MUSINGS

Playing solitaire with an incomplete deck is the essence of being pirate. This state of my affairs has given me plenty of hollow time to cogitate. When faced with this essential and repetitive incompleteness, there is one ever recurring thought and visualization. I am usually thinking about holes.

There can be no argument. You must agree that this could easily be a depressing enterprise, a falling into an affective hole. Holes in logic are as unacceptable as holes in socks. The hole is the worst prison accommodation. When I am in the hole financially, my best hope is to find a hole in the wall to dive into at night. Being in the hole is scoring less than zero. Potholes or holes beaten into things are equally problematic, emblematic of deficit, disorder, dire trouble. Holes beaten into flesh are worse. With any and all of these holes we have entered listless worlds found painfully lacking. Like T. S. Eliot's "Hollow Men" we can manage only a dying whimper.

The word hole comes from an Old German word meaning "hollow," which morphed in Old English into meaning "to conceal." The conceal angle reminds me of black holes. These strange astronomical hollows have gravitational fields so great that not even light can escape. With no light, there is no visual experience. All is concealed. I can hear you saying to yourself: Now, that's a real hole for inescapable falling, a hollow beyond hollow that conceals all through the imprisoning of light itself into hole.

But the exotic distance of black holes tempers our response. We don't believe that we will be encountering one anytime soon, and this comforts us, lulling us into forgetfulness. My pirate observation, however, demands abandonment of this premature insouciance.

You really need go no farther away than your own eye to find the most amazing and disconcerting hole. We call it a pupil, as if it exists substantially. But the pupil of our eye is really just a hole, defined by the muscles of our colorful iris. These muscles open and close, adjusting to the amount of ambient light. The surrounding light enters through our pupil hole, into blackness left behind as the light is drawn deep into the interior of our eye for processing and interpretation.

Our pupil is our own black hole, deeply pulling light unseen within it into emptiness. It is right here into this place of absolute non-substantial darkness that we gaze when we look with eyes of love into eyes of other. It is only here that we can begin to discover the potential holding of hole. It is here poised at the edge of the event horizon of connection with the other that we first feel the promise of embrace, the very antithesis of hollow concealment.

It is from the wonder given in mutual pupil love falling that we see the emptiness of holes in a completely new way. The hollow becomes hallowed, a sacred space of all possibility. From this point of view, it is the hollow emptiness that gives meaning and purpose to phenomena. It is like the emptiness of a reed that permits breath to become song. It is the hollow of a vessel that awaits holding water or wine. It is the space in a nest that is home to the new life of the coming eggs.

What was formerly a distressing hole is now a hallowed hollow, a new space of infinite possibility. What was void has become channel of birth, all possibility of embrace beyond imagining. As at the event horizon of a cosmic black hole, time ceases with exquisitely poignant single pointed focus on what is to come. There is a timeless breathlessness, a falling into emptiness suddenly bright with promise. The hole experience is one whole, all in all, completely full and still utterly potential. Nothing is left out.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse w ho hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cloak of in visibility, bu t emanating from within this shadow is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may even inspire the muse. Mak e contact if you dare.