Winter touched the earth. Darkness opened up and the womb of the night lay barren. The moon hid her face. But there was movement in a small farm along the deserted road. Blown away by dry winds, the topsoil had vacated its home. It gone, the aging man gave it no heed. The trees that were old could no longer age, the trees that were young had no youth.

From what I gathered, he no longer farmed, but he still worked the ground. I would only later see why. The house was empty, and we sat alone in its void. The stillness outside moved inside and sat with us. He apologized for the lack of water. In its stead he offered wine, the year of which I did not know and he did not tell, but it was past the fullness of time. Maybe years ago it had been ripe, but that time seemed very distant now. But I was thirsty and nodded a silent thanks to him as my teeth bit into the dry bread.

He and I sat alone with silence, a wordless nakedness. Few words were uttered. Our silence spoke enough. Its sound was almost rich and already powerful. How I came to the little shelter in the night was a journey between here and there, which has now transmuted into there and here. The truth is that I was lost, but where I was leaving and where I was going, time has hidden to this story. The years themselves have followed the origin and destiny into oblivion. Memory retains only the journey.

Suspense stayed both his words and mine. The unspoken letters hung in our mouths while their senses leaped into the air. The room was filled with the possibility of every word we had yet to say. In violation of the mood, I tried to relieve the tension by saying everything about nothing, but quickly found myself piously saying nothing about anything. Only when I ceased talking did the conversation begin.

The small house was dark, I never saw its color. No doubt it had its own hue, its own tone, but the moon was new and she claimed its colors for herself. The dim light from inside drew me from the isolated path for the night. It stood like an island—an island in an empty ocean. Standing out of the desolation of existence, it was alone, but still part of the earth. It struck me that man is indeed an island, but every island is contiguous, jutting out of the ground here and there, always connected but always distant. The lonely house stood, and there I arrived.

I traversed the pacific desert. The waters were parted and the waves were held beyond the edges of the world. Never knowing when the sea might return, I walked on dry land. I traveled always under the looming absence of my death, waiting for its parousia. In the clearing, there was the house. It would never have been my destination of choice, but as the fates might carry me, so I willed whatever might come. And there was the house.

I knocked on the door. Vague candlelight flickered inside the home. The scent of upturned earth was fresh upon the air. The door opened and the man inside, whose face I only saw darkly the entire evening, motioned for me to enter. The vagabond stepped across the threshold and the dweller offered him a chair. That was the scene: three chairs, two occupied by men, one occupied by an unfamiliar silence.

The loudness of the silence was not the mere absence of noise. The chair remained owned, though it no longer had an owner. This was the place of our silent discussion. It was not the topic, no. It was instead the center of our speech. The presence of the absence of some other person perhaps was the only reason the man had invited me inside. But I asked the silence whether my chair been empty before.

“It will be empty again,” I heard it say.

But what of your emptiness? I wondered.

“It is not mine,” it replied.

Is it mine?

“Yet it is not yours,” spoke the silence. Every time it spoke it might have been the voice of a man, or then again a child, or once more a woman. I did not know it, but it seemed to understand me.

I sat as a stranger in a strange place. I thought of a literary chair by a fireplace and crutch without an owner, but conversed most with the silence about itself. I did not know whose absence was present, but I sensed it in the emptiness between myself and the other. The silence resided in the space on the chair, under the ceiling, and all around us. Perhaps it was self-deception, but I thought that in the dim light I glimpsed an ethereal unity of myself and the stranger, whose guest I was. His form was blurred by the flickering candlelight and half possessed by shadow. My attention was drawn to the light, the single candle at the center of the table. From there light shone, and by it I saw something of the man. The light which revealed our faces concealed our backs from each other, which remained indistinguishable from the shadow which stretched over the barren fields, under the missing moon. So we sat like two men half out of water, or two halves of the same man facing himself. Which it was I could not say because I could not see.

Out the window even the moon was hidden in shadow. Only the dim light of the cold stars cast light on the world, which showed trees as darker cracks along the canopy, as if heaven were crumbling. The thin branches meandered like spiderweb fractures running up and out. If this was a struggle between earth and heaven, I could not determine a winner. But with the same strength it seemed that the earth supported the sky with its black pillars. At one glance, it supported, at another it struggled.

Who was the breath remaining on the chair? Whose body had it been? A child?

“Yes or no.”

A sibling?

“Yes or no.”

A lover?

“Yes or no.”

Which one is it? I asked.

“All is one,” came the silent words.

The silence spoke cleanly, not of mere absence, but of the presence of something once present and now nevermore. In the silence was something which had begun and ended, been born and died. But who was this silence? The man, too, whom I had nearly forgotten, seemed to be lost in thought, perhaps in the same thought.

The man’s dirt-caked boots rested by the door and his hat hung on the wall, but on my journey I had seen no life in the worn fields where grain had once been meant to grow. The fields were long dead and homes had decayed into houses which had crumbled into ruins. No one worked this land. No one even tried.

But my host did. His boots showed it and dirt slept eternally under his fingernails. This man worked the land alone. Yet I saw no evidence of production. There was no barn to be seen, no silo, not so much as a tool shed. There were no animals and the earth bore no fruit. Who was this man?

