It has been a while since I did a “picture with a meaning” entry. Having seen how many people continue to read these entries, time I picked them up again. It may lead to us repeating ourselves a bit, but hey, what’s life if not an endless loop of doing – learning – repeating?!
So, last entry was in January and now we are about to enter summer, so it is only right to consider starting from the darkness and working our way up to the light.
When you first look at the picture on your phone, this image looks like a black endless void devoid of life, devoid f anything but darkness, and yet if you look closely, if you truly pay attention you can see how small dots of light emerge. And as the dots emerge, a pattern also emerges, and that pattern, if you know astronomy, form meaning. Of course for that meaning to come to light you have to have some knowledge of what it is you are looking at, you have to be able to discern that one dot is in one place, the other in a different configuration, and together they form a constellation, and whether they are a planet or a star or just some random satellite.
In life, we often find ourselves in the void, we get to a place of darkness, a space that we think no living thing can exist. We get to that poin,t and we think “all is pointless and devoid of meaning”. Some of us can discern a bit of light, and we follow it, and we create meaning, and we hang on, and we climb some more, and eventually we surface to a new understanding. For some people the darkness is a scary place, for they have gotten lost there in the past, they fear that the darkness will swallow them whole, with no way out.
In Abydos, Egypt, we were asked this very thing, to become nothing, to become no one, to become no where. Being able to just float in the void was refreshing to me, to some of my group members was a living hell.
Becoming no body, no one, no where, means to me being at zero point, means a refresh, means closing a chapter, recapitulating all, finding the grain of sand and beginning again.
How do you find meaning in the void? How do you become something again from nothing? How do you recognize what needs to be seen and therefore done to continue?
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