I walked into the brunch with my new chaplain colleagues from my new workplace, I the new one. We had gathered twice before, they still getting to know me, I them. I wearing as usual, a Tibetan mala around the neck. One asked, "What does that mean?" I said, quite spontaneously and suprisingly, but seriously and consciously, "Nothing." The reply surprised me, but the sense of Truth pervaded the reply, and it came forth as undiluted from the usual unconscious manipulation to fit the facts of conventional expectation. The answer seemed to arise from a place other than my mind, any mind. Faces showed alarm, befuddlement, maybe I presented as of questionable self-presentation, stupid, disrespectful. After all, how can something be nothing? Yet, can, and is. Possibly that is another way of saying the same, it is - no end or foot-notes of explanation, clarification, intellectualization, or spiritualization. Possibly, in that nothing is more life than our eyes can take in, our mind grasp, and our heart feel. Possibly? Yes. And more, for in the nothingness is not less, but more in a way we both yearn for and fear - we are used to filling up spaces. That is the laughter we hear echoing from beyond us, from down the road: less meaning more, nothing everything in a way we never dreamed possible, or can until we see the naked, unadorned Truth and dare let it rest nude of all we mean by meaning and enter that Aloneness and Solitariness free of even ourselves being ourselves, or anything. The echo voices the Mystery that sources our Inarticulate Longing, that is, so always. So, no where to go, no beginning or end. Nothing, but what an amazing nothing. The echo is our own, but not mine or yours, not even Gods. Nothing adorned in Its own splendorous bareness, and so with less more Lovely and more Loving is and to be. Nothing, and we can rest here in quiet simplicity and become the silence for others in spontaneous, unselfconscious compassion. And we are surprised this naked nothing is from where we are most able to clothe the world with our compassionate touch. This touch is never, never mine, but the world touching the world, arising and returning to the fount of all. What shall I say, at last, then, that to love there is nothing to do, and in this quiet embrace a Mystery arises to caress you with Itself, so that you no longer feel any need for me, or anyone. We are all flutes through which Grace plays a song none of us can fathom or claim our own. So, I am free of even the need to express compassion, for in being the means of loving, I am only the hand through which Grace blesses the world with Itself. "Breathe, Oh Breathe!, My Love, Yourself through me upon the world - and that is all, for enough, My Love, yes My Love."