Between the supposed end of winter and spring's false arrival, I need to breathe out. No, more than breathe out. I desire to exhale a breath I did not know I was holding. To push air from the corners of my lungs into the corners of the earth. To fling everything I am in a shout or visible breath until it forms cumulus.

And then what? Become what Vietnamese-born, American-grown poet Ocean Vuong called a "Torso of Air" in his poetry on being and becoming:

Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night – sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. the boy, beautiful
& gone …
From “Torso of Air”

For Vuong, when you slip from one country to another, from one culture to another, you remake who you are from the air between. Hanging empty is a component of existence.

Hemingway admitted he felt empty after he wrote. Early in his career, he’d write from his top-floor Paris apartment, empty his being into words, diaries, and letters, and then walk slowly downstairs back into the world to grab food and drink.

It was wonderful to walk down the long flight of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck writing. I always worked until I had something done and always stopped when I knew what would happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.'
From Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast

While Hemingway sat through occasional emptiness, around the same time, in a vastly different space, Scottish writer Nan Shepherd said she fell asleep on a mountain and found “moments of quiescent perceptiveness with nothing between me and the earth and sky.” 

So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling, grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain, and snow – the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.
From Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain

Mountains are natural spaces to empty. They are still, eternal and vast, welcoming anything we devolve. “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent,” wrote Annie Dillard in her sojourn to Tinker Creek, Virginia, using words similar to Shepard:

You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
From Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Both women knew that mountains receive everything from us. And yet, many people find these vistas disconcerting. These scapes demand more than we can give.

Most life metaphors contain the concept of fullness, having, and abundance. We pulse in energy, passion, and feelings—things we hold within physically and conceptually. It is the ravaging of our thingness within that articulates the worst illnesses. Consider the vernacular for tuberculous was consumption. Literally, ourselves being consumed. Now we use similar words with cancer; it is ‘ravaging’ or ‘waging war’ within. 

In her seminal study on the misleading and meddling metaphors of illness, Susan Sontag argued that metaphors limit knowledge of fact and reality. Calling tuberculosis ‘consumption’ and depicting it as a disease of sensitive, sympathetic individuals reinforced the stereotype of the illness, bringing enlightenment when the truth was much more gruesome (one needs only to read John Keats’ letters to see the horrendous pain it caused him.)

Surely, an empty person is missing something, lacking. It is the limitation of Western culture that the focus on having rather than being disallows emptiness. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami admits he has sought a void every day of his adult life.

I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. […] The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.
From Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Born and raised in Japan, Murakami owned a jazz bar and wrote on the side. When he turned twenty-eight, he sold his bar to devote himself full-time to writing.

With the writing came the running. In Pilgrim, Annie Dillard went into the woods with feelings of emptiness and “an open palm” the two were well-suited – “the whole process […] focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon” could be said of either.

Like Dillard, Murakami distinguishes between emptying and being empty. Murakami praises the state of emptiness. He understood being empty expands our possible fullness.

I think about a line from Christie Watson’s memoir on her experience nursing: "Nursing is a career that demands a chunk of your soul daily. The emotional energy needed to care for people […],” Watson writes, “I have felt spent, devoid of any further capacity to give.” And yet she does give. Daily, weekly, the book tells us so. How? Did something become renewed? Did something fill that emptiness? French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil wrote that our emptiness was a means to welcome in God (grace) and that only when we released our unembodied self did we achieve genuine fullness.

This scream, this urge to exhale – maybe it is a compulsion that accompanies change, to expand outside our boundaries.

One of my favorite poets, Mark Strand, once talked of oblivion, forgetfulness, the fullness of forgetting, the possibilities of forgottenness, and all aspects of emptiness.

O is for Oblivion. I feel as strongly about it as I do about nothing. Forgetfulness, the fullness of forgetting, the possibilities of forgottenness. The freedom of unmindfulness. It is the true beginning of poetry. It is the blank for which the will wills.
From Mark Strand’s The Weather of Words

The freedom of unmindfulness is blank. I want to exist in that blank. In the void of Murakami, the oblivion of Strand, the empty palm of Dillard, the quiescent perceptiveness of Shepard…

Is there even such a thing as emptiness?

“In my opinion, there have not been any ‘empty spaces’!” wrote British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. “Space is an active & tangibly appreciated, dynamic—it is a reality asking for the relationship of the human figure or sculpture to perpetuate its dynamic.”

Hepworth’s forms often contain the enclosure of negative space, manifested by a piercing, a hole, or a thing missing. Critics have speculated that the emptiness within is a maternal, spiritual gesture, a commentary on the unknown. I think it was Hepworth’s way of putting something within, even if that something is merely space.

An emptiness is a space that shall be filled. As we empty ourselves, exhale, shout, and push everything out, we might leave it. And walk forward without.

But it does not mean we cease to exist.

Historian, memoirist, and narrator of the human social experience Rebecca Solnit observes:

‘Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves,’ said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word ‘track’ in Tibetan: shul, a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by—a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, and the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there.
From Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Footprints, shells, and photographic images are shul. Empty remnants. These words are shul; I am no longer the person who writes them.

But as the poet Vuong reminds us, your body is more than a portion of night sealed with bruises […].” You are more than what makes a footprint. You are more than a shell filling and emptying.

Shout. Exhale. Empty. Exist. You are the entire process.