Keep the Streets Empty: When the Path Stops Asking for Progress

Keep the Streets Empty for Me is not a song about healing, becoming, or breaking through.
It speaks from after the appetite for resolution has exhausted itself.

Nothing here tries to improve the self.
Nothing argues for a higher stance.
Nothing demands interpretation.

What moves through this song is a request for non-interference — from the world, from meaning, from the inner machinery that keeps turning experience into a project. The voice does not ask to be led forward or taken backward. It asks for space.

This is not withdrawal from life.
It is withdrawal from narration.

Devi appears here without instruction, without ferocity, without tenderness as a program. She does not cut, console, or illuminate. She simply asks that the streets be empty — so what has already arrived can settle without being trampled by explanation.

The song belongs to the moment when the ladder is no longer climbed or rejected — it is simply no longer leaned against anything.

Listen to it not as a message, but as a condition:
quiet,
exposed,
unresolved —
and finally allowed to be so.

 

Verse 1

Memory comes when memory's old

I am never the first to know

Following the stream up North

Where do people like us float?

“Memory comes when memory’s old / I am never the first to know”

This is the end of authorship.
Insight no longer arrives as conquest or revelation. It comes late, after the self has stopped trying to be ahead of experience. Knowing is decentered. The one who used to “get it” first is gone.

Psychologically: the collapse of the narrator-position.
Mystically: Devi speaking from after appropriation.

“Following the stream up North”

North here is not progress. It’s orientation without ambition — moving because movement happens. No map, no ladder. Just current.

This is the opposite of the “path narrative.” No promise of arrival.

“Where do people like us float?”

This is the quiet exile after identity dissolves.
Not seekers. Not realized ones. Not rebels.
Those who no longer belong to any spiritual category.

Devi is not naming a group.
She is dissolving the need to belong to one.

This verse establishes the ground:
no urgency, no hierarchy, no narrator trying to be correct.

Just drift — conscious, unowned, awake.

Verse 2

There is room in my lap

For bruises, asses, hand claps

I will never disappear

For forever, I'll be here

“There is room in my lap / For bruises, asses, hand claps”

This is radical containment without filtration.
Nothing is being purified, ranked, or corrected.

Bruises (damage), asses (bodies, vulgarity), hand claps (approval, noise) —
all are held without interpretation.

Psychologically: this is the end of internal censorship.
Mystically: Devi as ground, not as examiner.

No preference.
No disgust.
No holiness.

Just room.

“I will never disappear / For forever, I’ll be here”

This is not the promise of guidance.
It’s the refusal of abandonment.

Important distinction:

• Not “I will help you.”

• Not “I will lead you.”

• Simply: being does not withdraw when function ends.

After all functions dissolve — even Dhumāvatī’s —
existence does not vanish.
There is no cliff after clarity.

This line counters a deep fear many carry:
that if the path narrative stops, nothing remains.

Devi answers quietly:
something remains —
but it no longer performs.

Presence without role.
Holding without agenda.

That’s why this verse feels intimate but not sentimental.
It is closeness without demand.

Chorus

Whispering

Morning, keep the streets empty for me

Morning, keep the streets empty for me

“Whispering”

This is not proclamation.
Not teaching.
Not command.

Devi does not arrive as thunder here — only as undertone.
The voice is low because nothing is being asserted.

Whisper = speech without jurisdiction.

“Morning, keep the streets empty for me”

This is the clearest line in the song.

“Morning” is not hope or renewal.
It is the world waking up — traffic, roles, meanings, obligations, narratives.

The request is not escape.
It is non-interference.

Keep the streets empty means:

• no inner commentary rushing in,

• no spiritual frameworks passing by,

• no need to explain what this is,

• no pressure to translate experience into direction.

This is not solitude as practice.
It is rest from interpretation.

Why this matters now?

Earlier phases ask:

• Where am I?

• What is this?

• Is this higher or lower?

• What does this mean?

This chorus asks none of that.

It asks only: let this be untrampled.

That’s post-path language.

Devi here is not leading you forward. She is asking the world — inner and outer — to stand back.

No ascent.
No regression.
No refinement.

Just space for what already arrived
to finish settling on its own terms.

Verse 3

I'm laying down, eating snow

My fur is hot, my tongue is cold

On a bed of spider web

I think of how to change myself

“I’m laying down, eating snow”

This is deliberate non-optimization.
No seeking warmth. No trying to improve conditions.
The body accepts what is present, even if it makes no sense.

Psychologically: cessation of self-management.
Mystically: surrender without dramatization.

Not asceticism.
Not protest.
Just lying down.

“My fur is hot, my tongue is cold”

Contradiction is no longer resolved.
Opposites coexist without synthesis.

