Bumping, but not Melting into One Another

As with us, so with everything: all things influence one another. This is how the world appears, shimmers, and shifts, moment by moment. But if things always associate with and bump up against each other, they must touch one another. If so, they must have parts, for without parts they couldn’t touch (they’d melt into one another, disappearing). but the parts in turn are also things in their own right (a nose, part of a face, is a nose; an airplane wing, part of a plane, is an airplane wing), and so the parts must have parts (nostrils, wingtips), and those pars have parts, and so on: an infinite proliferation of parts, smaller and smaller clouds of them. (This is true of thoughts and feelings as well as physical objects.) If you look closely enough and truly enough at anything, it disappears into a cloud, and the cloud disappears into a cloud. All is void. There is no final substantial something anywhere. The only thing real is connection: void touching void.

Norman Fischer
from When You Greet Me I Bow; Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen