Vachon Imagined

When we try to prove something to another person, we are reaching into a kind of unseen land—an unformed place where all things exist as possibility before they take shape. We gather from it images, memories, meanings, and we bring them forward, hoping they will hold steady long enough to be recognized.

But what we call chaos, or injustice, or even joy does not stand apart from us the way objects do in a field. It arrives through us. It takes shape in the meeting between what is happening and the mind that is witnessing it. Without that meeting, it is not yet this or that—it is still unformed.

So when you tell me what troubles you, you are not handing me a fixed object. You are guiding me into your portion of the land. You are showing me how it appears as it passes through you: its texture, its weight, its temperature in your body. And I can see it there with you, not as something to possess or defend, but as something briefly made visible.

The difficulty begins when we try to hold what is moving. When we turn a passing formation into something permanent, something absolute. Then the land is no longer flowing—it becomes a boundary, a verdict, a weapon, or a banner.

But what is seen clearly does not need to be frozen. It can be witnessed without being seized. It can be acknowledged without becoming a law. And in that seeing—clean, ungrasping—it returns again to the land it came from, where it can take another shape, or none at all.