Reflection-The Gift of Nothingness

Why do migraines and headaches haunt me daily?

    Why do ailments, stress and anxiety accompany many of us?

What does our mind and body and soul desire

     in our 140-character, sound-bite, tech-drenched world?

Perhaps our inner self wants nothing - the gift of nothing.

What if my body had nothing to do; how would it feel?

    Just resting, being upheld by the bed of creation and relaxing into the weight of it.

All dis-ease and impurities can crumble to the bottom of my being

    and slide out the open chakra at the bottom of my feet.

How deeply can I let my body do nothing, need nothing, feel nothing?

Can I allow my body and soul to be in suspense without need or urgency,

    just present to the void, the space, the emptiness?

What can nothing release?

What can nothing regenerate?

How can I give my mind the gift of nothing?

I spend my devotions reading spiritual sages, poetry, assurances of the presence of God;

    I imagine meadows or beaches in the mind of my Spirit to see God's presence;

I rattle off questions about what I am to do today and in life

    with a spiritual list of clarifying inquiries that demand immediate answers.

But what if my mind and spiritual imagination desire the gift of nothing?

    Nothing to imagine as God's presence, but just to be.

Nothing to read about peace, just the absence of thoughts, needs, directions, questions, insights.

When I can give my mind and soul the gift of nothing, perhas the urgent pain will recede.

I can listen to my own body functioning -

    the high-pitched buzz of my nervous system,

    the pulsing of blood

    the steady thump of my heart.

Maybe my mind doesn't want more medicine, it wants more of nothing;

A presence to everything, the absence of everything, the presence of nothing -

Can nothing lower the sound of the inner buzz, slow the pulsing, breathing that is me

    And enter into the void that is God?

The constant presence of sacred energy that is not managed, just noticed?

Nothing is the place of creation -

    the void before atoms collide,

    the darkness of the soul buried in the ground,

    the dropping of the grain into air, earth

    the chrysalis hiding in the dark,

    the tomb of the 2nd day.

Perhaps only when we enter nothing do we become fully present.

Only when we enter the gift of nothingness

    do we become the void where God creates newness of life

    without our assistance.

Nothingness is freedom.

St. Ignatius of Loyola beckons me to see God in everything

    and be attached to nothing,

To see God as fully present in every molecule

    and myself as fully present in nothingness.