Many years ago, over a nice dinner, a friend of ours stood behind Bernie to introduce him to friends and said: “This is Bernie Glassman. Whenever Bernie wants to learn something, he gives a workshop on it.”

You couldn’t have said anything truer, I told our host later. Bernie would lose interest in teaching the same things, and especially, teaching something he knew, or not-knew, very well. Like all great teachers, he was always learning. And his favorite way of learning was to teach it.

Why? Because you work harder. You dig deeper. Most important, you let others teach you. He loved circles for that reason, where the form encouraged everyone to express themselves rather than just focusing on the guru. He learned and took to heart what they said, then taught another workshop, integrating what he’d already learned from before.

He opened up to others’ wisdom. If in earlier years he could sometimes act as a guru, once he started engaging in social justice work in earnest, he opened ithings up because he understood how much there was to learn from others.

One of those places was leading clowning workshops alongside his clown teacher, Moshe Cohen, known as Mr. YooWho. Some people said that YooWho, who had served as the head of the American contingent of Clowns Without Borders (headquartered in Barcelona, Spain), did the clowning and Bernie did the Zen. I didn’t think so at all.

Can you really clown without being ready to stand on the edge of things, and even sometimes falling, or failing (a word Bernie never used)? Sometimes we call that not-knowing. Others refer to opening up to the Mystery. Sure, you can paste a red nose on your nose, run around in small circles and flutter your arms like a bird, and that is charming and wonderful, especially for children.

But for me, the essence of clowning lies in seeing the space that exists in every moment for further exploration, and especially for exploring the unexpected. YooWho, who has a book coming out in the spring of 2027 on the importance of clowning and humor in everyday life, illustrates simple practices on doing something a little differently from before, like turning the page of a book but missing that all important paper edge with your finger every time you try.  Try it and see how funny that can be.

You don’t have to be hooked into doing the same things repeatedly; day-to-day life isn’t cement. You can go left instead of right or right instead of left, you don’t have to live the events of your life as if they’re on some shopping list and you’re just checking them off. Aussie and I often walk the same paths, but she always leaves me to explore the adjacent grove of trees or makes a rush after animals. I yell for her and she comes grudgingly, the look on her face saying: Why are you going here again? What about following the train tracks? What about looking what’s under that cluster of shrubs over there? And why rush? There’s so much to sniff and search for.

YooWho sent me the above photo. He lives in San Francisco, whose streets are filled with variations of self-drive and driverless cars. In the photo, the Zoox, a driverless vehicle with no driver, steering wheel or pedals, meets up with a cardboard box that drifted (or fell) onto the street. It seemed that the Zoox had no idea what this was, decided to be safe rather than sorry, and came to a complete stop. Cars packed the streets behind it, wondering what was holding it up and beeping their horns, while the Zoox, facing the cardboard box like it was an existential encounter, didn’t move.

It brought to mind the wonderful Hedy Schleifer and her focus on the space between two people, itself based on Martin Buber’s I/Thou relationship of subject/subject rather than subject/object. Hedy emphasizes that an entire universe exists in that space.

I don’t know how many “neighborhoods,” as her work partner Paul Browde refers to them, existed in the space between the Zoox and the cardboard box, but boy were there many in the space between Bernie and me. It took me years to see that that space didn’t merely consist of a vertical axis, as in: You’re the teacher here. That remained there.

It was the space between husband and wife that provided the fertile ground, with so many neighborhoods to visit, such as: Are we good friends? What prevents me from listening to you, and vice versa? When is there respect and when isn’t there? Does work fall equally on our shoulders? What are the hidden icebergs in this relationship?

Sometimes I feel I’m still visiting a few of those neighborhoods, talking to Bernie, reminding him of a conversation we had on board a plane, how he so loved to talk while driving that the speedometer would plummet to 10mph, a convoy of cars and trucks lined up behind us, and he happily, obliviously talking. There was small talk (e.g., What are we doing for dinner?), there was lots of dharma vision/work talk, and there were the neighborhood visits. I wish we’d done more of those.

I never realized that the space between two people can be a sacred space, one that can be explored deeper and wider all the time. You go to restaurants and see two people sitting over dinner and picking at their food, a little bored, barely talking to one another. It’s as if, having been together for a long time, they know each other so well that there’s nothing more to be discovered, no terra incognita, everything is known. Done.

Is that the case with you? Not with me. If someone were to tell me that everything is known and done about me, like the Presidents’ faces on Mt. Rushmore, I’d say: “No, I’m still becoming, thank you very much.” More like the great warrior Crazy Horse, whose enormous likeness with horse is still being etched out of the mountain even today. And while there are probably blueprints for how that may eventually come out, there are no blueprints for what I’m becoming as I age.

That space between two people, between I and Thou, includes the Good morning, Lori space when I first leave the bedroom to greet my housemate. It can be formulaic, or it can surprise. Someone came to look at our driveway to see to fixing it and the adjoining culvert after the big summer storms we had. In past lives I’d make a quick confab out of it, and once he began to measure the distance, I’d mutter apologies and leave. This time I became fascinated by the survey device he was using that logged coordinates and converted them into a scaled diagram. We walked up and down the driveway, I marveling at all the new gadgets being invented all the time.

I think of the space between Aussie and me, which is sometimes full of surprises and sometimes not:

“You’re so slow, Aussie, now that you’re turning 9 next week.”

“Am not.”

“Lori was commenting on how much slower you are in eating.”

“Your food ain’t what it used to be.”

“You don’t run around as hard as you used to.”

“You walk slower than you used to.”

And then there’s Zoox and the cardboard box:

“What are you?”

“A box. You?”

“The future.”

“Sure look like a box to me.”