An Article About Nothing

This article is about nothing. Therefore, after you read it, you won't know anything more than you did before reading it; it will be a total waste of your time because I have nothing to say. I mean, what can be said about mountains so high that the snow never leaves their peaks, and as we gaze up at them, they take our breath away as we mystically expand to match their majesty, and suddenly we find ourselves gone. Or stars so countless that we lose ourselves in their vastness, swirling in a black velvet night that embraces us like someone so precious that our heart stops beating for fear that she will leave?

What can we say about God? What can anyone say? Or about the natural kindness and compassion of human beings? Words never fit. We try to make sense of these things and explain them away, but we touch only the surface. We hear that the sun is made of gasses, but that is what science tells us. We understand in our being about the sun, and the moon, and what they mean to us in the depths of our soul, and that they are the warmth of our life, the catalyst of young lovers, and the providers of everything that we know. And that we are all the same.

We say we teach others, but what can we teach? Which of our life experiences can we transfer by words to another that become real for them . . . as it did us? What can we ever teach that is authentic and real? I'm afraid we can teach nothing. Life is the only teacher, life must be done, and everything said about life must therefore be hearsay. And here we are.

The goals of yesterday are now only mist, slowly rising from our heated ambitions, meaning nothing, marching toward that anonymity that we recognize in the pit of our being, but hide from because we are not quite ready yet. But it's harder to hide now, running out of places to hide, running out of reasons to hide. We stand naked more and more.

The seasons pass like rotors on a windmill, faster and faster until they blur in their march toward ete
ity. And we relax into that, suddenly we relax, and everything is just as it should be. Look at the snow this morning! It is so beautiful! It sparkles on the hills more precious to us now than a million sparkling diamonds once were. What is most prized was always right here in front of us, yet we thought that we were always running toward it. How foolish we were.

The children come and go, and then they are parents, grandparents, old and frail, still children in their hearts, the urn of ashes spread upon the ocean of a planet speck twisting around a sun on the fringes of a galaxy with a billion suns, lost in the endless universe. The moving vans too numerous to count, the cities and hamlets too numerous to recall, and all the people too momentary to remember. It all seemed so extraordinarily important at the time.

And one day, God calls us home. Perhaps it's a pretty spring day, one of those days when tulips optimistically break through the snow, growing toward the light, as we find ourselves growing toward the light as well, that special day, and understanding that the differences we at one time felt toward others is now melting like the spring snows. In this vast and immense obscurity that we once called our life, we now admit the mystery of it all, the unknowingness of it all, and the preciousness of it all. But we let it go now; we trust in something else, and fall into its arms. We trust in that which has no boundaries, has no limits, and we know that somehow; we are that.

And we finally understand that we know nothing, and we can't help but wonder why we have waited so long to surrender, to this full nothingness. n