I don’t know what it is.
I can’t meet it face-to-face.
I can’t turn my back on it.
It’s impossible to flee from it.
If, by some wild grace
(I don’t know what that is, either)
it turns its all-knowing eye upon itself,
the default idea of duality
(by which I mean the unquestioned compulsion to label, define and separate)
vaporises.
Even the concept of ‘one’ is clearly one idea too many.
Knowing without a centre, without a knower,
knows.
It excludes nothing. It has no preferences.
Separation ceases.
The old urge to know what it is,
how it is, why it is,
has become irrelevant, obsolete, laughable.
I say: here it is. Show me how you can possibly ignore it.
– ml
2021
Painting by Michael Leunig, Desert Song Man
echoes from emptiness 