Dear Sunday: emptiness, part ii
Under-Earth-Emptiness, Dawn Light Sanctuary, & May Muses
I didn’t plan to write about emptiness again. But here I am.
And decidedly, this essay is a prayer. Everything we write is a prayer. So, this essay to you is a prayer.
I’ve been quite still. Musing again on emptiness. The quality is emptiness, but I’ve been thinking about its aromas and flavors, because it feels cyclical, and especially when a friend recently commented about her own emptiness.
Emptiness, I’ve come to see, is not something we visit. We must learn to dwell in it, like silence, or winter. Or the dark, rich soil beneath the frostline where seeds soften before they open. Under-earth-emptiness. It’s the circle around which we go, in which we sit, on which we are.
These past few weeks, I’ve felt the barrier thin. I feel the bud around me so very tight, and there is some discomfort in that. Before-blossom-emptiness.
It’s a stillness not chosen for productivity, but received like a bowl receives water, without agenda, without grasping. I don’t want to fill it. I want to listen to what its shape has to teach me. Bowl-receiving-emptiness.
Something struck me while teaching my poetry class this week. I have been guiding students through the craft of image-making, showing them how the most ordinary things (spoons, bowls, socks on the floor) can become entry points to meaning. And it felt more clear than ever: this isn’t just writing practice. This is life practice. This is the backbone of presence.
Noticing isn’t something we do on the way to something else.
It is the way.
A student made a beautiful distinction in class last week. After the lecture during discussion, he said he could now discern the difference between everyday objects and everyday details. The details are the image, he emphasized. And he’s exactly right.
The noticing I’m practicing now feels different from past seasons. I’m not noticing in order to gather. I’m not gleaning. I’m not making anything out of what I see. I’m simply seeing and feeling the contours, lines, shadows, details of each day without embellishment.
At first this calm felt uneasy since I’ve had a bit of an unsettled year, and I wouldn’t say there is resolution from that yet. So I first identified the calm as a sort of surrender. It’s been a different kind of calm than the typical tranquility, because it’s not alone. It feels almost like it’s one rail of a train track. There is also the opposing force rail. And perhaps this is the tension of the opposites, and the train is the third thing.
There is a peace in emptiness. In cultivating it and getting to know how it sounds, feels, looks, tastes, smells. It feels like a groundedness to earth and the nature of things. I feel alive in a different very calm way. Knitting, gardening, writing poetry, teaching poetry. Noticing. Sitting. Just sitting. The emptiness makes the calm palpable.
Mary Oliver said “The real prayers are not the words, but the attention that comes first.”
I think of this often in times of quiet. How attention, even unadorned, even when not directed at anything beautiful or dramatic, is the highest form of reverence. You don’t need to be writing a poem to be practicing poetry. You don’t need to be in prayer to be practicing faith. And yet, practicing poetry leads to poems, being in prayer leads to faith.
Attention is the first inkling of anything true.
There is something holy about letting yourself be exactly where you are. Not reaching for change. Not looking for a sign. Just resting in the shape of your own life. Loving what you love.
This is the attitude of my quiet resistance. How I believe the world needs changing. SLOW is a form of RESISTENCE. And my debut poetry book explores this, and this publication ALL DAY explores this, and we are exploring this together here.
I’ve been writing less lately. Out of trust. Some things don’t need to be named right now. Some things are still forming. And so, I walk gently. I sometimes sit in my chair without opening a book. I make a drink without writing down the taste. I let the thoughts come and go like wind through an open room.
And in this way, the emptiness fills me with presence.
How are you? What moment of the emptiness cycle are you experiencing?
Write to me, I’m on the other side of a letter.
Love,
Lindsey
PS, I finished my bright red slipover, my first cable-knit blouse and I’m plum beside myself! I will show you soon. Can you believe sweaters are knit with one continuous strand of yarn?! I’m so in awe.
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“Words have the ability to a be a medicine… and Lindsey’s writing feels just like that. Connecting us to our deeper animate self and the world around us, feels like such an important call to action at the moment and one in which she seems to do with beauty and ease and without us even knowing!!!” —Kate
ALL DAY’s MAY MUSES
Beautiful Lindsey. Thank you 💛
In my morning pages today I wrote about a feeling of “stuckness”. This musing of “emptiness” feels like a gentle counterpart, softening into this season of quietude. Thank you.