Emptiness is not a box and yet it holds everything close. The world is piled in over emptiness as if it were the soil for the world to grow. I imagine emptiness to be the dividing line between here and somewhere else. Holding onto the picture of a cardboard box so heavily taped together from the many times I have moved I begin to wonder... How many things have slipped from here to there, and from there to here once it knew how? Like a fish in water, I have forgotten that I bump and bother the ocean of air that sustains me. Perhaps emptiness is the ocean that floats all that we can see. It’s invisible substance being the very thing that nourishes all the possibility that can be… Destiny. This is all done between the groaning spirals that might be games. Each move played through a snowballing universe that could contain the heavens.

Once in a while I look out at the vastness of space and see the colors of a sunset, a swaying field of grain, and the crashing of the waves. All the while asking myself how this reflects emptiness, and somehow the information is communicated from there to here. Somehow, all these little bits of something speak to me without words. My concept of what is opposite of here will always be there, but will the same cognitive point be shared amongst us for these undiscovered flip-flops. Silently embracing us and subtly whispering to us, emptiness seems to have a message that touches each of us in gentle ways.

As part of everything that we see and inside all that we know ourselves to be, I may be the first to question if I am one of emptiness’s children. One of the animate universes that seeks to explore and venture into the game by the interactions of the restless vehicles of life. All of us children of emptiness holding onto the formless forms that keep us seeking to know the forms that we embody, imagine, adopt, and design through our unrelenting curiosity. Every thought must be pregnant with the delight of emptiness and the next possibility. I must make sure then that my thoughts are good ones.   

There may be no here or there for the children of emptiness. It seems to be all a matter of belief and perspective that can move me to once again seek out the experiences that communicate to me about my roots of emptiness.

Joseph Santiago is an internationally published author and has a decade of experience working as a teacher, trainer, and facilitator in a variety of fields, across a range of industries in and out of the US. Joseph founded WorldVoiceProject.com, the World Voice series which has become a quickly growing global community learning network. World Voice books are a cultural exchange where people from around the globe share their lives, passions, spiritual pilgrimages and their own humanity through poetry, stories, and art; thus becoming part of the historical record of a burgeoning global society