One door opened,
a life I longed to live,
Then it closed,
and I remained
on the old road,
dragging the weight
of the person I am today.

Grief moves slowly.
It is not only the loss of someone,
but the loss of a future self,
a life unlived.
The wound is not only loss,
but shame.

The hardest forgiveness
is the mirror’s forgiveness.
Yes, self without substance,
a shifting mirage,
but before dissolving the old identity,
one must see clearly
the tight knots of attachment,
the names we give ourselves.

Knots ripped apart at once,
But no gentle release:
rather, a tearing.
I did not feel
objects vanish into emptiness.
I felt myself torn from them,
left bare,
wandering the wilderness,
asking:
who am I,
without what was taken?

Love enters, departs,
two cousins dancing
through the corridors of time.
Love tears, loss follows.

Since then,
I ricoched down the river,
syncing up with new sankharas
eddying around me,
opening to them as best I can,
growing through the cracks.

I move through emptiness,
seeing it in all:
past, present, the debris of loss.
One grief after another,
personal loss piled upon loss.

How my heart clings:
frozen, clawed,
nervous system hardened
like Miss Havisham in her dusted gown.

Emptiness is a screwdriver,
unscrewing the hinges of samsara.
It is lubricant,
smoothing the friction
between subject and object.

I dissect experience
into time and space,
into parts that shimmer and vanish.
Careful
not to slip into nihilism,
not to disown the vividness of feeling.

To touch experience
while seeing its emptiness
is the subtle art I practice.
All for myself,
so I may one day extend
to others.

July 2024 was more than ego death,
more than heartbreak.
Affliction clamps the chest;
emptiness pries it open.

A mirage in the desert:
from afar, shimmering,
yet at the source, nothing to hold.

A rainbow: radiant, uplifting,
grasp it and there is nothing;
its being depends on sunlight, raindrops, position.

An echo in the valley:
a voice resounds,
yet no speaker dwells behind it.
Thoughts, feelings, “I”,
all echoes,
arising and fading
in awareness.

A mirror:
holding images yet unstained,
forms vivid,
but substance absent.
Experience arises,
seen fully,
but nothing lies behind.

When sankharas cease,
a possibility arrives:
neither drive forwards into *becoming*
nor collapse back into *non-becoming*
In that gap
is your true home

Dukkha teaches anatta
over and over again