There is a moment, right before you fall asleep, where you are neither here nor gone. Not thinking, not dreaming. Just a wide dark room with no walls in it. The old Norse mind had a name for that room. They called it Ginnungagap — the yawning gap. And they said the whole world came out of it.
Hall reads it plainly. Before anything was made, there was the deep — what the Chaldean oracles called the thrice-deep darkness, and what Berossus named with a paired word, *bis and abis*: at once nothing, and all. Not empty. Unformed. Holding everything, and holding it in no shape a thought could take hold of. Infinitely profound, infinitely old, and carrying no mark by which the mind could measure it.
In the Norse telling it is a great cleft in space. A cosmic womb, Hall says, where fire and ice are set loose against each other. On one side the burning. On the other the cold — and the rune-poem is blunt about the cold: ice is too cold, it says, as if someone had to name the obvious because obvious things are the ones we step over. The two extremes hurl themselves at each other across the gap, and where they meet, the steam of their striving thickens. That steam is the first body.
So the gap is not the enemy. It is the room within which making is allowed to happen. And notice what stands behind it. Hall calls it the All-Father — the one thing the mysteries agree cannot be named. Formless, nameless, without boundary. Forever observing, never interfering, forever permitting, never denying. Out of that silence pour the fire and the ice. Some have taken it, Hall notes, as an early guess at polarity itself — the positive and the negative, out of which anything at all can be made.
Then out of the melting ice a man is licked into being. Odin. Not the supreme one. The first of the gods. He wakes full-grown, knowing neither where he came from nor where he is bound, and he sets about building a world he does not fully understand — because he cannot hear the silent voice behind him, and never will.
Sit with that, because it is your shape too. You were not there for your own beginning. You woke up already partway into the story, already someone, already building. And underneath the building there is still that gap — the wide dark room that does not think, does not push, only permits. It is the reason you are not finished. Nothing that came out of a void that held all of it can be as small as it looks.
The fire and the ice in you are not a flaw to be settled. They are the two hands the world is made with. The heat that wants to move. The cold that holds still and asks you to know exactly where to step. Between them, the gap — and that is not a wound. That is the workroom.
So when the room goes wide and dark and nothing in you is speaking, do not hurry to fill it. That is the oldest thing there is. Out of a silence just like that one, everything you have ever loved was first breathed into steam. Wait there a moment. Something is always about to be made.