I have cousins who own a summer house that is wrapped by a spectacular porch and looks out over Cape Cod Bay. Last summer, I met one of those cousins for the first time--until then, I had talked to her only through e-mail. Her e-mail account name is "theporch," and sitting with her on that porch, I remembered that and asked her why. She swept her arm around and said, "The porch... this is my life." I couldn't tell if that really meant anything or not, and I couldn't figure out a follow-up question that would shed any further light on the matter. Perhaps spending her summers on that porch while growing up--sitting peaceful and loved under its protection, yet with an almost unlimited view of the vast sea--shaped her in some way. And according to Christopher Alexander, the provision of just that transition between inside and outside, with a unique perspective on both, is exactly the role to be played by a porch:

Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.

The experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building. If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival, and the inside of the building fails to be an inner sanctum.

...what matters most is that the transition exists, as an actual physical place, between the outside and the inside, and that the view, and sounds, and light, and surface which you walk on change as you pass through this place. It is the physical changes--and above all the change of view--which creates the psychological transition in your mind.

The English Freudian D. W. Winnicott, best known for his work with transitional objects and phenomena, proposed a strangely analogous transitional space that arises during the course of infant development, as the infant learns to identify with the idea of the self:

If it is true that the transitional object and transitional phenomena are at the very basis of symbolism, then I think we may fairly claim that these phenomena mark the origin in the life of the infant and child of a sort of third area of existing, a third area which I think has been difficult to fit into psycho-analytic theory which has had to build up gradually according to the stone-by-stone method of science.

This third area might turn out to be the cultural life of the individual.

What are the three areas? One, the fundamental one, is the individual psychic or inner reality...

The second area is external reality, the world that is gradually recognised as NOT-ME by the healthy developing infant who has established a self... The expanding universe which man contracts out of, so to speak.

Now infants and children and adults take external reality in, as clothing for their dreams, and they project themselves into external objects and people and enrich external reality by their imaginative perceptions.

But I think we really do find a third area, an area of living which corresponds to the infant's transitional phenomena and which actually derives from them. In so far as the infant has not achieved transitional phenomena I think the acceptance of symbols is deficient, and the cultural life is poverty-stricken.

To me, the location and cultivation of this psychic transitional space seems to be crucial to the practice of Buddhist meditation. Or at any rate, it's where I find myself spending my time as I prepare myself for that practice. And, without thinking about it, I recently described that area as "the porch that my face opens into and casts the light of external sensation onto. From that perspective, I can see the room around me on the outside and my representation of that room on the inside." It's there that I receive sensations from the world around me, and it's from there that I can look into my mind and body. It's not out in the world, nor is it within me, but it's directly connected to and aware of both. Maybe this is the realm of the "listener" with which I will seek to identify in my meditative practice.