emotional vacancy.

February 1, 2026

audio - emotional vacancy

eniafe isis

How I am moving through this world, in these times, changes every moment of everyday. Also in every moment of everyday, I am moving as slowly, as deliberately, as intentionally, and as carefully as I can.

There is a kind of vacancy¹ that replaces occupancy in the emotional body when there is so much loss.

Even more so when loss - whether it is death, whether it is unwanted change, transition, or transformation - is not expressed, not shared, not acknowledged; when we do not handle life with sacred care.

Now you may ask, how one fills these vacancies? And I cannot tell you. And I do not even know that you fill it, but I do know, you do feel it.

As I have been feeling and moving through and within my own vacancies, I have been meeting and re-meeting words, and language. When I am struggling I seek out language because if I can name a thing I can see it with more clarity. I can process it, digest it, and express it so that the weight of it doesn’t just sit, it alchemizes.

So I have been meeting words, and language. Meeting them like I meet people. Bumping up against them. Words and people. But words are different than people.

Words sometimes are like an empty page. Even as they bare themselves, openly, ready, willing for you to savor them, words ask for nothing from you but welcome all of you, all that you are willing and able to give, all that you are willing to allow and all that you are willing to take in.

This week I kept bumping into language of revelation and revolution and I had this thought about the letter “R” and how each of these words can stand alone with out it but take on different meaning with it.

Revelation~Elevation (a rearrangement of letters, evelation = elevation)

Revolution~Evolution

What if the “R” stands for Rebirth?

What if we are birthed once by our mothers and then again through life’s vacancies?

Joél Leon, author, creative director and storyteller, recently wrote, “Revolution is a love language.”

I believe many of us have revolutionary hearts. It’s our minds that lag behind, still needing to learn how to speak the language. The televised revolution is what happens after our minds meet our hearts and the fluency in its language evolves, not just into action but into new ways of being. New ways of occupying vacancies.

– ei

Interviewer: The revolution wasn’t televised in the 60’s. Is it going to be televised in the 90’s?

Gil Scott-Heron: Well you know, the catch phrase, what that was all about, that was all about the first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you’re living and the way you move. So when we said, ‘The revolution will not be televised’, we were saying the thing that’s going to change people is something that no-one will ever be able to capture on film, it will just be something that you see and all of a sudden you realize, I’m on the wrong page, or, I’m on the right page but I’m on the wrong note and I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what’s happening in this country.

1989 was 37 years ago and a revolution…evolution is still needed, is still necessary.

Thank you for investing your time here. It isn’t taken for granted, and it doesn’t go unnoticed.

– ei

¹ Writer’s Note: The doorways through which most of these written pieces come are almost always conversations. Conversations with myself, conversations in dreams, conversations with nature, with others...with grief, in grief... This piece came by way of a conversation with my Mother. We’d just recently attended the funeral of a family friend who passed suddenly at the age of 36. Growing up my Mother always spoke about death as a sort of agreement. It is because we live that we will die and in the same way we rejoice, and honor life, death deserves the same. Both are sacred, both are a gift, though not always seemingly so. [Note: I recognize that death under traumatic circumstance ie. state violence, domestic violence, suicide, genocide is it own subset.] What I have come to realize is that generally in the western world death, grief, and most often life, is not held with sacred care, if held at all.

Often grief and the grieving are tolerated. The grieving are expected to get over it and get past it. Some of us learn to stuff grief down, hide it, and then are even hardened by it and so there is this space that is created wherein even as we may feel it, we (try) to separate ourselves from it and avoid it but the grief is still there, sometimes showing up as a vacancy…empty space where something that once existed, someone that once filled it, is no longer there and we often don’t know what to do with it…

This piece is just a toe dip into what may become a larger essay but for now I’m sharing what I have in the moment, standing in the doorway of conversation with my Mother about life, death, grief, vacancy and its connection to revolution and revelation.