No Thing

Who's to say what is happening on those days where nothing seems to spark interest and no starting point is visible. It is gray and raining, a climate which usually inspires me. Today - gunmetal blue flat nothing comes to mind.

All of the laundry sits. The filing and shredding do not beckon. Weblinks remain broken. Books lie untouched. Food is unappetizing. Music off.

Perhaps it is an apt end to a weekend filled with time wasted. Perhaps it is that mysterious time when work is being done so far deep in a place that no conscious light can make ideas ready before their time. Maybe all of my energy is coiled too tight to move. Packed into inertia. So solid that no illumination can get through.

And maybe this is the time work is being done. Maybe deep underneath ideas are being sorted out and feelings dealt with and future action is being crafted. Maybe my inability to see what is happening does not mean that nothing is going on. Perhaps this nothing is a great something after all.

That is how change happens to me. It feels like a great darkness and emptiness. But in reality, deep down there is movement and growth. It is like the wintertime of soul. Cold and hard consciousness does not perceive the tiny little seed that is warming and roasting and toasting and growing and waiting to spring into life.

Patience is the only creative action which makes sense right now. Let nothing be and see what happens. In that way there is an anticipation of the action that is to come.

Creativity is like that, isn't it? The more I chase it the more it slips away. But sure footed waiting ... ah...keeping the stage empty for the show will go on and the lights will go up and the mood will change and out of this fallow darkness I will see all that I left alone unfold, fragrantly; rich, ripe and beautiful.

It is this dark day that breeds my faith. It is this rainy nothingness that quenches the thirst of a soul which is at work even if I cannot see it.

Rilke, as so often happens, comes to mind.

For in a week or a month or maybe in an hour or tomorrow something will flow out of me and I will think "Now I have done it," but that isn't the truth. The truth is that it was done in the time of quiet nothingness.

Quiet nothingness is not no thing at all. It is the merely time before seeing. Now it is done.