Space 11.03.10

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it liveable.

We work with being,
But non-being is what we use.

Tao te Ching #11

Space. For the last several months it is a theme that appears in my dreams, my reading and my music. White space provides focus and emphasis. One of the most frustrating aspects of commercial design is the client’s insistence on wallpaper content. Animations become visual/temporal strip malls with no space for the imagination to find respite, ground. 2D material becomes so cluttered with message and content that there is no message or content.

Space in traffic, space in meditation – practicing no-thingness. Thought ceases – and with it: desire, clinging to form, identification, objectiveness.

Space for thought – on the road there is surprisingly little space – itineraries, agendas, timetables (gotta settle into a different groove neh?). they occupy space and leave less for one.

I love the Tao te Ching today. Bowls, Homes, Wheels – totally the three most important things in my life right now. (food, accommodation, transportation) – they are the fundamentals. Their utility resides in where they are not.

Let’s consider no-thingness that are ignored or invisible by familiarity in our personal lives.

The circumference of a hug
The gap between the lips we use to whistle
The sustain of silence within a song

Please feel free to add your own.

Sighted animals evolved from creatures with an pin-hole camera-type eye - it gave them advantage in their environment – coarse light and shade discrimination provided superior survival opportunity. The human eye is an exquisitely designed sense organ – perhaps the most miraculous one. Light is refracted through a space within the iris and projected on our absurdly finely woven rod and cone carpet and put through a processor to stimulate neurons that create some sort of facsimile, however impossible, of our exterior environment.

Life without vision. How blessed we are to be able to see. To see in such detail and depth.

Taste: a space on the surface of our taste receptor is mated with the counterform molecule. The provenance is viet coffee, heavy sweet kumquat juice, quiet, woody rice, loamy shiitake

Smell: astronomically small bits of aerosol molys swimming about in space suddenly dock with a coral array of receptors in your nose. There is cinnamon, turmeric, rotting fish, salt air, almonds, crushed daisies, mint.

Even seeming solids are made of space. There are gulfs of space between the nucleus and electrons. Solar system distances between subatomic particles. We are more space than matter by a country light-year. On an atomic level we’re almost not here at all. We think of the world as substantial but is only thinking that makes it so.

Create space. Find someone to bring into it.

Thank you, all my friends and loved ones for the space you occupy in my life. I am honoured.

‘There is a hole in everything. That’s where the light gets in’
Leonard Cohen

The photo at the top of today's letter is of a mint farmer. We were cycling along a road and ran into what seemed to be a wall of invisible Spearmint gum. This lady was gathering the perfect leaves into a rush basket. They use mint everywhere here. The pho and the mojitos are worth dying for.