The absence of something, anything, and everything is not nothing

The absence of something is not nothing.

The absence of everything is not nothing.

And no, I'm not quoting some famous poet or one of my favorites like Nietzsche and so forth.

That's just something I am saying right now.

It's something that I realized.

If you're familiar with The Sword in the Sunflower and the origin story of that, you know that It came about magically, abruptly, one day from a walk in a cemetery in which my mind wasn't usually clear.

And when I mean clear, it felt like it was, for all intents and purposes, empty.

It was the absence of something.

In fact, it was the absence of anything and everything.

It was just there.

And as I've said in talks and so forth, if you are someone who overthinks or feels like you have a certain version of ADHD or autism, you may find that having a quiet mind is darn near impossible.

That a few moments in which you have a clear mind like this is, as I've said before, Christmas.

Multiple Christmases.

A decade worth of Christmases.

But the absence of something or anything or everything is still not nothing.

It's a very nuanced poetic point that I'm trying to make, and the only way to make it is in a nuanced poetic way.

There's so much to what makes existence existence, and there's so much to what makes us us, that even with nothing, there's still something.