This poem needs no commentary from me, Elham, beyond saying that I like the way you've woven your own thoughts and words through Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy. I can feel you feeling everything.
Elham, what struck me was that you didn’t try to rescue Macbeth from his despair or argue against it. You entered it with enough stillness to discover that the same words can open toward a different horizon.
I found myself rereading “light learning it was never the source” and “mind untethered from love, narrating to avoid listening.” Those lines gently shifted the center of the soliloquy. They didn’t contradict Shakespeare; they invited me to read him again.
Perhaps that is what good reflection does. It doesn’t erase the darkness. It changes the way we stand within it.
Knowing this emerged from the uncertainty of waiting, distance, and concern for your family gives the piece an added gravity. It feels less like an interpretation of Macbeth than a conversation with it.
Something happens in this poem that I want to name, because it mirrors a move Buddhist philosophy makes with the same word.
Shakespeare's "signifying nothing" is despair. Nothing as absence. Nothing as the abyss where meaning was.
Your poem receives that same nothing and turns it inside out. "Nothing as the open palm, the uncarved silence, the doorway emptied of idols." That is not nihilism. That is closer to what the Mahayana tradition calls śūnyatā, usually translated as emptiness. The Mahayana reading is that emptiness is not the absence of something. It is what makes room for anything at all.
"Surrender mistaken for extinction" is the sharpest line. This is exactly how nirvāṇa gets misread. People hear "the candle blown out" and assume annihilation. The tradition says the candle was never the light. The light just stopped insisting it needed a wick.
The shift your poem makes, from despair's nothing to the open palm, is the same shift the tradition tries to point at, and almost never manages in prose.
What I'm curious about: did standing inside Macbeth's despair feel like a method, or did it find you?
It found me and it has kept finding me for nearly two decades. So many moments in my life are tangled with the echo of those lines in my head and body, and with the inner dance they keep provoking.
Your reading through Buddhism feels deeply true to me; I recognize and accept that understanding of emptiness as spaciousness rather than erasure.
Dear Elham, again life has asked you to draw from your courage the energy to go on living with a situation that is absurdly sucking. To stand inside that darkness without letting it become your master. Please know that even inside that darkness you are not alone. Love, Maria
Dearest Elham, I know exactly where you are standing and the storms coming at you. Here are five words for you, not even sure if they make sense: hold onto echos of resilience.
Your words held me, perhaps in the way we sometimes need to feel discomfort - for clarity about ourselves and our circumstances. And I think Dipti's response was spot on and very eloquent.
This poem needs no commentary from me, Elham, beyond saying that I like the way you've woven your own thoughts and words through Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy. I can feel you feeling everything.
Elham, what struck me was that you didn’t try to rescue Macbeth from his despair or argue against it. You entered it with enough stillness to discover that the same words can open toward a different horizon.
I found myself rereading “light learning it was never the source” and “mind untethered from love, narrating to avoid listening.” Those lines gently shifted the center of the soliloquy. They didn’t contradict Shakespeare; they invited me to read him again.
Perhaps that is what good reflection does. It doesn’t erase the darkness. It changes the way we stand within it.
Knowing this emerged from the uncertainty of waiting, distance, and concern for your family gives the piece an added gravity. It feels less like an interpretation of Macbeth than a conversation with it.
Dear Dipti, thank you for meeting the piece with such care. 🙏❤️
This wonderful poem reveals the pain and despair associated with war. Thank you very much for sharing your testimony.
Thank you, my friend, for receiving it with such care. 🙏 ❤️ Writing it was one way of giving the pain somewhere to go.
Something happens in this poem that I want to name, because it mirrors a move Buddhist philosophy makes with the same word.
Shakespeare's "signifying nothing" is despair. Nothing as absence. Nothing as the abyss where meaning was.
Your poem receives that same nothing and turns it inside out. "Nothing as the open palm, the uncarved silence, the doorway emptied of idols." That is not nihilism. That is closer to what the Mahayana tradition calls śūnyatā, usually translated as emptiness. The Mahayana reading is that emptiness is not the absence of something. It is what makes room for anything at all.
"Surrender mistaken for extinction" is the sharpest line. This is exactly how nirvāṇa gets misread. People hear "the candle blown out" and assume annihilation. The tradition says the candle was never the light. The light just stopped insisting it needed a wick.
The shift your poem makes, from despair's nothing to the open palm, is the same shift the tradition tries to point at, and almost never manages in prose.
What I'm curious about: did standing inside Macbeth's despair feel like a method, or did it find you?
It found me and it has kept finding me for nearly two decades. So many moments in my life are tangled with the echo of those lines in my head and body, and with the inner dance they keep provoking.
Your reading through Buddhism feels deeply true to me; I recognize and accept that understanding of emptiness as spaciousness rather than erasure.
Wonderful.
🙏❤️
A poem filled with pain, but beautifully rendered. I loved reading it and feel it's one that I will come back to, again.
This feels like what happens when someone walks all the way to the edge of despair and comes back carrying observations instead of conclusions.
"Sorrow wearing armor."
I don't think I'll forget that anytime soon.
Thank you for putting words around something so many people live and so few know how to name. 🫶
“observations instead of conclusions” touched me deeply. Sometimes naming the sorrow is the only way I know to loosen its armor.
Thank you 🙏🤍
Dear Elham, again life has asked you to draw from your courage the energy to go on living with a situation that is absurdly sucking. To stand inside that darkness without letting it become your master. Please know that even inside that darkness you are not alone. Love, Maria
Beloved Maria, thank you for standing beside me in it. Your words made the darkness feel a little less lonely.
You have written a powerful, moving poem that demands reading at least three times to capture more fully what feels between each line.
Thank you for spending that kind of time with it. It means a great deal that you listened for what was living between the lines.
Dearest Elham, I know exactly where you are standing and the storms coming at you. Here are five words for you, not even sure if they make sense: hold onto echos of resilience.
Fatemeh jan, these words make perfect sense, and I’m holding them close. Thank you for seeing me so tenderly.
Your words held me, perhaps in the way we sometimes need to feel discomfort - for clarity about ourselves and our circumstances. And I think Dipti's response was spot on and very eloquent.
Thank you 🙏❤️ being held through discomfort is exactly what I hoped the piece might allow. And yes, Dipti gave it such a generous reading.