Zen and emptiness in writing and life.
The spokes of a wheel join the hub to the rim while the hole in the middle allows the wheel to turn.
When clay is shaped into a pot it is the emptiness inside that is used.
When doors and windows are put in a wall it is the opening that makes them useful.
It takes bricks and wood to build a house but, the emptiness inside is where people live.
How strange.
Being is what we work with while non-being is what we find useful.
Lao Tzu
If you’ve ever been to a Japanese Garden you’ve had a glimpse of Zen. The garden is a place where orderliness, simplicity, presence, emptiness, restraint and clarity are found. Without resorting to words a subtle sense of well being emerges, stilling both internal thought processes and external activities. We feel it. It is so subtle we may not at first notice what has happened and only become aware of it when we leave. In a sense the garden is a reminder of where we come from. It’s not personal but impersonal, like awareness itself.
The French Advaita master Jean Klein, a classically trained violinist, would remind us from time to time that we’re all attracted, deeply so, to beauty. He was referring to beauty in all its forms and in particular the beauty found in music. “Beauty is our home.” He would say. “It is our home ground. It reminds us of who we are, what we are. It is universal.”
Beauty stirs something deep in us. It exists prior to words — although words may later refer to it. Today we are inundated with information and requests that demand our attention and action. Books also require our attention, perhaps more so. I have a friend, a writer, the author of two books. He asked me if I would consider giving him reviews. I was happy to do so. When I got home and opened the books I suddenly felt the weight of what was ahead of me. Each 9x6 page was filled with text; white space was almost non existent. It felt heavy and I found myself postponing the reading to which, I’d so happily agreed. It had already become a chore and I hadn’t read a word.
It turned out they were both excellent books and I did enjoy them but even so, each time I opened one I started from a heavy place, which is no way to read a book.
I’ve thought about books and what happens when we read them. In a way books take us into another world, particularly novels or poetry. When we open the pages of a book we enter a space, in many ways a sacred one, a temple where we are completely alone — A silent place. If the temple is cluttered or crowded we feel a kind of energetic disturbance, not the most conducive to the process of reading.
For that reason, as an author myself, I have not yielded control of the design and layout of my books to others, and when I signed a contract with my publisher I did not grant him this control.
The spaciousness I found in Zen was one of the most important influences in my life, one for which I seemed to have a natural affinity. It might help explain my love of photography. As a result, the books I write have a great deal of space in them, of light, and sometimes images that I hope facilitate and compliment and do not interfere with the stories or poems.
I feel this way about language too. As Chiang Tzu said, Words are to communicate that which lies behind them and when that is done words are forgotten. I find that when writing I am constantly working toward simplicity, taking away words. I want the language to be clean and simple, bordering on elegant, facilitating the story, the climate and setting. I don’t want it to interfere with the reader’s contribution to the story.
When a writer describes a mountain, a river, a rock or human characteristics — both physical and psychological, the reader paints the picture from his own personal palette of experiences. It is the writer and the reader who, together create the story.
If, as writers we are enamored with words and don’t leave room for the reader to do his part, the reader can lose interest. We have, in a way, become controlling and selfish, imposing our reality on the reader. The reader and the writer share in the creative process and the good writer, in my opinion, does not interfere. When it comes to writing blogs or letters it’s usually the same.
Each year I teach at an Elder College. I don’t seek to impose anything on students but rather to uncover the beliefs and conditioning that prevent all of us from perceiving what is real; the truth that lies on the other side of belief. Questions are like the emptiness of a Zen Garden; spacious, uncluttered, free of beliefs, or the need to impose them on others. Invariably, when I write to students I do my best to provide something that is in itself a thing of beauty, a Zen garden of sorts. To do this I have found it best to touch the world and words lightly.
