The Fullness of Empty

While embroiled in my normal creative endeavors, I also assigned myself the task –– as a kind of spiritual exercise –– of working on one very personal poem that would be a distillation of my personal truths. If it took the rest of my life … so be it. 

Over the first 20 years I watched the poem billow into a tome of a million words. Feeling its bloat, I renounced my indulgences and sought humility in haiku. 

Soon, however, the “housing” seemed a bit too spare, too lean. Not me. So I embellished – a little here, a little there – and watched it surge again, sumptuous with adjectives and “dazzling” metaphors. 

Years later, I had the painful realization that I was up to my same old tricks. Once again, my work appeared overwrought with tacked on passageways and innuendoes –– unwieldy with the lack of restraint.

I retreated again, this time to the organized discipline of a sonnet. Again, I struggled to fit the volatile  “me” inside this unforgiving frame. Then … I happened upon a life-altering perception. 

Without the spaces and silences in between the letters, one character would fall upon the next, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. Without space and emptiness, all my articulations of heart and soul would end up as, one fat indecipherable ink-stain! 

With newfound respect for emptiness...with renewed passion for all that is wild, mysterious and free, I leave you with my poem’s final draft: 

“………………………………………………..”