Empty

My brood has lived an exhilarating, exhausting flurry of hot, school-is-out activity for the last three months.  We wrapped our arms around summer and squeezed every drop we could out of it.  So much that today - the first day of the school year - arrived with very little energy for fanfare.  We attended open house events to find classrooms.  We packed our new book bags with supplies.  But today dawned much like those before, albeit with a wake up in the dark, and presented itself as new but subtle.  In its wake I find myself in a house that is empty. 

Following are the first four entries offered at Dictionary.com to define empty.   
1.  containing nothing; having none of the usual or appropriate contents
2.  vacant, unoccupied
3.  without cargo or load
4.  destitute of people or human activity

The house is unoccupied by humans except me sitting in a foreign quiet surrounded by motionless marks of cohabitants, various belongings not of my choosing.  It feels so long since a morning with just me in it stretched out its hours like hands, strong and soft, as if asking to come along on a slow walk.   

I know from recent conversations and FB postings that there are many levels of empty being felt by folks wishing their kids off to school.  How do we approach empty?  The quiet makes us listen perhaps in ways we have not had time or energy or desire to do in some time. 

Empty can be like a piece of paper on a spiral bound tablet.  The previous page flipped over was full of things we checked off a list – accomplishments that took a day, like clearing a closet of outgrown clothes, or maybe the better part of a year, like completing a 200 hour yoga teacher certification class, or maybe a week, like a trip to the ocean, or maybe eighteen years, like raising a baby to become a college student.  We listed, prioritized and reprioritized, we deleted, we added, we made the page fit as much as we could.  Now on a new page we may have none of the usual contents.  Instead a canvas on which to paint, new work opportunities to embrace, new friends to make, old friends to cherish,  a blank space to sit with empty as long as feels right.

I like the feeling of empty to make room for the “What’s Next.”  But empty is also wonderful as “What Is” right now.  Empty may be the just right thing for this moment which, like all the others, offers itself to us as the present.

Bare

empty of thoughts, noise not

no boo hooing barely knowing

what we dare doing, taking

bites and chewing, spewing

eschewing while brewing, see

solitude moments arrive

strive to swallow, exhale

expound sound of breath

breadth of gone, a new day