How empty can a fullness be?

That's the question for your consideration this evening. I am in high-order bibliographic training right now, suffering lots of my old student anxieties. And today has been particularly wrenching, in a way that you'll understand best, perhaps, if I tell you that when I looked out my car window and saw this image earlier today, it felt like a recognition, the making manifest of a gathering inner blank:


Fortunately, though many things are lost, many others remain, and some turn out to be not so much lost as transmuted, which is its own decidedly non-blank blessing. And so the question pivots on itself to become "How full can an emptiness be?" I think these two are inextricable. They certainly are for me, certainly for today.

I'm hoping that my writing here will be decidedly more full (though perhaps not empty-full) again very soon, but it may get quieter for a little while, first. There are all these book details to know and to wield, you see. But first, there's all this fatigue to be slept away.