Embracing Emptiness
Words are powerful; magic making symbols. they create stories, pathways, and patterns, all of it, swirled up into form and placed on a timeline. The words I say have great impact on my memory (the past), my experience (the present), and my hopes and fears (the future). Since the beginning of time, I have felt a wanting, trying, needing to get somewhere other than where I am. Looking at it one way, it looks like the adventurous seeker, in another light it is a tortured soul, perhaps even disembodied. There is an untrue story I believe that something outside of myself will make me whole and the situation better. I have experienced placing my okayness away from myself in outside forces.
As of late, I have been practicing making ‘I am’ statements. And it has become so obvious, where it once was not, that I am exactly who I keep saying I am trying to be. I remind myself with a deep inhale. I am the one living this experience. Being present with the feeling, the direct experience of being who I am as a mother, a teacher, a seeker, an animal rights activist, an addict, a wounded child, an adventurer, a witch, a healer, a tortured soul and a liberated one who walks dogs under the blossoming wild cherry trees that contrast and accentuate a topaz sky crowded with blustering clouds and a rookery of crows, in relationship with absolutely everything from rocks to stars, from atoms to Adam and Eve.
Making ‘I am’ statements shows me that I am everything I am aware of and the world is not outside of me. The world is inside me. I take it all in with the senses of perception both gross and quantum. Always remembering that these concepts are not the source. I am the Source. I am. I am. I am.
And the reason I say these words are magic is that it all comes out of emptiness. All concepts, stories, physical entities, narratives, identities are illusions. Take a deep breath in and on the exhale just empty the mind. I know it’s hard to do, but words are powerful and repetition forces the magic to rise. Deep breath in and exhale, empty the mind. (I know you are still reading this, but its cool, many timelines can exist in the same moment.) Now bring your attention to your body and the fact that it is mostly water…. your identity as a human is an illusion, you are water. Now place your attention upon the molecules that make up your body. From your liver to your big toe, you are molecules, yet they are also an illusion. Molecules are made of atoms and atoms comprise mainly of space, of emptiness. Embrace emptiness. You are that.
This is when we can truly live. In the words of Thich Naht Hahn, ‘Practice so that each moment of your life becomes real life. Walk just for walking, not to arrive. Be alive with each step.’
