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After the canyon, something in me remained open—
not in the luminous way it had been that night,
but in the quieter, disorienting way that comes
when the old scaffolding has fallen
and nothing new has yet grown in its place.
I didn’t understand this then.
I thought I was falling apart.
But now I see it clearly:
The hollowing had begun.
Before the emptying, there was Ruth—someone I met at an Avatar retreat, just before the canyon pulled me under and rearranged the inside of my life.
She lived outside Munich.
We didn’t share language, so we barely spoke.
It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even compatibility.
It was something else—
a recognition that presence wasn’t in the words,
but in the tone, the pauses,
the space we kept falling into between sentences.
For ten days, we moved through a kind of borrowed stillness—
sex without story, dinners with her friends at long wooden tables,
dusk that stayed warm in the air like breath.
A piano in a barn. Laughter that didn’t need translation.
Europe felt slower.
Or maybe I did.
I didn’t meditate.
I didn’t practice.
I just… was.
And for a moment, that was enough.
But of course, it didn’t last.
Stillness doesn’t yet stay when the identity remains intact.
Except driving.
Driving at the edge carried the same electricity—
the moment taking over.
The BMW would drift through a run of turns,
all four tires sliding in unison,
four streaks of rubber laid down like a brushstroke.
For a few seconds, there was no separation—just motion.
The strange thing was how it felt—
as if the tires were part of my own body,
each grain of sand, each seam in the road
registering through me.
The car at the edge,
and me woven into the movement—
a few seconds where the world felt whole again,
as if the canyon were still speaking
in its own language.
Surfing on pavement.
One afternoon, drifting along a winding road,
a set of tight turns appeared.
I downshifted, the car sank into the asphalt
like it was being pulled through the earth itself.
The first corner flowed.
The second rose up fast.
And then the hill crested—
and the truth arrived half a second too late.
Not a left turn.
A hairpin.
I knew instantly: physics wouldn’t let me make it.
Not sideways.
Not upright.
Not at all.
The curb caught the wheel.
The car launched.
And time slowed into a soft, disbelieving silence.
When it hit the wall, it felt like the world exhaled.
Airbags burst.
Metal folded.
Half the rim vanished.
I crawled out into the quiet.
I refused the ambulance.
I called Kim.
The car hadn’t failed me.
It had done exactly what I asked.
But I had been asking the wrong question.
After that, the unraveling gathered speed.
My business frayed at the edges.
I stopped showing up.
Projects slipped.
Invoices lapsed.
Bankruptcy followed like a formality.
And then came the dimming.
Avatar hadn’t saved me.
But it had cracked something open.
I had touched the rapture of direct awareness—
not as a high, but as presence itself.
The problem was simple:
my identity couldn’t hold it.
And without an identity I could lean on,
everything else began to lose its color.
Not collapse.
Not catastrophe.
Just fog.
A slow, grey molasses that thickened around the edges of my days.
I didn’t rebuild.
I drifted.
My contracting business kept breathing on its own for a while—
crews working, money coming in, clients paying—
but the aliveness was gone.
The part of me that once cared
had evaporated in the canyon’s afterlight.
I didn’t quit in any dramatic way.
I just stopped belonging to that life.
And the life quietly let me go.
My parents were preparing to leave Long Island.
They had bought thirty wooded acres in Western Massachusetts—
a pond, a bridge, a small stream threading through the hills.
Fenbrook.
The name felt soft, like ferns and breath and forgiveness.
They had space.
I had nowhere else to go.
Or maybe, more truthfully,
I needed to be somewhere quiet enough
for the hollowing to finish its work.
Barry flew out to San Diego.
We packed a U-Haul, gave away surfboards,
and crossed the country in silence.
There wasn’t bonding or revelation.
No big emotional catharsis.
But there was something steady—
the coals of a fire that doesn’t try to be warm,
and yet warms you anyway.
He taught me how to drive the truck.
“Tall-long-wide,” he said,
like a man passing down a simple truth.
In Massachusetts, I tried to find what mattered.
And what came was art.
I had loved making things as a kid—
clay, models, small sculptures.
It had been the closest I’d ever come to stillness
before I had a name for stillness.
So I followed that thread.
I met a sculptor named Andrew DeVries,
asked if he would take on an apprentice,
and soon found myself working in his foundry—
bronze casting, plaster molds, patinas,
chiseling forms that resisted being born.
Andrew was brilliant.
Disciplined.
Monastic in his devotion.
But his life wasn’t what I imagined art to be.
It wasn’t creation.
It was survival—
politics, galleries, money, luck.
The winter deepened.
So did the fog inside me.
I made pieces—a marble flame,
a copper structure of recursive leaf forms.
The ideas thrilled me.
But the carving numbed me.
The soldering dulled me.
The truth arrived quietly:
I didn’t love art enough to suffer for it.
Not the way artists must.
And that truth landed like the death of a dream
I hadn’t even had long enough to fully believe in.
Weekends were the hardest.
No structure.
No purpose.
Just a wide, grey silence that stretched across the walls.
I remember lying on my bed at Fenbrook one winter night,
not in physical pain,
but in the ache of meaninglessness—
the sense that I was no longer who I had been,
and not yet anyone else.
A sharp thought surfaced—
not a desire to die,
just the shape of escape.
The mind trying to find any structure
to hold itself upright.
That was the hollowing.
I didn’t know it then.
But something eventually broke open.
Something small.
I met a woman online—Tamara, from Ontario.
We spent a weekend at a B&B upstate.
It was intense, physical, consuming.
Not love.
Not even possibility.
Just ignition.
A reminder that the body could still feel awake.
That something inside me
had not gone numb,
only quiet.
It was enough to turn the tide.
And when spring came—
when the snow melted and Fenbrook shifted
from white to green—
something in me thawed, too.
A clearing.
A tiny space of movement.
Not joy.
Not purpose.
Just the first quiet sensation
that the hollowing had run its course,
and something new—
something true—
was ready to emerge.
Many readers have told me they set aside time for each chapter, letting it echo into their own lives. If the bell rings in you, consider passing it on—someone else may be listening for the same tone. And if you’d like, leave your reflections below; your voice adds another note to the resonance.
Wow, the part about "the hollowing" really stood out. Such a powerful way to describe that disorienting phase. I wonder if true stillness can ever be acheived without letting go of *some* identity, as you suggest. Your point about Ruth's presence without words is brilliant.