CONCLUSIONS OF AN EMPTY WOMAN

On various occasions, I heard about the December eclipse. I must admit I never paid too much attention to it. To any eclipse, actually. I always felt that eclipses were simple indicators of a cycle, something similar to what a street light does but with a different set of lights.

But the December eclipse arrived. And that morning, I felt different, almost confirming that everything I had known until that moment had died: the way we interacted with people shifted, the fundamental beliefs that always organized us were undermined by simple questions, and on the streets, people ceased to walk with their faces uncovered. I felt the structures- the surroundings- have fallen down. And I asked myself if a Roman has ever woken up one morning recognizing that his Empire was falling down, like the way I woke up. I cannot say I felt it as a death day because I could also feel that something was being born somewhere, not very far. During breakfast, I chewed the hope of what was coming. When I finished it, I looked up at the sky, and I felt I was in the middle of death and birth. At that moment, I discovered that my ideas about birth and death also died and were born in a unified way, recognizing both processes as one. The same force with two faces.

At noon I went to the beach. There were some minutes left before it went dark, before the eclipse reached its summit, for the moon to get between the Sun and the Earth. I wanted to dive in the sea. I forgot about the wind and the cold. I dove. I don’t know why I did it, but I just felt it. Suddenly I stopped feeling. To be honest, everything I describe here below is my mind trying to recreate what happened, something I would never be able to do precisely because we remember through emotions, and at that precise moment, I stopped feeling. There were no emotions on the field that was moving water, absorbing me, pushing hard, carrying me away with the tide. I let my body go. Feeling nothing. Void. The sky darkened as if the electrical power had been shut off. I looked up. The Sun was no longer visible. I could not recognize myself in the water. There was nothing to feel.

That is how I recognized Grief, which so many times I thought it was an emotion. So many times. I could now identify it not as an emotion but as the absence of all of them.

Absolute Void.

I let myself be carried away by the water. I allowed myself to be that Void. There was nothing inside, but because the inside part did not exist either. It was just Nothingness. No borders. Nothing. Void. 

At times my mind tried to appear, but not until it recognized itself as part of that Void could it do so. To appear meant exactly to disappear. Because when you are Void, there is nothing different from you, nothing to see or tell. So I insist, this is an attempt to put down in words and give shape to something impossible to observe, name, or describe because it is not visible outside or inside. You just have to experience it. 

How many times have I judged Grief? How many times have I undermined the Void I once felt and that I have often recognized in others? How many times have I denied its power of liberation?

In the Void, I felt accomplished, which is not the same as full. So many years, days, I have lived filling me up. I was full of external recognition. Ties. I was full of selfish desires, those which we stubbornly want them to be instead of surrendering to what really is. I was full of disbelief. I was full of clothes and objects. I was full of prejudice. I was full of guesses, which at the same time filled me up with anxiety. I was full of offensive statements. I was full of stories that were not mine. I was full of success. I was full of drugs. I was full of plans and events. I was full of ignorance. I was full of duties. I was full of control. I was full of parties. I was full of lumps in my throat. I was full of speculation and calculations. I was full of excuses. I was full of prejudice against innocence. I was full of veils. I was full, and I hurt myself because, above all, I was full of insufficiency. 

And in the centre, in Nothingness, there was nothing to fill. Fulfillment was just that: the absence of that stuffed space. The lack of a gap. In the sea, I was fulfilled. Absolute presence.

After the Void, still spread on the sea, came fear. At that moment, my physical body recovered its shape. I saw myself far away from the shore, far from firm land, far from what is comforting. And the most horrible ideas, or better said, memories came across: the feeling that I might drown, that animals from the bottom of the sea were coming after me, that I might not be able to reach the shore. 

Fear, I understand now, took me away from the Void. It gave me my pulse back. It gave me a purpose: the desire to go from one point to another, from the water to the shore. Fear returned me to my senses. Fear became power. Because that is what fear is: a package of energetic force. And even in the depths of the sea, I understood that it was me who could apply that power and give it a purpose. I decided to use the power of fear to come out of the water. Like a vector, I gave a direction to it. Fear helped me. It always helps as long as it is at your service and not you at the service of it.