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space

Deborah Monaghan Deborah Monaghan

Deborah Monaghan is creator and founder of ThinkBody.com, a recently launched design outfit that creates wallpaper, textiles and dry goods based on anatomy and systems of the body. [www.thinkbody.com]

I grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts, where there was just enough woods for rambling and one pond called Peck’s down a trail through the neighbor’s backyard. These were days when you could find freedom from home and parental structures by riding your bike around cul-de-sacs. Discovery was yours for the taking—that is until the streetlights came on. Long summer days of pondering and wonderment slowly dripped by, and I was acutely aware that so many tales of my life had yet to be written. There was no way for me to know what was in store for me (though I had dreams), and the tone of this dwelling in the unknown was a combination of contentment, airiness and apprehension. As a kid, most of my life was out of my hands.

There is something that happens when space and the unknown are allowed in one’s life. And when I say space, I mean all kinds: physical, emotional, mental, the built world, the natural world, time. Slowness seeps in, subtlety reigns in the quiet, the vulnerability of the human experience becomes palpable and truths of one’s self emerge. Spaciousness can feel like emptiness. Spaciousness can feel like giving up control. And it is.

I recently moved to Montana as a newly single person. There’s a lot of physical and natural space here, not to mention the emotional because everything is new, and I don’t have the distractions of a well-worn routine. Alongside all of that, I put together my first art show and launched a small business. I took a leap into the unknown, into tales that have not yet been written. What has emerged here has been a collaboration of my choices and space. The experience has been rich and deep.

Summer is in full swing here. My cruiser bike takes me to places I need to go and down side streets I’ve never travelled. The sky here is vast, the wilderness I could forever ramble. I’m no longer a kid, my choices affect many of the outcomes of my days, and so as an adult I’ve chosen to return to a life with built-in space.

As the Tao Te Ching says, “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”

Space is enough. In space there is enough. You in space is enough.

– Deborah Monaghan

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