*
18″ x 48″
Oil on board
2000
Ricardo F. Morín
Nov. 17, 2025
Oakland Park, Fl
1
There are relationships in which language arrives too early.
Two minds meet, and each brings its own architecture—one built of corridors, the other of thresholds.
Nothing coheres. Nothing resolves. Yet something is exchanged.
Perhaps the only way to describe it is to refuse description.
What passes between the two is not influence, nor authority, nor instruction.
It is the faint recognition that creation does not always arise from tradition,
and tradition does not always arise from clarity.
One mind preserves structure because it fears dissolution.
The other preserves freedom because it fears enclosure.
Neither is right, neither is wrong, and neither can become the other.
If there is a lesson, it is not philosophical.
It is simply that some encounters generate form only by refusing to take one.
Some dynamics can be seen only by letting them remain unsettled.
Not a system.
Not a method.
Not an alchemical transformation.
Just the quiet knowledge that meaning does not always arrive in recognizable shapes—
and sometimes the refusal of structure
is itself the most honest form.
This is neither alchemy nor allegory.
It does not mirror academic tropes.
It does not explain itself.
It simply stands.
2
There is a place where thought has not yet chosen its weight.
Where nothing must resemble anything.
Where no lineage can be traced because the idea has not agreed to be inherited.
Two minds meet there sometimes, though neither intends to.
One arrives with tools, the other with openings.
One tries to recognize what appears; the other lets appearance undo itself.
No roles persist in that space.
No teacher, no student, no authority, no dissident.
Only the slight disturbance of something wanting to become meaning
and something else resisting the invitation.
Perhaps the exchange exists only in the refusal to define it.
Perhaps it is nothing more than two ways of seeing colliding for a moment
before each retreats to its natural distance.
There is no lesson.
No transformation.
Not even understanding—
just the faint impression that the encounter mattered
in a way that cannot be justified.
Some relationships never enter language fully.
They touch the threshold and withdraw,
leaving only a shape that refuses to become a shape.
What remains is not story, not insight, not metaphor.
Only a quiet remainder:
that something passed between two minds,
and it does not wish to be named.
3
Some encounters move like weather across the mind—arriving without intention,
passing without conclusion.
They do not teach; they do not claim.
They shift the air and leave a pressure change that takes days to understand.
Two temperaments can drift into the same moment like front and current.
One carries the weight of accumulated seasons,
the other moves with the quiet urgency of what is still forming.
Neither is stronger.
Neither is clearer.
They simply meet, and the atmosphere changes.
There is no point of balance.
No point of conflict.
Just a tremor in the air between them,
as if the room itself were listening for something that never quite becomes sound.
Thought loosens in that space.
Meanings approach, circle, and recede.
Nothing settles long enough to be named.
Nothing wants to.
Some relationships never become narrative because narrative would freeze them.
They remain suspended—felt more than understood,
remembered less as moments than as shifts in light,
like a room darkening for reasons the sky doesn’t explain.
When they part, it is not an ending.
It is a dispersal, like mist thinning at the edge of dawn.
Each carries a trace of the other’s weather,
a change in temperature that lingers long after the shapes have dissolved.
What remains is not knowledge.
Not conclusion.
Just the faint sensation that something passed through—
and continues to pass through—
quietly, insistently,
without ever agreeing to take form.
4
There are moments that never arrive fully.
Not as meaning, not as feeling—more like a faint shift,
a drift in the periphery.
Two presences cross, neither entering nor leaving.
A pressure, a thinning, a pulse without source.
Not connection, not distance—an interval that hovers.
Nothing coheres.
Nothing insists.
There is only the sense of something lightly touching thought
and withdrawing before thought can respond.
Contours don’t form here.
Edges blur as soon as they appear.
The exchange—if it can be called that—dissolves into the same air that carried it.
A pause lengthens,
not to reveal anything
but to remind that revelation is unnecessary.
This is not atmosphere; even atmosphere has structure.
It is less.
A faint impression that doesn’t land,
doesn’t settle,
doesn’t belong to either mind that felt it.
Later, one might remember a flicker—
not an idea,
not a moment—
just the residue of an approach that never closed.
No clarity follows.
No resolution.
The experience continues only as dispersal,
the way fog continues after your body has walked through it.
What remains is not being,
but the trace of something that preferred not to become one.
5
There is a place where awareness thins,
not into silence,
but into something before silence—
a faint trembling at the boundary of what the mind can hold.
Nothing shapes itself here.
Outlines gather, loosen, drift apart.
Perception moves like breath against a surface it cannot see,
feeling only its own hesitation.
Two currents brush past each other—
not touching, not avoiding—
simply passing through the same unmarked space.
No exchange takes place, only a slight alteration in texture.
The air feels different by a degree so slight
you question whether it changed at all.
Sensation approaches but does not declare itself.
It folds and unfolds at the edge of recognition,
as if deciding whether to become experience
or to recede without consequence.
Thought cannot follow it.
Emotion cannot name it.
Language reaches out but finds nothing to hold,
its grasp closing on the faint imprint of something
that prefers not to be caught.
There is no meaning here,
only the suggestion of one—
a whisper of form that vanishes when looked at directly.
What remains is the after-feel:
a soft pressure,
a disturbance without cause,
a nearness with no direction.
It lingers not as memory
but as the memory of almost remembering—
the residue of a touch
that occurred just beyond the threshold
where understanding begins.
At the edge of sensation,
nothing is known.
Yet everything feels about to become.
6
There is a quiet that does not empty the world but concentrates it—
a quiet that draws breath around itself.
Nothing is spoken, yet everything leans forward,
as if waiting for a pulse to reveal where it has always been.
The stillness is not rest.
It is tension held with care,
a subtle hum beneath awareness,
a throb the body recognizes
before the mind opens its hands to feel it.
You could call it presence,
but even that word is too heavy.
It is not being,
only the soft insistence
that something is unmistakably here.
Light moves differently in this quiet—
slower, denser,
as if thought itself thickens the air.
It is the moment before meaning,
before shape,
before the world chooses a direction.
Alive, but without calling attention to its life.
Silent, but without conceding to silence.
A current passes through,
barely perceptible,
yet carrying enough force
to rearrange everything
it does not touch.
What remains is only this:
a breath held between two states—
not message,
not impression,
just the warm gravity of being
before it becomes anything else.
7
It comes softly,
so softly you cannot tell whether it arrived
or whether you only stopped long enough to feel it.
A warmth gathers at the edge of awareness—
not heat,
but the suggestion of nearness,
like breath that barely lifts the air.
Nothing speaks,
yet something touches you
in the place where words would break it.
It moves the way light moves across closed eyes—
a tenderness that does not seek to be seen,
only to be known without knowing.
It is the quietest kind of nearness,
the kind that asks nothing
and in asking nothing
restores a part of you you did not realize
had gone dim.
It grazes the soul like a hand
that never quite touches—
a promise of contact,
a murmur of care,
a soothing traced along the inner surface
of being itself.
No message,
no direction,
only the gentle reassurance
that something in the universe
has noticed your existence
and answers with a softness
equal to your need.
A whisper,
not into the ear
but into the space behind the heart,
where feeling wakes before thought understands.
It lingers there—
a quiet pulse,
a sheltering nearness—
not holding you,
but letting you rest
as if you were held.
And then, barely,
it recedes—
not leaving,
just loosening—
like the last warmth of a hand
still felt long after it has gone.
8
It appears without approach.
Not rising, not entering—simply there.
A pulse without rhythm,
a force without weight,
life showing itself in the smallest possible gesture.
No softness here,
no harshness either—
only the unqualified fact of energy
standing in its own clarity.
It does not warm,
does not startle,
does not soothe.
It simply asserts a kind of being
that needs nothing to validate it.
Not spirit.
Not breath.
Not sensation.
Just the unmistakable surge
that accompanies existence
whenever it remembers itself.
A being unshaped by intention
moves through the moment,
neither touching nor retreating,
neither demanding nor yielding.
Its essence is activity without aim—
motion held within stillness,
potential without need for direction.
It does not call attention to itself.
It does not fade.
It does not speak.
It remains—
a clarity,
a tension,
a spark of the world’s own self-recognition
before language arrives to claim it.
Alive,
unadorned,
without echo or interpretation—
just the force that underlies all form,
manifest for an instant
in its simplest,
most unmediated state.
9
At last the force loosens.
Not fading—simply releasing its hold
on being something.
The pulse ceases to define itself.
The clarity thins.
What was formless being unravels
into the same unbounded quiet
that preceded it.
No retreat,
no vanishing,
only the simple act
of no longer remaining.
The vitality that stood so plainly
lets its edges dissolve,
not into darkness,
not into silence,
but into the untouched space
that asks nothing of it.
What stays behind
is not trace or echo
but the openness that held it—
a vastness indifferent to form,
yet origin to all form.
This is not return
because nothing was ever apart.
It is not ending
because nothing concludes.
It is the unmaking
that restores everything
to the ground of its own possibility.
Where force once stood,
there is now only the expanse
from which force arises—
the nothingness that is not absence
but the pure condition
of all that can become.
Here, being and unbeing
are the same gesture.
Life dissolves
into what has always held it.
And the dissolution is complete.
CODA
Nothing follows.
What has unfolded returns to its origin,
not as echo,
not as meaning,
but as the same quiet field
that allowed each motion to appear.
The cycle leaves no imprint.
The trace erases itself.
The movement completes by letting the world resume its stillness.
There is nothing to gather,
nothing to carry forward,
nothing to understand.
The unfolding has ended where it began—
in the openness that holds all beginnings
and requires none.
What remains is not conclusion
but the calm that arrives
when even dissolution has dissolved.
And from that calm,
if anything were ever to arise again,
it would do so without memory of having been.
Observations On Perception 