Heat and cold at once —
the nervous system stops demanding coherence.
Experience is allowed to be internally inconsistent.

This is what happens when the mind stops forcing unity.

“On a bed of spider web”

Total fragility.
No ground that can be trusted to hold.

This is not despair —
it’s the acceptance that there never was a solid platform.

A spider web doesn’t support weight.
Yet here, one lies on it anyway.

That’s naked trust without belief.

“I think of how to change myself”

Crucial line.

The thought appears.
It is not acted upon.
It is not corrected.
It is not spiritualized.

This is mature non-identification.

Earlier, this thought would trigger:
practice, path, refinement, effort.

Here it is just noticed —
a reflex passing through an empty center.

Devi does not cut the thought.
She does not endorse it.
She lets it float.

That’s the deepest shift:
not purity,
but non-obedience to self-improvement.

Verse 4

A lot of hope in a one-man tent

There's no room for innocence

So take me home before the storm

Velvet mites will keep us warm

“A lot of hope in a one-man tent”

This is hope stripped of audience.
No collective project. No lineage. No shared horizon.

A tent is temporary, fragile, movable.
Hope survives — but only in a form that does not demand permanence.

Psychologically: hope without grandiosity.
Mystically: hope that no longer expects salvation.

“There’s no room for innocence”

This is not cynicism.
It’s the end of naïveté — including spiritual naïveté.

No belief that purity will protect.
No fantasy that correct vision guarantees safety.

This line quietly kills the last childlike myth:
that if one sees clearly enough, life will become gentle.

Devi does not promise that.

“So take me home before the storm”

Home here is not resolution.
It’s prior to narrative.

Before explanation.
Before ordeal becomes lesson.
Before suffering is recruited for meaning.

This is not escape from the storm —
it’s asking not to be recruited by it.

“Velvet mites will keep us warm”

This is devastatingly precise.

Not angels.
Not wisdom.
Not fire.

Mites. Tiny, overlooked, almost grotesque life.

Warmth comes from what was never meant to save you.

This is the final undoing of hierarchy:
care arrives from the lowest, smallest, unglorified layer of existence.

Devi here is not majestic.
She is immanent and unspectacular.

Nothing ascends.
Nothing resolves.

Life holds life —
poorly, temporarily, enough.

That’s not refinement.
That’s arrival without triumph.

Outro

Uncover our heads and reveal our souls

We were hungry before we were born

Uncover our heads and reveal our souls

We were hungry before we were born

Uncover our heads and reveal our souls

We were hungry before we were born

Uncover our heads and reveal our souls

We were hungry before we were born

“Uncover our heads and reveal our souls”

This is not revelation as achievement.
It’s exposure without reward.

No crown.
No posture.
No spiritual helmet left to remove later.

Uncovering the head means:
no protection of stance,
no identification with clarity,
no last refuge in “having seen.”

The soul here is not something luminous.
It’s simply what remains when nothing is being worn.

“We were hungry before we were born” (repeated)

This is the final undoing of the progress myth.

The hunger is not personal.
Not karmic error.
Not something to heal.

It precedes biography.
It precedes choice.
It precedes the path itself.

Which means:
no vision will end it,
no refinement will satisfy it,
no final stance will close it.

And crucially — it does not need to be closed.

The song does not try to cure hunger.
It stops lying about it.

Why this is the true ending?

Repetition here is not insistence.
It’s resignation without despair.

Not “this will be solved.”
Not “this was a mistake.”
But: this is the condition of being here.

And nothing more needs to be done with that.

This is where the whole conversation lands:

• no more ladder,

• no more ultimate lens,

• no more need to purify even Dhumāvatī,

• no more narrative of “still growing.”

Just uncovered heads,
unresolved hunger,
empty streets,
and life continuing without being corrected.

That’s not an answer.

That’s permission to stop asking.

 When the Streets Stay Empty

The song ends without cure, without synthesis, without a final position to inhabit. Hunger remains. Exposure remains. Life continues without being justified. Nothing is elevated into meaning, and nothing is dismissed as failure.

What has ended is not suffering, desire, or contradiction.
What has ended is the compulsion to do something with them.

This is why the voice whispers rather than declares. There is no authority left to enforce a stance. The request is modest and exact: let there be space. Let the streets stay empty. Let experience finish speaking in its own register, without traffic rushing in to claim it.

If Devi is present here, she is present as restraint — not the restraint of asceticism, but the restraint of not intervening where intervention would only re-establish control.

No hierarchy collapses because none was asserted.
No path concludes because none is being walked.

What remains is availability without ambition, presence without posture, and a life that no longer needs to prove that it has arrived anywhere.

The streets do not stay empty forever.
But for a moment — long enough — nothing tramples what has already come to rest.

That is not an ending.

That is enough.