[Video: “Empty Space Is NOT Empty,” from Veritasium (Derek Muller’s “science video blog from atoms to astrophysics!”). To my knowledge there’s no plain-old Web page to point you to, but here’s the YouTube channel, and here’s the Facebook page for those of you who are all Facebooked up.]
From whiskey river:
The Moth, the Mountains, the Rivers
Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so
briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone
longing to be ground down, to be part again of
something livelier? Who can imagine in what
heaviness the rivers remember their original
clarity?Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile
time with them. And I suggest them to you also,
that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life
be richer than it is, that we — so clever, and
ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained — are only
one design of the moving, the vivacious many.
(Mary Oliver [source])
…and:
Many people are afraid to empty their own minds lest they plunge into the Void. Ha! What they don’t realize is that their own Mind is the Void.
(Huang-po [source])
…and:
When Tesshu, the famous Japanese samurai master, was young and headstrong, he visited Master Dokuon and triumphantly announced to him the classic Buddhist teaching that all that exists is empty, and how there is really no you or me. The master listened to this in silence. Suddenly he snatched up his pipe and struck Tesshu’s head with it. This infuriated the young swordsman, and then Dokuon said calmly, “Emptiness is sure quick to show anger, is it not?”
(unattributed [but see here, among many other sources, in more or less these words])
Not from whiskey river:
Puzzle Dust
When the final piece is lifted and set in place,
completing the field, filling the hole
in a grove of trees, a jagged gap
in the ocean or the flat, black sky.
When the scene is whole before me:
tiny men, arms thin as wicks, walking
briskly along a gray rain-riven street,
the woman bent to her dog under an awning,
his wet head held up with trust,
one white paw in her hand, tip
of his tail I kept trying all day
to press into the starry night, ruffled
hem of her blown-up skirt
that never fit into the distant waves
breaking along the shore,
and the bridge, its rickrack of steel girders
I thought were train tracks or a fallen fence,
when it all, at last, makes sense, a vast
satisfaction fills me: the mossy boulders,
pleasing in their eternal random piles,
the river eased around them, green
with its fever to reach the sea,
a ragged bunch of flowers gathered
from the hills I’ve locked together,
edge to edge, and placed in a glittering vase
behind a window streaked with rain
which the child in his woolen cap
looks into: boxes of candy wrapped
and displayed, desire burning
in his belly, precursor to the fire
that could have broken his small heart
open like a coal someday
in his future, which for him
is nothing but this empty box
layered with a fine dust, the stuff
from which he was born and will
die into, carried, weightless,
to summer’s open door
where I bang my hand against
the cardboard, watch the particles,
like chaff or ashes, vanish in wind.
(Dorianne Laux [source])
…and:
Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra
A sound of far-off thunder from instruments
ten feet away: drums, a log,
a gong of salvage metal. Chimes
of little Issan bells, pipes in a row, sometimes
a querulous harmonica.
Inside the elephant orchestra’s audience,
bubbles form, of shame and joy, and burst.
Did elephants look so sad and wise,
a tourist thinks, her camera cold in her pocket,
before we came to say they look sad and wise?
Did mastodons have merry, unwrinkled faces?
Hollow boom soft chime, stamp of a padded foot,
tingle of renaat, rattle of angklung.
This music pauses sometimes, but does not end.Prathida gently strokes the bells with a mallet.
Poong and his mahout regard the gong.
Paitoon sways before two drums,
bumping them, keeping time with her switching tail.
Sales of recordings help pay for their thin enclosure
of trampled grass. They have never lived free.
Beside a dry African river
their wild brother lies, a punctured balloon,
torn nerves trailing from the stumps of his tusks.
Hollow boom soft chime, scuff of a broad foot,
sometimes, rarely, a blatting elephant voice.
They seldom attend the instruments
without being led to them, but, once they’ve begun,
often refuse to stop playing.
(Sarah Lindsay [source])
…and:
[Months after his stroke, Al] sat there in his ( ) at the little picture window, and watched ( ) get into her car and ( ) away. ( ) — wait, no… Bonnie, that was it. It was Bonnie who got into her car and ( ) away. Pleased but exhausted by the effort, he had barely enough willpower to motion with his eyes, signifying to the nurse on duty: Yes. Please turn me around to face into the ( )ing room.The holes, the empty shoeboxes on the shelves in his mind — he still had that problem, but he’d gotten used to it, stopped fighting it, stopped struggling to come up with long, awkward substitute phrases: he’d learned he often didn’t need specific words or phrases, even language itself, trapped in his own head as he was. Like with ( ) just now: he knew the shape of her face and color of her hair, the sound of her voice, even the fragrance of clover after a fresh rain. When she’d walked into the room he’d known instantly who she was, her relationship to him. All of which made up ninety-nine percent of what he cared about, of what was important about her. He didn’t really need the word “Bonnie.”
He could not tilt his head, but he could move his eyes. He looked down at the little gift box, still open, on the tray which straddled the arms of the ( ). The nurse, misunderstanding his glance at first, made as if to remove the box. He could not stop her with a word, nor with a gesture or frown, but he stopped her nonetheless, with one of the little tricks he — together with the three nurses — had developed: he thought, hard, the single word NO, and he trembled at her.
They could not sense this trembling from across a room, but they’d learned to feel it almost humming in the air anywhere within a radius of a couple of feet from him, and they’d learned to be alert for it…
So Al trembled at her now: NO. The nurse left the box and its contents on the tray, and left him alone in the room for a moment.
(JES, Seems to Fit)
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