08/28/2026
🙏🤍
"Space is too wild, undomesticated, and vast to be “held.”
The image of holding is an evocative one. We speak of “holding space” for another—staying near, listening, attuning to what they are feeling and how they are making sense of their experience. Through empathic resonance, something in them feels felt and understood.
And yet, in my own experience, when I’m with someone who is overwhelmed, grieving, or wandering beyond the familiar edges of themselves, it does not feel as though *I* am doing the holding. There is holding occurring, certainly, but it isn’t mine. It feels older than that, as if the room itself has opened into something larger—the silence beneath our words, the earth beneath our feet, the stars moving outside the window.
My role is less to hold this space than to enter it: to move into reverie, to loosen my certainty about what healing should look like, and to listen for what is trying to emerge. To wonder, to pray, and to allow something unknown to have its life between us.
Perhaps this is why I love the image of birds moving through an open sky. The sky does not hold their flight; it gives their flight somewhere to happen.
Maybe this is closer to what we offer one another—not a space we possess or manage, but a vastness we enter together, something we can participate in, tend to, and love, while remembering that it was never ours.
Space cannot be held, but it can be entered into and loved."
- Matt Licata