“A man,” replied the silence.

Why does he work the ground?

“He is a man.”

Someone had died. The ground had born fruit and it had died. The birds had laid eggs and those baby birds had died. The flame of the candle wavered in the cool house. The candle grew shorter as time passed. The candle too had been made and would be unmade. And someone, too, had died.

Something invisible had torn the fertile soil away and taken it elsewhere. To where, it does not matter. It might be as near as the next field, but there is never here, and here is always only where we are. The fertile soil was lost in the shadows, indistinguishable as the man and I were in the darkness. The wind might as well have been waves, eroding the island plot. Wherever the fertile soil was, it was not here.

The silence concerned me again. There had been a death, or at least an ending that had taken someone away. And maybe it was fate which blew away the man’s fertile soil and growing love. But fruit dies in order for a tree to grow. And yet I felt that this man had seen the seed die and waited—always waited—for its rebirth. Maybe it had been a son sitting in the third chair, or a wife, or a brother, or… All is one. Whomever it had been, that person was gone and no one had been reborn. The man waited. The flame shuddered. The wick shortened. The fire ate at the candle and created new forms. At every feast there is a skeleton. The painful process of creative destruction continued as it always had, always will, always should? This man had witnessed a bird fall into the fire, but the coals had long grown cold and there was no phoenix to be seen. He was left only with the pain of his burns. But he returned day after day, turning up the ashes, looking for a hint of life.

And so the chair remained without dust, and the field without weeds. The man preserved both the chair and the soil. Both were empty, but equally rich with possibility. That was why he continued to till, the same reason he continued to sit. He was a man, and so he lived as a man. Whatever his goals were, he tended their possibilities.

And then I realized. It was I who was sitting in the empty seat. The empty third had been there from all eternity. His missing love had been in my seat, and the empty chair had dwelt with them always. Unfilled, and yet suddenly familiar. I looked to the man, who too looked at the chair. Was he remembering the presence of another, now absent? Was the scene different for him with another guest? Who was the silence in the chair? It wasn’t quite a spirit or even the presence of a spirit. Perhaps it was the last breath of a brother. Perhaps it was the stifled laughter of a child. Perhaps it was the unio mystica of lovers. But again I remembered the silence: all is one.

Maybe the stillness suspended over the chair was between every human. The silence was not human, but maybe it made me human. Or perhaps it made a tree a tree, or a dog a dog, or a bird a bird?

“One,” said the silence.

The stillness was everywhere, between everything. And there I saw that the stillness was the between. Here and there were both within the stillness. I moved my feet within the emptiness in which I could hear my shoes roughly slide against the coarse wood only because of the silence. The emptiness held everything I might have done and everything I might do. It seemed like every possibility held within that sacred space.

“All is one,” came the words from the void.

In the light we are different.

“In the dark you are the same.”

The boots by the door were living. Their life tended the potential of the field, as the man tilled them, awaiting the possibility of growth. The man was a shepherd of hope. And the chair he preserved quietly. And here I sat, in his sister’s chair or his mother’s chair or his daughter’s chair. The empty chair remained. Or was it empty? I looked there and saw the wealth of possibilities: anyone might sit in that chair, anyone at all. It was not necessary that anyone sit, but anyone had the freedom to sit. The chair simply waited between the man and me. The chair sat silently, hosting this eternal silence.

I saw that the man was a craftsman, if such a word can be used to describe him. He was no common laborer, for he was no slave to necessity. But there he dwelt, working the ground always, teasing out its possibilities. The land there, even if all the other fields were abandoned, was ever the care of this single man. The potential for growth was cultivated carefully, even if actual agriculture never was seen. The chair too, the man cultivated—the possibility for it fulfilling itself always remained full in its emptiness. Or maybe its emptiness was its fulfillment, the openness to the possibility of fulfilling itself.

My eyes met those of my host. He smiled as if regenerated, but wearily, as though in the evening of life. He moved away to his separate room, and I to mine. The stillness followed me and I let it lull me to sleep, rocked gently by the sounds of possible waves, winds, and waterfalls. I slept as an infant shrouded in black.

I woke from a sleep filled with every dream I could imagine. Each dream and variation contained worlds of possibilities, entire universes to see and become. It was well before dawn, and I rose to take my leave early. I found the man sitting at the table, staring dimly at the empty chair. The room was only lit by starlight, and there was little to distinguish one thing from another. He said nothing. I said nothing. But we both listened. The words of the silence came again, and I knew he heard them too. It was the silence which made the two into one. Our humanity was hidden within the silence, the same silence which showed that the islands are, in truth, one. The sea of sounds obscures the truth, for it fills the basin of the sea, hiding the truth that every island is of the same earth, as every man is of the same humanity. Every man is an island, and no man is an island.

As I left long before dawn, the man extended his hand, with what might have been tears glittering under the stars: “Thank you,” he said as I crossed the threshold. Once again on the road, I continued to my destination, waiting for the dawn of a new day and the rich emptiness of the future. I believe I smiled perhaps all the way I walked from there and finally to here.

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