saturday the waves were smaller in the afternoon. we saw a girl sitting on the sea wall waiting. i could see she was waiting to swim. she wondered why no one else was. we are, i said. then she got in too. mister likes smooth water better now and soon turned for shore so i turned to follow and held his tail and his chest to guide him so he wouldn't be dashed upon the rocks.
when they talk about our essential emptiness i get sad, though it's not a sad thing i know. we're bodies with hunger too. maybe our hunger gets confused by emptiness. we get afraid and want to fill ourselves any way we can. but you can't fill emptiness. i think the shadow pictures try to speak the emptiness. if emptiness can't be, need not be filled it does seem to want to to communicate and correspond to the emptiness in others, plants and animals and the essential nature of life. nature must be confused by us as we are confused. nature leaves us as we leave nature. by ourselves, emptiness becomes a vacancy. we leave our nature. that makes the emptiness isolation. we want to be natural but we have strayed so far. the sadness is probably not the emptiness but the increasing loss of connection between our essential nature and the vanishing nature of our world.