In the realm of entertainment and distractions, the 'great hiatus' is simply silence. We drink in and indulge in the inanity of mediocrity. Our consumption is shallow and what remains great is always out of reach.
Sometimes I think just shutting the hell up is a better way to be than spouting off the latest platitude or expressing your inner bullshit. In Chinese culture, especially in Taoism and in the many paintings done in the Orient, the 'nothing' is vital. A landscape is a landscape and if a human figure appears the sky, an empty white dwarfs the figure of man. The bowl is useful because it possesses emptiness.
The West is strangely obsessed with 'content.'. In the beginning, there was the 'Word'. Does this mean we have to speak all the time and fill in the blanks with seamless sentences and gossip from both the rags and the real time news clickers that pass below our 24 Hour News stations?
Oh, I value solitude and silence. I enjoy the escape and it's strange to live in a society that continually wants to be plugged-in. Maybe I want to be plugged-in, winner the social lottery and accumulate e-mails of praise and be 'Twitted' about. I don't know. The consumption is apparent in our shopping habits but what else do we consume besides time...?
Perhaps we long for an on-going bout of self-importance....
I don't know... I just don't.
Day after day, the West is always longing to gain something new and leave something else behind. The remaining world is the world of quiet, solitude and peace. Newspaper after newspaper, blog and vlog after blog and vlog saturate the day and when it comes to night, I feel sleep is better than anything we might accumulate or recognize in the waking hours of day.
An ode to silence, to the emptiness in all our moments. Let there be a nothing settling in all places of our life. If this is life, we need to balance the thisness with the nothingness.
Amen...
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