Where Nothingness waits in metal bars

 

When I look at this image — this kitten behind thin, cold metal bars, perched in its little plastic box against the muted, almost desolate backdrop of old buildings and empty street — something tightens in my chest.

I remember standing there that early morning in Guangzhou, the air still clinging to the hush of dawn. There was no bustle yet, just the faint echo of footsteps and distant voices. And there, in the middle of this sleeping street market, was this small life caged — soft fur, wide eyes — a fragile heartbeat in a steel enclosure.

I thought of Nietzsche then — the will to power, the weight of freedom, the burden of choice. Is this creature’s spirit shackled by these bars, or is it my own mind that sees the cage more than the kitten does? Does it know it’s captive? Or does it dream beyond these grids, beyond the cold wire?

Then Laozi came to me — the Dao De Jing whispering its lessons of emptiness and non-striving. The street was empty; the kitten’s stare was full. The emptiness was not absence but potential. The bars defined the space but could not enclose the vastness of what is not said — the ten thousand things returning to the uncarved block. Maybe freedom is not the open street beyond, but a stillness inside this tiny being, so untouched, so perfectly wu wei.

But it was Zhuangzi who stayed with me longest. His words of drifting with the wind, of refusing golden cages. I remembered the parable of the sacred bird, so exquisite that kings offered palaces for it, but Zhuangzi turned them away: better to let the bird live among the clouds and trees than gild it in luxury and watch its soul wither.

This kitten — this gentle prisoner — made me wonder: where do I stand in this moment? Am I the bird in the cage, gilded by comforts yet bound? Am I the iron bars, defining the limits of others? Or am I the empty street — a space where anything can happen, where freedom and nothingness merge?

In that early morning, I felt the ache of existence: a soft creature confined, the whole city sprawling behind it, blurred, indifferent. It is not only the kitten’s cage I see — it is the invisible cages I carry within me.

Perhaps all that remains is this: to look, to feel, to know that behind every bar is an entire sky waiting to be remembered. To stand before a caged kitten and find my own longing for wild flight, for uncarved spaces, for drifting freely like Zhuangzi’s butterfly — dreaming of life that cannot be pinned down.