Light can spill. It can quiver-bend. It can turn and funnel like a tornado. It can be sharp in the dark. I have seen it flow from me in an infinite river. It nourishes like water. It may not be extinguished. When something heavy falls on it, it becomes spores exploding from a squashed beam. It dapples. Scatters. Plumes.
Am I navigating the body through this web of light? This soft moveable thing that folds up like a fitted sheet. It seems to me akin to the celestial sack that holds all life—the threads of which lead from thought to blood to dreams to sickness to hunger to delight. An interstellar interstitium; something that weaves through the body and extends in some unseen form into everything. I arrive here honestly. Not as a scientist or a religious scholar, but rather as a woman who loves the world, someone who began noticing light ten years ago and now notices it move through people. In every instance, it arrives with a sense of peace and leaves everything a little more healed.
It encourages me in a way I find hard to describe. So far, I can sense that my path of noticing light is just beginning. Or maybe it’s taking a sharp turn into a new infinity?
Either way, I am an apt navigator who can drive through the dark.