Note from the Editors:
It is a great pleasure to introduce Dipti Vyas as a featured Monday poet here at the White Rabbit poetry society. Dipti has an amazingly lovely presence here on Subastack and fills her posts not only with charm but also with awareness and spirituality. She describes her Substack publication as “I write to untangle big feelings, chase clarity, and occasionally trick hope into showing up, usually with coffee and a sense of humor.” I hope she knows that in her writing hope shows up frequently no tricks needed. Please take a moment to visit Dipti Vyas. subscribe and read her work.
Original Post
Where the Voice Began
A reflection on writing, memory, and the quiet influence of Advaita
Every writing life begins somewhere small, almost unnoticed. Mine began last June, with a poem written for my son.
There was no ambition behind it, no thought of craft or audience. Only a few lines shaped out of feeling. When he read it, he loved it, more than I expected. His response carried a quiet recognition, as if he had been waiting for me to arrive at something I had not yet named.
He has always encouraged me to write, to journal, to place words around the difficult terrain we have walked together. Trauma has a way of scattering experience into fragments; writing, he believed, could gather some of those pieces again, not to resolve them, but to let them breathe differently. Over time, it became not only refuge, but inquiry, a way of holding experience long enough for it to reveal its own shape.
Earlier in my life, writing first took form in more structured spaces: thesis, dissertations, grant applications, the disciplined architecture of scientific language. It taught me how thought is constructed step by step, how clarity is made and held through form.
When I returned to writing last June, my attention shifted toward what could not be contained within that structure, what remains when explanation reaches its edge and quietly dissolves.
In truth, the first seeds had been planted earlier, when I was invited to be a “book” at the Human Library hosted at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library by the Human Relations Commission I was serving on at the time. The premise was simple and disarming: instead of borrowing a book, visitors “borrow” a person and listen to their story.
Sitting across from strangers and offering pieces of my life: its fractures, its reckonings, its quiet survivals- taught me something essential about narrative. A story does not remain with the one who speaks it. The moment it is voiced, it opens into shared space, where another person may begin to recognize themselves.
When I began writing afterward, those experiences naturally became poems.
I have written some prose, but poetry is where my voice settles most fully. Prose tends to explain; poetry allows silence to remain within the architecture. It leaves a small clearing the reader can enter with their own meanings, their own echoes. A poem does not close itself, it stays slightly open, like breath at the edge of release.
Much of what I write carries the quiet influence of Advaita, not as doctrine, but as a way of seeing. It points toward what lies beneath the shifting surfaces of life: roles, identities, wounds, stories- that is never fully separate from what appears.
In poetry, this is rarely stated directly.
A personal memory opens into something less personal. A moment of grief becomes impermanence itself. An ordinary scene, a sky, a body of water, a passing stranger- begins to soften at its edges, as though form is gently loosening into something wider that language can only gesture toward.
Perhaps this is why poetry feels like the right vessel. Advaita moves in the space between words. It points rather than declares.
When I write, I am often tracing small, intimate moments: loss, resilience, tenderness, confusion. Yet within them, a quieter question persists: who is the “I” that experiences all of this?
Sometimes the poem leans toward an answer. More often, it lets the question remain, unresolved, but no longer tight.
Looking back, it feels fitting that my writing began with my son. What started as a simple gesture toward him gradually unfolded into something larger: a way of meeting the past without being enclosed by it, a way of shaping experience without fixing its meaning.
If trauma fractures memory, poetry gathers its fragments without forcing them into order. It allows contradiction to remain intact. It allows complexity. It allows light to fall differently across the same story.
In that sense, my writing is not an attempt to explain life. It is an attempt to listen to it more closely.
And perhaps that is all poetry is: a moment where language becomes quiet enough for something deeper, something shared, to be heard.
The Seam of Two Silences by Dipti Vyas
At the seam of two silences
I stand,
one hand warm from the door that has closed,
the other brushing the veil
of something not yet formed.
The mind calls this moment
ending.
It gathers the ashes of yesterday
and lays them out:
names, habits, the familiar weather
of a self I used to wear.
But the wind passing through
refuses the ceremony.
It says nothing,
only lifts the surface of things
as a breeze
reaches the lake and leaves it changed.
What I thought was departure
is the river
folding quietly around a stone.
What I called loss
is the sky
forgetting the shape of a cloud.
Still, the heart trembles
in the narrow corridor
between what has dissolved
and what has not yet appeared,
a small vestibule
where memory loosens its fingers
and the future waits
like an unopened window.
Here, the old pronoun I
thins and flickers.
The one who mourned the ending
and the one who leans toward tomorrow
both tremble
brief lanterns
in a house that was never theirs.
Something wider remains,
without comment.
The same quiet
before the first story was told,
the same stillness
after the last page falls.
I stay here a while,
between endings and continuations,
until the border softens,
until the question itself loosens
as if the river
never asked where it ended,
as if the sky
never counted its clouds.
Something has always been here,
patient as space,
watching
doors open inside doors.
Nothing ends.
Nothing begins.
Only the endless Self
turning,
dreaming the movement of worlds.
Note From the Editors:
A very special thank you to Dipti Vyas for her time and for her lovely essay showcasing her life, her journey, and her spiritual awareness. We are so honored to have you here. Please take a moment to visit Dipti Vyas, subscribe, and read her work.
We are so grateful that you are here. Please leave a message if you are inspired. We would love to see what you write. The White Rabbit Poetry Society is a place to find some inspiration and even some friends. Don’t be shy—add links to your poetry!
