During meditation practice today I wrote some words and phrases on two notecards in response to the following three meditative prompts: Nothing, Form, and Intention. As a writer, I live in the world of specificity, concrete detail, or in ideas expressed explicitly and with clarity. Sometimes I struggle with some of the more esoteric aspects of the practice. I had a real hard time today with these meditations and my mind was interrogating the process through the entire hour–until the end, when it became about something else, something palpable, embedded in the messiness that is life and loss as human beings. Anyway, the material on those note cards became a poem. And the strangest experience to date with my meditation group turned out to provide the greatest gifts, the least of which became the following piece of writing.
Poem Against Nothing from Two Notecards
Nothing
Nothingness
No thing ness
I cannot describe what is not.
There is never nothing.
There is never not something.
There is always the thing
that came before the thing.
Once, there was
the generative void.
I think I understand
that, and it continues
to generate forever
and ever, but even before
the anything
there was something.
You can call it
whatever you like.
But in the way that
I can’t or won’t play piano
because I don’t know how,
I cannot see, hear, or feel nothing.
It’s all form, baby.
There is always form.
Even a thought–
even in the before-thought
when there is no thought,
there’s thought.
Creativity even comes
from a place.
I didn’t know I would sing
those words but now I am
singing those words
and it may feel as if
they came from nowhere
but you would be
wrong about that.
I do understand
intention, and I value
it over the default–
but that’s the point:
less auto-pilot,
less fear,
less self-sabotage
more intention,
more integrity,
more truth,
more consciousness.
And none of that
comes from nothing.
And we are not changing
from one thing to another,
but becoming what we already
are—and that’s something.
And love is another matter.
Given freely it multiplies
like weeds. Never out of
nowhere. Never from
nothing. It emanates.
It moves, is moving.
Right now. In this room
with relative strangers.
michael jarmer 