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Shifted onto the white pages now. They glare at me, bright and cold, most definitely empty. I thought I felt intimidated by them, but perhaps it just requires a change of perspective. These bright open pages are gleaming, inviting, absorbing, longing to be taken. Their brightness is nothing to be afraid of, unless you only feel you will mar their purity, but nothing should remain unsoiled forever. The truth is probably that it really doesn’t matter what lands on pages like these – whether genius or utter tripe – it’s all just marks on a page and the page will remain empty no matter what fills it, how saturated it becomes. Perhaps that’s too zen? Too tao? Possibly, but the point of those is that too much is never just enough and an overflow all the same. To be ‘too tao’ just brings it all back around again. An arch, a loop, a mobius, an auroboros all the same. Touching, untouching, attracted and repelled. It’s good to be in this place where things are understood in their crucial futility, where everything matters because nothing matters, and visa versa. It teaches us humility, understanding and how to be in relation to things and ourselves, realising that ‘our’ ‘selves’ are abstract concepts, as worthy of investigation as to be pointless.

My relationship with tao & zen feels as though it becomes more heightened again recently, perhaps because of late I have been so consciously connected to the existential and theoretical portions of my mind, places where stress and anxiety are focussed, little balls of psychosomatic energy which, left unchecked, can easily grow and overwhelm the other areas. That’s why it is so very important to acknowledge them and to keep them in sight – to keep them in check and chip away at them whenever you can by addressing them, thus undermining them and stopping them getting a grip. Talking is important. It doesn’t have to be, indeed it shouldn’t be, all you talk about, but from time to time it (the subject) must be addressed. Most of the time you should then be able to shrug it off or realise how ridiculous it all really is, thus the undermining and subversion. This is where zen comes in, because you realise that everything really turns out to be nothing, or not much at all, and thus we come back into relation with ourselves.