Meditation: Wheel & Texture

The wheel of the bike:
a useful emptiness of
traction and texture.

...

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn't
is where it's useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot's not
is where it's useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn't,
there's room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn't.
- Tao Te Ching, "The uses of not," Lao Tzu (tr. Ursula Le Guin)

...

"Contact is beyond fullness or emptiness, beyond connection and disconnection.... This incommensurable, absolutely heterogeneous repetition opens up an irreducible strangeness of each one of these touches to the other."
- Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural

---

As a reprieve from William Coperthwaite's A Handmade Life, I sat about and gathered my thoughts. I realized I was sitting in domo-style and took the moment to reflect--at least until my ankles began to whine. My eyes fell on a bicycle wheel (my friend Cori's) and my mind also returned to the lessons of Tao mentioned above. "The uses of not" isn't exaclty accurate--though it is lyrically and intellectually pleasing--concerning the wheel, but what strikes me is its reflection on myself.

We are full of emptiness, not in a spiritual sense but in a mental sense; we have space for our minds to flutter and pray and stretch and turn in on themselves. We have within ourselves enough space to learn and adequate space to forget. We are wheels in that we touch the world and one another on only the periphery while some much more is able to pass through, dwell within, and move back into the larger world. I am glad for this flexibility, this internal openness.

Nancy has grabbed much of my attention and I bring him in now because of his comments on the strangeness of people. As a phenomenologist, he emphasizes the shared flesh or texture of the world--something I have written on before--but it is through the radical "strangeness" of others--people, objects, places, what-have-you--that we experience them. It is in the disuniform nature of that shared cloth that we are able to discern the world in rich, enticing, and beautiful ways.

The medley arises from how we are full of emptiness but able to c experience traction with the world. The wheel touches the earth and is able to push along and guide direction. If the pavement were like the tire, the nobby rubber forms would lock against one another; the two textures would become one. If we come into contact with those that are too similar (lovers lost in one another, interlocutors arguing endlessly, the lonely souls in a rehab facility), then we can lock into inconclusive patterns. To escape these behaviors, we require the empty space where we can reflect and be pushed and challenged, where the wheel itself can change. Nancy's strangeness is integral not just for our contact with the world, but how we interact and respond to the stimulus of those (human and more than human) around us. That strangeness alone speaks to how we can lock into one another but it takes our--incomplete--emptiness (the texture beneath the texture) to go beyond that immediate experience and break from the old crystallized patterns.