The Void: Tasting magic
I don’t want to write this story, the gravity of narrative is strong in me. I don’t want to write it for fear of losing myself — although that fear slowly fades the further I walk from what I thought was ‘just the way things are’. Mainly I don’t want to write because the experience is still unfolding me, still shaping me, like the wind and sun continuously shape the sands of the Sahara. “Tell me desert — how you came to be this shape?” and the desert would roll and blow, then with a wink no longer be the shape it was. Still amongst all this shifting is story. In that, the possibility of a multitude of connections, doorways and invitations to begin and end.
So here it is a little story.
The void — that space that one reaches — that I reached, after feeling my way to the end of my own world. I experienced my own situation so deeply in my body that it left me changed. I followed it into the cells that make my marrow, through the boney matrix of my skeleton, I felt it rushing like hot streams through my liquids and pulsating far enough above my skin to hint at a connection to something beyond physical form. To feel all the way through to the other side of feeling, into presence, into stillness and to ring with the same notes of the stars. Going through the doorways of my own fear, my own sadness and my own fiery rage changed me. The world changed around me and anything that did not stand the test of my own deep feeling was let go.
It meant turning down jobs,
sleeping beside the road,
standing fully present in front of my mother and saying “No”.
It meant walking through the hills.
Mostly it meant meeting that void, in me. The dark, deep, ocean at the end of the lane. A place full of myth, wordless mystery, a place of a certain kind of death. I’ve come to realise that it has been calling to me and I have distracted myself from going there. I have become very cunning at avoiding the void. Until it was the only place left to go.
The void for me is beyond what my head could learn from books and beyond the sounds I hear from others telling me how life works. The void is completely without time, form or limits. To be there lifts the edges of everything, the way moisture gets beneath wall paper and the corners peel back. Most interesting is that when the edges of everything is lifted, there is nothing there.
There is no person calling the shots,
there are no words,
there is nothing really solid about who I am.
My name is a label,
my job is a story,
my mind is not the moment
the moment is the moment
and time is deep, ready to turn on a dime, or float away on a breeze.
The other sensation of being in the Void is a rising up under the skin. A lifting of the goose bumps, causing ripples of energy to wash down my spine. This is scary. This is when the part of me that wants to get really busy, really quickly comes on line. It wants right and wrong, it wants logic, reason and answers. If I indulge in that the void packs up and leaves and my two dimensional life returns causing dreams to become petty and die.
For in the void the dreams are the directions, the longing on my heart strings causes a subtle tearing pain and gives me a nudge - not so much what steps to take, rather a felt sense of what the next step will feel like. A shadow form of the future, an energetic blue print of what is waiting to come through me.
I’m learning to trust it, to go there when its time and to dance in the limitlessness — to me this is a taste of magic.
Originally Published here: Millie Haughey
