Beneath Certainty, Beneath Self

The Void whispers:
                    you already know
                              you came from here
                                        you return to here
                    I am not your enemy
                                        I am your oldest home

Some nights I practice
                    small surrenders—
letting thoughts dissolve
            before they crystallize
                    watching the space between
                              in     and     out

And in those moments
                    the Void feels less like absence
                              more like
                                        potential

The blank page before the poem
The darkness before dawn
The quiet before
                    everything


                                   *

In Buddhist temples
            they speak of śūnyatā—
                    emptiness that is not empty
                              but pregnant with all possible forms

The Void nods
            (if nodding is something it could do)
                    and says:
                              your mystics brush against my edges
                              your scientists map my fingerprints
                              in the quantum foam
                              your artists chase my reflection
                              in negative space

                    None of of you are wrong
                              and none complete

I have stopped trying
            to understand it fully
                    the way you cannot use a flashlight
                              to illuminate darkness itself

Instead I have learned
            to sit with it
                    this companion who was never not there
                              this absence that enables presence

The Void asks nothing of us
            (what could it need?)
But perhaps we need it—
            need to remember
                    that beneath the solid-seeming world
            beneath certainty
                    beneath self
                              there is this
                                        vast
                                              quiet
                                                    openness

And it is not
            to be feared.