Thursday Thoughts...

“Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.” 

D.T. Suzuki

He's a wise man Mr Suzuki, and here, he has expressed something that I often worry about, beautifully and wonderfully.

I have a fascination for emptiness, the sense of it, the nature of it and the potential of it.  So often in life, we can be tempted to view things in a deficit manner - that emptiness represents the absence of something, the loss of something. In a way defining it by saying it is the result of something being taken away; that 'it' used to be something before it became empty, and therefore is now lesser as a result

I often think emptiness offers the opportunity for something to happen, to take place, to take root, to begin...

I certainly think emptiness offers the chance to contemplate, to be quiet, to consider and explore. I think it has potential.

This links to my work in the way in which I sometimes fear that my 'less is more' approach may leave me with blank pages.  It's no surprise to anybody who knows me, that my work is spare and uncluttered. I like less, but I am also conscious of the need for the less and its accompanying emptiness to say something, not simply be the absence felt by me leaving things out. I fear things being perceived as lazy or unfinished, when in their spareness they appeal to me.

That's all becoming a bit of a complicated tangle, so perhaps I should simply stop and say "what he said".