"empty of a separate self"

a blank page. a blank page that is born full of lines, full of full lines, lines full of curves and crosses, dashes and dots, already born and waiting for a pen to unravel the stitchwork of time, people, places, and feelings, already imbued in a sheet of dead oak, a sliver of a thousand years worth of sunlight, soil, and rain, an atom within an eternity, full of stories and wit and wisdom, blooms and blossoms and defeats. clear your eyes of remembrance and prejudice and you have yourself a blank page, an open day which is a white canvas, and a white canvas is already deep with white, ya know, not blank or open as you might think. words are written before they're thought of, thought of before they're comprehended, comprehended before they're linked with others we call "words", and before all that is the blank page, awaiting the starting pistol. we say that "life will begin when..." but its already begun and going by the time we can believe we are choosing the outcome. it begins before you awake - the page is writing itself. it can be reasonably stated that the story is compiled in utero, and back beyond to pre-inception. the page is writing itself, is written, before we have a chance to lay hand, eye, or mind upon it (it is when we enter the coliseum with each and every other already-written page that something we call "spontaneity" occurs because we are all walking our very own tightrope of evenly-spaced lineage. worlds coming together, etc...). this page was never blank, always had its own story to tell, its own life bursting from its superficial two dimensions. nothing is blank. the air around our heads could be broken up into individual atoms and recreated as a mosaic of diversity and clashing bodies. the light in our eyes can be upon our skin as waves in the ocean.

"an empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance - almost dull, in fact - in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy" - Wassily Kadinsky

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afraid of the page because of what it might have to say, and where that thought could lead us, ad noctum, into shadowy places where the real meat of life rests in coolness, waiting for the light of illumination to spoil. afraid of strangers because of what their eyes could teach us about ourselves, how they respond to our gestures and inquiries, how their response is more an indication of the real I than the maze within our heads. Gotama sat by that river because it had something to teach him, and because he brought his blank self to it, it had something to teach his open mind, to flow without words into the deep pools of his open ears and tell him more than ten thousand libraries ever could.
we're afraid of sitting calmly and just breathing, like a shark that expires if it stops moving and must devour all that stands in its way. when we sit calmly we no longer express, expell, or produce, but absorb. we have to open ourselves to the flowing of life around us to feed the flow within us. we're afraid of openness; the desert frightens whereas the forest soothes, for example. but the desert opens us as it is open, cracks us open like a clam and sucks out all the soft fatty insides, truly puts us in our place, because walking and trying to gain new vistas, new horizons, to devour, is almost futile and we're better off taking in than putting out in that space. the point being: to be humble and accepting of things as they are. no matter where we sit, stand, kneel, or lay, we are on the verge of entering a wonderfully transformative metaphysical desert, and we'd do well to enter. summits and vistas are valuable, but not so much as the climb, the climb not so valuable as sitting a mile away and dreaming of the climb, the dream not so important as the blank slate that enabled the dream in the first place.