Would you hear my voice if I cried,
In my lines?
Could you touch
My tears with your hands?

I did not know songs could be so beautiful,
Or words so insufficient,
Before falling into this sorrow.

There is a place, I know;
Where everything can be said;
I have come very close, I hear it;
Yet I cannot tell.

Orhan Veli

Both in the geography we inhabit and within ourselves, fault lines broke. We woke up shaken. Our homes collapsed, our cities collapsed; our perceptions collapsed, our meanings crumbled. One moment we were here, the next we were not. Many lives were lost.

After the great tremors, when the shock and the intense emotional states—whose direction could not yet be discerned—began to settle, many of us felt that we had fallen into a deeper emptiness than the field of meaning we thought we possessed.

Some of us were able to put this into words; some of us were not. It was understood from our eyes.

Our wardrobes
Our homes
Our streets
Our cities
Our lives
Our relationships
Our minds…

Even when filled to the brim, at some point in time a person falls into emptiness. Perhaps driven by the urge to possess, perhaps by the fear of being alone, perhaps in the name of holding on to life or making it easier, we filled every space with everything and learned to live tightly compressed—and we called this “life.”

With such compression, it was inevitable that the fault lines within us would break.
And they did.

We were left beneath the rubble of collapsed meanings.

Some people, during this time they call life—a way of passing time—experience a pre-awareness moment. Questions such as “Something is missing” or “My comfort is intact, but why am I not happy?” lodge themselves like a splinter in the mind.

Suddenly, from within, emptiness says hello.

Most often this state emerges after a great loss, a tremor, a trauma—when emotional intensities too heavy for the body to carry invade the person.

It is a moment when none of your thoughts, feelings, beliefs—nothing you cling to or trust—can console your existence. A moment when they even abandon you. It is when one feels most intensely how foreign one has become to oneself.

For a brief moment, your being no longer fits into your body. You slip out of the vise of the ego. The exhaustion of being human descends in its heaviest form.

Falling into emptiness frightens a person.
Like all falls.

This is the fear of the ego.
Emptiness is the territory the ego cannot control.
It is the moment of helplessness and insufficiency for an ego accustomed to boundaries.

This is why many rush to fill it—clinging more tightly to the familiar, grasping habits, distracting themselves with things.

Yet once this threshold is crossed, life does not return to its former shape.

At a certain point, emptiness no longer remains emptiness.

Another door appears.

This is the moment when life begins to expand.
It is an invitation to transformation.

Those who dare to pass through that door may realize that they did not fall into something lacking or broken. They may realize that what awaited them was not emptiness, but the void.

They understand:
they did not fall into the void,
they became the void.

V o i d is “good.” Allow it.

The void is not a state of negativity to be avoided, nor a dead end. It is not that everything becomes meaningless; it is that the meanings we once gave to life have grown too narrow.

Perhaps it is the remembrance of an ancient longing.

I am no longer speaking of falling into emptiness,
but of being the void.

The void is the nothingness from which all existence is born.
It is the birthplace of truth, the inspiration of creation.

To be the void is the harbor before infinity, opening onto the sea of boundlessness. It is the field where all possibilities become potential, where everything is possible.

It cannot be filled, frozen, or tied to objects.
It is a source of meaning beyond language, concepts, and definitions.
It is absolute stillness.
Absolute silence.
Existence remembering itself.

It is the intention of a free dive—where opposites give rise to one another, where what coexists transforms and dissolves into each other, where there is no need to cling.

It is liberation from surface-level attachments.
The end of separation.
The reunion of parts with the whole—while witnessing that nothing remains the same.

The void is a depth that does not close.
It is beyond time—the design studio of imagination, movement, and life.

It is the raw material of unformed consciousness, the breath of life itself.

It is the field in which love, compassion, mercy, justice, respect, peace, and all human virtues can exist without limit.

To be the void is to be pregnant with all becoming that has not yet entered time.

V o i d is “good.” Discover it.

Whether we hear it or insist on not hearing it, the life we know today says farewell to some of us—and to others, it says remain empty.

It arrives according to how you choose to listen.

It offers both the courage and the opportunity to say goodbye—to what you have accumulated, clung to, believed, assumed—and to say hello to a new self.

V o i d is “good.” Understand it.

I know. Everything I have said is empty—born of emptiness, shaped by the void. Words are like carrying water in a sieve. Most of the meaning leaks away along the path.

Let it flow.
Somewhere in the void, it will remain.

If not the words themselves, their dampness will stay in our hands. Perhaps it will sprout seeds in someone’s heart. Perhaps it will become material for creation, for art. Perhaps it will give life to an intention—not to cling to what is inside life, but to its source.

I filled an empty page with reflections on emptiness and the void. What else can one do? Until what we understand becomes meaningful, we cannot stop filling the gaps.

Still, we know the eraser is close to the pencil.
We write, erase, fill, empty—passing through life.

And in those moments of void, a voice calls from deep within.
We hear the invitation.
We know there is a place.

And the path inevitably passes
through the void.

V o i d is “good.” Know its value

for everything and everyone it gifts to the realm called life,
while they are still here,
before the eraser is used.

Remembering Orhan Veli with love and respect, and with the indulgence of his readers, if we were to express what he felt once more, in our own way, it might sound like this:

There is a place—we are going;
Everything can be done;
We have come very close, we hear it;
Yet we cannot tell.

Levent Kenter, March 2023