A responding nothing
She gardens in the earth and in the body, pulled in directions sometimes at odds, sometimes in tandem, tilling dreams and fears together into a fertile ground, receptive to what may have never grown here before—if she’s lucky and she is lucky in much, much that is familiar, having dropped from where she came into streams made into life by pilgrimages made for centuries along the very same way. How shall we move along ways that haven’t yet been made?
Like water, says the earth, speaking of rivulets filling up the cracks and low spaces within. It is a filling up, cries the earth, unaware of itself as so many cracks and crevices formed of millenniums of molten liquid filling up cracks and crevices.
It is in our choices, she answers, looking at a stand of African daisies and mentally deadheading the darkened brown flowers. One direction will move her toward comfort and relief, the other—on multiple levels—will stretch space and explode the imagery of her oft-experienced thought and feeling, launching her far, far past what has ever rocked her to sleep at night, and way, way beyond what palliates her worst fears.
To live is to stretch! To really live is to expand into flows that have not yet flowed or are instead so very ancient as to be lost to us, bobbing on the surface. Way down there, she points, past the surface self, past her heart and into realms quiet and dark as a new found archeological treasure, an opening into undefined space, what has not yet formed itself around anything, a sizzling nothing that has no need of the patience that binds to time, and without need of ready-making, being perpetually prepared for creation.
And does it draw back from the familiar, she wonders? The deep black answers, Nay! Already it moves in the known and has no longing for anything to be other than it is.
Then it is our longing, she sees, that pulls the sizzling nothing—not sizzling, she says to correct herself, nor is it pulled. It responds.
It is a responding nothing.
