There is a clearing

Beyond what is, not away from it but before it, 
there is still something else that happens. 
In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. 
There is a clearing, a lighting…. 
This open center is … not surrounded by what is; 
rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is…. 
Only this clearing grants and guarantees 
to human beings a passage to those entities 
that we ourselves are not, 
and access to the being that we ourselves are.*
                                   - Martin Heidegger

* From passages selected/translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus.The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Page 296.