The Space Between Trees – Fullness in Emptiness

It’s a rare pleasure to be simply still at some moment during the day. Afternoon naps are a lost art and day dreaming a near impossibility since the emergence of smart phones.

Just now, as I sit quietly after work in a favorite copse of hardwoods, my gaze shifts from its focus on the tree trunks to the spaces between the trunks. Of course most of us are used to pondering somethings rather than nothings, so for a moment I’m a bit disoriented, and then, mysteriously, the whole world changes.

It reminds me of an experience of radical visual shift I first had in childhood. Have you ever been gazing at a ceiling or a floor with a regular pattern of dots or lines and unfocused your eyes so that it all goes blurry, and then your eyes find a new way of focusing, lining up the pattern of dots that one eye sees over the pattern of dots the other eye sees, except they are different dots? The effect is striking. The two dimensional surface is no longer flat; it has become deep like water and the dots are no longer on the surface, they’re floating in the surface, which isn’t a surface anymore, but a clear medium, a field. The truly remarkable thing. Beyond being astounded at the sudden radical transformation of the ceiling or wall, you also feel that you are floating. You’re no longer looking at something, but looking within the open field.

Well, I go to the trouble of describing this phenomenon because it is akin to the experience of looking at the space between the trees – except it’s not so much a visual change as a kinesthetic one. As I try to focus on the nothingness between the trunks and can’t, my sense of self is drawn there, into the space, to no particular point, but to the “field” and suddenly I’m in it, light and translucent as the air itself.

Now, a month later, I’ve been enjoying the practice of looking at the nothing, the space between things. It’s shifted my whole way of seeing. Colors are richer. Air feels full of light. Objects are not just what they are, but what they contain, and the space around them is vibrant. Clarity is no longer an absence, but a presence. Give it a try.

I’m coming to terms with emptiness as rich and full. Within quietness is something dynamic; in the absence of movement, stillness glows.

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