The Empty Field

off-the-cuff musings on facing the blank page

A blank page is equal to pure silence.

Those words begin a rambling exploration about writing that spans the length of one of my pocket notebooks. When I first opened the new notebook yesterday and read those words I admit I had a gut reaction of, “Oh yeah? How often do you face the blank page? Must not be very often. Silence? Pfffft.” I kept reading though, and then I kept thinking about it, and then I turned back to that first page, ironically not blank at all, and began to write. Here is what flowed from brain to fingers to pen to page, unedited:

a blank page is equal to pure silence, but is also a refuge for an anxious mind to empty itself. What about cultivating the empty field? Perhaps the blank page is rough up the soil, or plant the tentative, yet hopeful seeds of words and phrases that can be pruned and weeded into robust sentences, that fill the white field with row after row of unfurling thoughts, ideas and imaginings, and perhaps with our most attentive care will grow into something nourishing and alive that might even feed others. But there is a long growing period, and I should not skimp or be too impatient with my sowing and weeding and watering and waiting. it is a process and it cannot be rushed—

and then I started to wax poetic about watermelons and I will spare you that. But I find it interesting how I pivoted from my first ruffled reaction to what I wrote down when I came back around to the beginning. Honestly, it’s pretty meek, what I wrote. My thoughts are bland, embarrassing, like I was trying to say something clever…and failed. How I really feel about a white, blank page runs an entire spectrum of emotions and often what I set down on those empty fields never sets roots or sees light again. No, it rots and seeps back to where all unworthy thoughts and ideas go to moulder. I don’t want to visit that place. Ever.

It is true that my journals, hundreds of blank pages at the ready, are a place of refuge for me lately. Lately? Maybe the past two years, since the war criminal V.P. (I will not say his name) invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine. A big part of my heart and soul lived there when that war began, people I care deeply about are still there, and I suddenly felt a kind of anxiety that I had never known in my life. My notebooks became a place to contain my fears and my grief. I filled them fast, and it has not let up since. With the state of my country and of the world right now, I cannot see it stopping anytime soon. And why would I want it to. My notebooks are some of my greatest companions.

They are also private. Now and then I wonder how it would feel if someone read them. Do I want them to be read one day when I’m gone? I think so. But oh they are full of trivial things, boring observations, self-pitying drivel, big plans I dream up and never follow through. I make myself feel better by imagining that all journals and notebooks are full of similar things, made different only because of circumstances and personalities. But what if I’m wrong? If someone ever does read them one day, they will find a very ordinary human, sometimes lost and sometimes very found, who really loves a smooth paper and a toothy pen—I can go on and on and on about notebooks and pens, let me tell you—but also a human who every now and then does tap into something straight from some deeper well of awareness, and that makes all the daily drivel worthwhile. I’ll wager 90% of my notebooks are drivel, just to be clear.

What does it mean to face the blank page and write from the heart and all that comes out is how my heart feels about the differences between three brown inks I have been trying? What if it’s just my way of chasing the words that I know are in there, deep down in there, because I dream them and taste them and see them flickering in the shadows when the maple tree casts its wind-tossed silhouette over that very blank white page. What if it’s just an unfolding love story between what I think I know, what I am afraid of, and all of the things I have yet to even discover? Brown ink. Blue ink. So trivial…and yet paving the road for words to flow. Blackest raven-wing ink staining my fingertips and the cuff of every sleeve I wear. What if it’s a long luminous saffron thread, an endless rope that I keep trying to grasp onto and pull the words down from the sky or up from the places that I still have not managed to reach, but oh I know they are there. Oh…. I know they are there. I can smell what they want to tell me, and then like a visceral memory of my gramma’s homemade dinner rolls—it wafts by and disappears.

Equal to pure silence? An empty field to cultivate, plant seeds and form them into nice little sentences all in a row? God. I really hope not. What would happen to a writer who finally figured it all out and wrote the words they have sought as fiercely as the knights quested for the Holy Grail? What would we have to strive for then? I want to risk everything when I show up to that clean, white page, and yet there I am almost always reinventing the wheel of ordinary thoughts on an ordinary day. But you see, that is how we crack open and stumble onto something that we never once tasted before. The quotidian act of showing up, over and over again, is the only pathway to that elusive blue feather of bringing some profound truth to light. I know it to be true. I can count on two hands how many times it has happened to me out of thousands of days of showing up—if you are a creator of anything you know this—but it has happened. And that brief taste of expressing the only-moments-before ineffable thing is what keeps you coming back again and again to the blank white page.

Sepia ink. Highly shading turquoise. Paper smooth as skin tucked into a fragrant leather cloak. Hardly silent. Hardly empty. Poised and waiting for my aching attempts to bring the words home.