Writing nothing.

I love the Oxford Dictionary's definition of a writer: a person who has written something or who writes in a particular way.

A writer is a person who writes. A person who pens (or types) words, capturing experience in language.

Maybe it doesn't matter what the writer writes about: Perhaps it is the drive to capture something in written language that unites us.

I wouldn't say I'm a writer first and foremost. Writing is not my “calling” per se: Speaking is, but I'm still working out what that means for me.

What I do know is that writing is the intermediary step between me and speaking.

One would assume that writing is me practising putting what-I-want-to-say in words, but it is not that. Not by a long shot.

Writing is my practice… to separate self-ish and egoic attachment from my expression.

What is self-ish? Is it the same as selfish? Mmm… yes and no?

I see self as a container, a temporary one, at that. Experience comes and goes through this container, just as temporary. My challenge is to write from and about both, acknowledging the potential meaninglessness and meaningfulness inherent to their ephemerality.

A flower is similarly meaningless and meaningful; here today, gone tomorrow. So is a cloud, and the sunrise and sunset. Life and existence: Meaningless or meaningful, both or neither?

To write in a way that remembers that control and certainty are completely illusory, while empowering my choice to care for and do the things I find meaningful and important, despite the potential futility of my actions.

Why do we choose? Because we can. That's what I believe, anyway.

That's what I am practising in and through my writing. And it is hard, very hard.

Writing is my practice… to remember, and live from, from the knowledge that I am nothing creating nothing.

Formlessness-in-temporary-form, creating more temporary form.

• Articulate what matters to me, without trying to make a point or be a “good” writer or speaker.
• Articulate what matters to me, without needing to be understood, useful, or “an authority”.
• Articulate what matters to me, without obsessing about being perceived as respectable, normal or “insane”.
• Articulate what matters to me, without needing to be anything, even nothing.

Especially that last point, for then I would defeat my practice. Even nothingness can become a thingness through attachment.

Hence, I guess I am practicing articulating my subjective experience of my essential nature of nothingness, and that's all. Inherently meaningful and meaningless, all at the same time, it does not need to be anything else.

Hard to remember and practice, for me.