Presencing, and the Space Between

Presence is a state; presencing is an act — and the shift from the one word to the other is the whole turn of the praxis. To presence something is to draw it actively across the threshold from potential into actuality: a relativity of entelechy, a relation that brings into being what would not otherwise have been there. And the place where this happens is not inside either person. It happens between them. This is the deepest reason the second volume dwelt so long on the space between things — for that space is not empty. Between any two beings who have come into genuine relation there opens a third thing: a field, a living interval that belongs to neither and arises from both.

Older minds had names for the intelligence that inhabits the between. One of them was Gaia — the sense that the connective tissue of the world is itself alive; that the relations among things are not mere gaps but constitute a being of their own. To presence genius is to enter that field on purpose: to attend to the space between oneself and another so carefully that the larger life resident there can come forward and speak. What arrives then is not yours and not theirs. It is the genius of the between — the most extraordinary consciousness available from the meeting of two, drawn out and made present. We do not manufacture it. We make the room in which it can appear.