Why Your Words Don’t Matter

God is in the emptiness.

I get it — this collective, oppressive fixation with words. Once spoken, twice removed.

See? There’s space here now, between conversation and what we cannot know. Pressure eases. The room can relax. Into activation, you say? No matter. Comfort comes from things familiar.

I too seek safety in these spaces, etching quietly on the page. Making sentences. Making sense. Writing is where I wriggle out of the existential. All the the more so when exploring it.

I see what I’m up to though, in making meanings. With every word, distance from truth. With every word, untruth by omission.

Another violence and another death. Necessary, perhaps — at least in this body and form. Irrelevant, I guess — in the ineffable whole. Still, something must die when words come to be. I see the lie. I name the killing.

Even if thusly. Even if the workaround is to pull it into me. Into differentness.

Perhaps this approach will create entry for therapizing, confuse those eager to exile, deflect the calling out.

Slightly.

Or not at all.

The hold of sacrosanct games is potent.

Easiest just to play.

Let’s be clear though: there is another option. There is, says poet Faisal Mohyuddin, God in the “perfect emptiness.”

What if we enter there? Engage that space? No words. Not filling. Only presence. Just courage.

I do not know many things. I do know describing the self and the sacred already divides. All words, a prison. All words, bids for control.

Approximations of iterations in one still moving moment in time.

Meanwhile, the real conversation carries on. Meanwhile, the “me” who looks back may find today’s treatise indecipherable. God. I hope so.

Approaching that place, the place from afar yet to arrive, we find that self and soul are not a thing but a process. You are not the you who came before nor the you who will eventually be.

Except in the sense that all is everything.

I hunger for this. For the wonder that comes from dethroning the self, de-centring words with their labels and boxes.

I hunger for a glimpse beyond your name, your pronouns, your category, your acronyms of the moment. You in the dark, wordless wildness. You who doesn’t come to clear conclusion.

This is my diagnosis. Of me. Of us.

This is a diagnosis that can only be made from edges and outskirts. That can only and ever be disruptive.

Sometimes, putting it to words, I already feel a traitor.

Sometimes, rejecting words, I fear falling off the page.

Others, I pray for it.

No matter. It’s not up to me.

We

all

fall

off

eventually.

Thank you for reading. I’m a doctor of Chinese Medicine and write about sobriety and soulful living. Find all my links here: