My body still feels the echo of my long swim this morning.The coldness and depth written into me.And I stood a while at the edge as birds were held in the breeze like kites, and the question was already there, not yet a question, more like a tightening in attention that later finds words.What remains when the ‘me’ is not here.Water moving without hesitation.Light breaking and breaking again, never needing to resolve into anything final.A line of ripple arriving at the shore and disappearing as if it had never been separate from it.Looking happens.And something slightly out of phase with it ~ the sense that someone is looking ~ arrives and fades without insistence.Then only the lake again, though even ‘again’ feels too structured for what is actually there.At times there is no clear centre to the seeing.Not an absence, exactly.More that nothing gathers into a point that could be called mine.Or me.The question returns in fragments rather than sentences.It is not repeated so much as reappearing in different light.What remains when the ‘me’ is not here.And it does not hold still long enough to be answered.It drifts on the breeze.Later, on the walk back from the lake, there is no clear sense of when it stopped being present in the foreground.Only that it is still there, folded into the movement of attention, no longer asking to be resolved.The lake does not change.Neither does what is looking.And still there is continuing.Unfurling.No centre gathers.