He sat at his desk for the third morning in a row, staring at the same half-formed sentence. Coffee gone cold. Cursor blinking like a pulse too slow. The insight had come to him clearly in meditation—simple, whole, undeniable. But now, trying to write it down, it slipped away like breath on glass.
He muttered to himself, fingers twitching over keys. “It’s right there. Why can’t I just say it?”
Each attempt grew heavier. Words felt clumsy, like trying to paint air with stones. His frustration rose. Maybe he needed to take a walk. Or maybe the insight hadn’t been that clear after all.
Then he paused. Felt the heat behind his eyes. The pressure in his chest.
And something whispered: This feeling… it’s not the sentence. It’s not the cursor. It’s not the missing words. It’s how you’re meeting them.
He blinked. Sat back. That whisper was the very insight he’d been chasing.
Most people think the source of frustration lies outside—in deadlines, distractions, imperfect language, failed expectations. But the truth is, the real source isn’t the situation—it’s how the situation meets us inside. The emotion doesn’t begin in the words. It begins in the self that’s tangled in needing the words to be right.
Suddenly, he didn’t need the perfect sentence. He breathed. Watched the cursor blink.
The pressure eased. The page didn’t change, but he had.
And then, as if carried by the stillness, a phrase came—not to capture the insight perfectly, but to carry it gently:
“The source isn’t the world—it’s how the world lives in you. And once you know that, the power to shift begins.”
He smiled. Not because the sentence was perfect.
But because it didn’t need to be.
The Writer’s Koan
A writer sat before the blank page and said,
“The words won’t come. The silence is mocking me.”
A voice within asked,
“Who is it that suffers—the silence,
or the one who calls it failure?”
The writer looked again at the page,
and saw it had never been empty.
The writer believes the silence is outside, that the problem is a lack of words, of form, of something to fill the page. But silence is not the enemy—it is the source. The irritation, the resistance, the sense of failure all arise not from the empty page, but from the mind’s demand that the page be otherwise.
When the voice asks, “Who is it that suffers—the silence, or the one who calls it failure?” it is pointing to a subtle truth: the suffering does not come from silence itself, but from the way the self interprets it. The silence is simply being what it is—vast, alive, waiting.
The insight comes when the writer looks again and sees that the page was never truly blank. It held presence, breath, possibility. The silence was not absence, but invitation.
The same is true for irritation, pain, or any disturbance: the source is not out there. It is in the grasping, the pushing away, the story we tell ourselves. When we return to the source within, we find space, and with space, freedom.
To see this is to begin writing again—not from desperation, but from stillness. Not to escape silence, but to speak on its behalf.
Only the words that need to be heard or spoken
rise like mist from the morning field—
not summoned, not forced,
but simply arising
when silence has been listened to
long enough to speak.
The writer waits,
not to create,
but to receive.
And when the words come,
they do not fill the silence—
they carry it.
Spiritual Gravity 