In the time before the naming of places, there was a place that refused to be named.
The first people knew it was there because sometimes one of them would come back from the forest or the water's edge with a changed quality: quieter, as if something had settled in them that had been unsettled for a long time. When asked where they had been, they could say the direction but not the location. They had not been paying attention, they said. They had been somewhere inside themselves when they arrived.
The name-givers tried to find it. They were trained. They walked every part of the forest in patterns that left no section uncovered. They measured the distances. They made marks on trees. They did not find anything. What they found was forest, which was already named, and it was only forest.
One of the name-givers, an old woman, said: what you are looking for is not in the forest.
The others asked: then where is it?
She said: it's in the quality of not-looking. It is what you arrive at when you stop directing your eyes. It exists in the world but it can only be reached by a mind that has stopped reaching.
This was not considered a useful answer, and she knew it was not, and she said it anyway.
A young girl who had been listening said: I found it once. I was thinking about something else.
The old woman said: yes.
The girl said: can you find it again, if you try?
The old woman said: you can try. You will not find it. You will walk through the forest correctly, and you will find the forest, and the forest will be what it is, and the place will be somewhere you are not, which is in the quality of not needing to be anywhere in particular.
The girl thought about this for a long time. Then she went back into the forest, and she thought about other things, and she did not look for the place, and she found it, and it was there.
When she came back she said: I think I understand.
The old woman said: now you will spend the rest of your life trying to explain it to people who need to look for things. That is the work.