~This started as a wild write with my Friday morning sangha. The poem we were writing to is Maggie Nelson’s “Birthday Poem.”

I should write you all the time, tell you about this space inside me, like the hollow of a bell. I think we all have it, this space, this hollow inside. Most of us spend so much time thinking of it as a hole, a void, a wound. We think we need to fill it, to fix it. We treat it as a problem but what if it is exactly what it’s supposed to be: empty space? A portal, a passage, a path? What if healing has more to do with accepting, surrendering to the space, the unknown, the mystery? Maybe we should see it for what it is — empty, yes, but luminous. 

My Buddhist name, the one I was given when I took my refuge vows, translates to “space dancer.” I was taught that this name is a tool for practice, that it holds the capacity to be both transparent, a clear description of something true, AND a riddle you spend your life attempting to unravel, like a Zen koan. And it’s been that way for me — it makes absolute sense that it would be my name AND remains a mystery. In terms of that space inside, like the hollow of a bell, it seems to be an instruction — dance with the space, in the space, ring the bell and others will hear it exactly because it is empty to begin with, you are empty and the way you move against it will make it sing.

On our morning walk, a red winged blackbird flew over my head as we made our way along the path next to the water. As it flew, it sang, and I wondered, again, how something so small can make such a big noise. Even during the effort of flight, it still could do it. Chickadees are similar, so tiny and skittish but also able to make such a big sound. What it must feel to sing like that, to have it fill you like breath, to feel the sound reverberate as your lungs empty, to feel it vibrate in the hollow of your throat as it goes.

And what it must feel like to fly, and as I say that I remember that some bird bones are hollow. I always guessed that was part of why they can fly, but when I look it up, these hollow places, this space inside like the hollow of a bell, actually helps them breathe. They are called “pneumatic bones” and they help birds to fly not because it makes them lighter but rather they need so much oxygen to fly that their lungs extend into some of their bones. The hollow and the breath allow the flight as well as the song.

This morning, as I listened to the music track I picked for meditation, which included the sounds of rain and wind and bamboo and a guitar, it made me think of the story about the musician who climbs to the top of a mountain to ask a teacher how to practice. The teacher, knowing the question is coming from a musician, uses an example he’ll understand, referencing the strings of his instrument, and gives the practice instruction that I’ve heard Pema Chödrön give: “not too loose, not too tight.” If the strings of your instrument are too loose, they won’t make a sound, and if they are too tight, they will break. Therefore, to practice, you must keep yourself not too loose and not too tight.

Then I thought about a guitar and how like the bell and the bird it can feel the music they make because of the hollow spot, the empty space. The guitar and the bell and the bird vibrate with the sound of their particular song, can feel it inside even as they let it go, literally hold space for it in their own emptiness, and that holding and eventual letting go, that hollow is what allows it to echo out as music. And in this way, through the holding and letting go, both the origin point of the song and where the music lands can feel it in that hollow space they each have inside. 

It is the same when making any art, any offering that comes from a truth previously held hidden. The artist feels their voice, their truth like breath in the hollow space inside. If we instead try to fill that space, that hollow of the bell, with other things, thinking we must fill the emptiness, heal the wound, what actually happens is we are silenced, stuck, unable to sing or fly or even breathe. So the food, the phone, the drug, the new furniture or whatever we reach for to fill the void is in the end just junk, a heap, a pile, a hoard that doesn’t truly fill us up but rather traps us, turns us into a hungry ghost who can never be satisfied. We misunderstand so much about the emptiness, get so confused about the space inside us, like the hollow of a bell. Empty yes, but also luminous.