no thing

So I'm sitting in a booth at the Trolley Car Diner with my friend David and we are discussing with the waitress whether anything should ever be called something as unappetizing as "breakfast meat." As we wait for lunch which is a breakfast, I catch him up on the Lace Futures project and my recent fascination with voids (see past few entries). As I am talking about nothing which becomes something, he tells me that I am restating a Zen idea. "No thing." Not "nothing," but very much the opposite idea. He puts his finger in the empty coffee cup, stirs it around and shows me that without the "no thing" inside there is no place for the refill of coffee, for which he is waiting.


The character "no thing"