WAKING UP

First thing in the morning, I look at the table by my bed and see a bell.
And the bell is a reminder of emptiness.

That is, if I picture a bell ringing, the sound comes from nowhere and returns to nothing. The sound is amplified by the empty space (without which there would be no bell). And I imagine the bell dissolving and there being no clear edge between the bell, the inside of the bell, the outside of the bell, the vibrating air and the air that is not vibrating.

And the picture extends — the sound of the bell, the vibration, passing through any and every object in its path. They are not separate. For the soundwave, nothing exists in the way it might normally appear — as distinct and separate with a name. This perspective loosens the definite-ness of anything. Everything can be undefined, unnamed, undifferentiated. This gives a kind of virgin territory to the morning. A landscape as it appears before any stories are told about it. Before lines and artificial partitions are drawn on the map.

This allows a great space of possibility. Allows the landscape to exist as potential — open to being named, defined, differentiated — but not yet there. Empty. Just seeing the bell switches on this lens, this perspective, of an empty world, full of potential.

In this empty landscape, how do I start the day? Without prejudice. Without assumption. Without expectation. Without plan or commentary or strategy or motive or preoccupation. Without pre-existing drama. And before I start telling stories about who I am or need to be or what is happening or needs to happen (or what is right or wrong or good or bad or anything) I can listen — indefinitely — to this emptiness.