Everything you can point to is moving. Not just the river, never the same water twice, but the things that seem to hold still. The mountain is a wave; in stone’s slow time it crashes like surf. The continent under your chair is drifting. The sun is burning itself away at four million tons a second. Your face is changing as you read. The cells of you are dying and being born by the millions per breath; the you of this morning is materially not the you of tonight. Every “thing,” looked at honestly, turns out to be an event — a happening with a speed. Some happenings flash like lightning; some take ten million years; none of them pause. The world is not furniture. The world is music — and you do not ask music to hold still; its moving is it.

Your language hides this. It chops the flowing world into nouns and then wonders why the nouns keep dying. But the universe contains no nouns. It is a single verb, conjugating itself — flowing, burning, blossoming, raining, personing. You are not a thing that lives. You are a living that has briefly shaped itself into what your passport photographs.

The old word for all this is emptiness, and it is the most misunderstood word in the world’s spiritual vocabulary, so let it be rescued. When the sages said all things are empty, they did not mean barren, or meaningless, or void. They meant empty of separateness — empty the way the apple is empty of any apple-essence that stands apart from rain and sun and soil. And look at what that emptiness actually is: the apple is empty of “apple” precisely because it is full of everything else — full of sunlight, full of dead stars, full of the whole reaching history of the world. Emptiness is fullness seen clearly. Nothing contains only itself. Which means: nothing is alone. Which means: emptiness is the technical name for intimacy. Every thing is made entirely of other things, the way every word in this sentence is made of the whole language, the way you — trace yourself backward like the apple — are made of two people, who were made of four, of eight, of a village, a migration, an ice age, a sea; made of every meal you ate and every sentence anyone ever said to you. Remove from you everything that is not-you, and nothing remains. You too are empty. You too are the whole, locally.