Day of the Legendary Duress, 61st of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Deneb): I set a personal record today and walked a 12-mile Taylor. I went back to the Path 400 "trail" (really, a glorified sidewalk), avoiding the section that goes underneath Interstate I-85 where all the homeless people are encamped. Half the distance today was just to the trailhead and back, the other half was up the path and back from mile 0 to where it crosses Lenox Road at the southeast corner of Lenox Mall (it likes to call itself "Lenox Square" but we all know it's a shopping mall). 

The path isn't well marked which gets confusing as there are many spur trails and sometimes it's hard to tell if you're on the path or just some random sidewalk. But the confusion's actually part of the fun - it makes the walk feel a little more like exploration, a small adventure. Case in point, at one spot where the path ended in a residential neighborhood, I turned back and took the pedestrian bridge over GA 400 that I had passed earlier and continued on to Lenox Road, only to discover when I got back home that the trail actually does go through that residential neighborhood along its random sidewalk.

I'll go back there again, probably sometime next week or so, and take the correct route and see if I can't walk a 14-mile Pierce or maybe even possibly a Lincoln.  

But that's not what I wanted to write about today. While I was walking, I was thinking about potential, even as I was listening to several podcasts ("orange man bad") on my walk. 

Potential. What existed before creation, before the Big Bang, or if you're of the mindset, before God breathed life into the void? What existed before God, for that matter? What has always existed, has never not existed, and will never not exist?

Potential. There has never not been potential. In fact, the less of anything that there is, the more potential there is. Potential is inversely proportional to abundance. 

All things are marked by emptiness, the Heart Sutra tells us. "Form is emptiness and emptiness is form." We, each of us, are empty. But that doesn't mean that who or what we are is nothing, zero, a void, or worse, The Void. The Heart Sutra's emptiness is actually an infinitely open space that allows for anything to appear, change, disappear, and reappear. The basic meaning of emptiness is a vast openness that is ripe for potential. 

As Tibetan teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche says,. "At the basic level of our being, we are 'empty' of definable characteristics. We aren't defined by our past, our present, or our thoughts and feelings about the future. We have the potential to experience anything. And 'anything' can refer to thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations."

All physical phenomena, all actions and occurrences, all your thoughts, attitudes, and mental formulations. arise from potential. Waves of potential rise and fall in a field of emptiness and the waveform collapses with each appearance of a phenomenon, be it the world, a person, a thought, or a reaction.  Schrödinger's cat exists as potential as long as the box is closed, and the waveform collapses when the cat is observed to be either alive or dead.

Picture an infinite field of emptiness. Picture a net stretched across that field, and then imagine waves rippling across the net. All phenomena are instances of those waves, so all phenomena are themselves empty in the most basic sense, like individual waves at the beach are all essentially "ocean." And all phenomena are also instances, impermanent manifestations of the waveforms, and as the wave moves on, phenomena changes from one manifestation to another. They're also interdependent, the Buddha points out, as they're not separate from the net and therefore each other.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking as I was out on my Taylor, listening to podcasts on other topics through my headphones. No wonder I missed the pedestrian bridge over 400.