People fear nothingness. However in zen, we are taught to value emptiness as a source of potential and creativity. Think of it as an empty garden or an empty canvas. We have to let go to be empty, and it is in that emptiness where we can start cultivating again.

Scientists couldn’t look directly at nothing to see something; they had to look and listen around the void, deploying techniques similar to image compositing and echolocation. We might apply these lessons, these techniques, to our own attempts to comprehend the pandemic’s pause, which has its own experiential event horizon. We have to look and... See more

Nothingness, then, for all its presumed vacuity, is a multi-faceted thing: it embodies ways of knowing, it has ontological agency and politics, it has degrees and dimensions. A map of nothing demonstrates that an experiential nothingness depends upon a robust ecology of somethingness to enable its occurrence; and it recognizes the particular... See more