A Way of Being Folded
It can be difficult, when using words, to exceed the value of saying nothing.
This has been an ongoing challenge for me as a writer.
There’s just so much noise out there. Why add to it? There are so many words – is writing this really the best use of my time? There are so many experiences I could be having, yet here I am, writing.
Yet…
Yet…
There’s also a silence deep inside what I choose to share — if you choose to feel it, you’ll find it. I dunno, maybe it’s like those noise-canceling headphones that generate silence by generating sound. If I could do that consistently! That would be a worthy goal.
I know – or at least I feel – the place I’m writing from. And what I can tell you is that for me anyhow, the best writing and the best ideas seem to emerge from a place where I know that even if I say nothing, I’m still broadcasting. Touching that space, even with the evaporating, evanescent fingers of the mind, the sense I get is, I’m praying. Not the prayers taught as rote words. Not even prayers “for”. Not prayers as distinct from any other kind of doing, or any other mode of being.
To my sensibilities, language that emerges from contact with that place has a different quality. As an analogy, I’ve heard teachings about violins or drums being hollow and how important that is for their sound. But heaven help me, even if I were a violin, drum, bell or guitar stuffed with old gym socks, muted, suffocated and shut down, on some level this hollowness would still be available to me. The hollowness is hallowed. It is the thing more real than the thing.
This emptiness is the real shape that the body of the violin is defined by, not the other way around. Likewise, this emptiness is what defines my own body. I’m wrapped around literally nothing, no thing.
I feel that space. It’s giddying to notice it at first.
I once observed to a friend of mine who at the time was taking care of his girlfriend’s pet bunny: “A rabbit is just a way of being folded.” We were watching it hop around his living room at the time. And what was odd was that the only way I knew that, clear and without question, was that it emerged from within the folds of my own being. So there we were, three folded beings in a room together, folded in time: the rabbit, my friend, and myself. What I saw in the rabbit, the delight of it, I folded into my own being. It taught me a new way of folding, folding that rabbit-feeling into myself. And what the three of us shared, we folded together.
At a certain level, such folding can never be undone.
Thus we live. Thus it is written.
Brain to brain. Breath to breath. Membrane to membrane. But inside it all is the space in which it operates: Peace… yes. And, perpetual yearning for more. Feel those forces at play. At play!
The way the smoke rises from the campfire. The way the trees hold the breezes by moving with them. They know that each passing breeze is a slice of forever.
I swear that’s why they live so long.