Beingness and Nothing

On Saturday past, a lovely autumn day, the sort of day that had to have prompted more than one person to inanely utter to some innocent bystander "this is why we live here," I spent the afternoon and evening with two longstanding (to say "old" seems to connote wrongly) and very dear friends.  We talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some, er, wine, gin, and vodka, variously--whatever Simon Says, there were no beers this time.  And then I had an hour-and-a-half-drive home, contemplating, following a gorgeous half moon hanging low in the sky, the ipod set to Van Morrison; I barely scratched the surface of the 735 songs by him on that machine.   With all of that, the glow of close connection to people important in my life for decades, the beauty of the cosmos, my favorite singer pouring out his--and touching my--soul, what I was struck by was the void at the center of it all for me.

I have been a most fortunate man.  My life has been, and continues to be, blessed by more love, kindness and support than any 5 people have a right to expect.  I have been exposed to and immersed myself in music and literature of unsurpassed beauty and depth, the blood, sweat, toil and inspiration of some amazing minds.  I have been given a wonderful family, both of origin and that which I had some small part in creating.  I look out any window in my home and see nothing but the beauty of the natural world,  colors, shapes, movement and flow of trees, flowers, leaves, mountains and sky, flora and fauna of great variety and breathtaking inspiration.  At night, as when I arrived home and stepped out of the truck Saturday night, there's the immensity and wonder of the firmament hanging above me, a beauty and clarity that, alas, fewer and fewer people get to experience due to light pollution, maybe pollution in general, maybe general inability to see and wonder at.  Stars uncountable, depths unseeable, size unimaginable, and   all    of   it   right...There.  And yet it's not enough, it's never enough.

I think now, in ways I never realized before, that that night's moon is the perfectly apt metaphor for my Being: Half full, yet half empty; half there, half absent; wholly half, half hole.  Two halves and half not.  It's yet another context for seeing, as Wallace Stevens had it, "nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is;" that definite article makes all the difference.  Though the moon is sometimes only partly lit, the outline of the missing piece is miraculously still clearly visible, another "(thing) invisible to see."  What lies beneath is for me illusion, pure and simple--though, of course, neither pure nor simple.

Some people seem to have managed to fill the void for themselves, or perhaps for them it never existed; they've been whole, contented and fulfilled from the start.  Others find many paths to get them there: drugs, meditation, religion, yoga, hiking, painting, creation in many forms.  I've tried many of those, and yet "the nothing that is" remains, and feels like it always will.  I envy those who feel complete and filled full, even those who only think they do; the inability to feel thus feels like ingratitude, especially for one such as I who, as I say, has been blessed beyond all even unreasonable expectation.  It also, though, may have given me more insight into those people, like Van, who seem to have it all, who seem to be enlightened, or at least on the path there, who seem to be living comfortably in the material world, and who yet present a curmudgeonly side: "leave me alone and just let me do my art in peace," even though, without us, their fame and fortune would be impossible.  But if, after achieving those things most of us profess a great longing for, one is still hollow at the core, only half there, then what?  It's not an easy place to stand, but a place I can understand, beneath the overarching foreverness, trying to feel whole.

"...it's only castles burning...."
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On an unrelated subject, except that everything connects:  a former student of mine at UNH/Manchester (I think), Lisa Carver, had a wonderful piece in the Times magazine on Sunday, an appreciation, of sorts, of Yoko Ono.  You should check it out; it raises lots of cool issues worth thinking about.