Buddhist terminology, Buddhist jargon

There are two Buddhist concepts that seem immensely valuable to me, but are often expressed in phrases that may not be much help to outsiders. But: health warning. This is only my probably feeble and inaccurate understanding of them. I'm no Buddhist scholar; that's why I need a translation, as it were, before I can make full use of these insights.

Dependent origination.  I take that to mean that nothing exists as an entirely separate entity. We throw our distinctions across the workings of the universe so that we can come to some sort of understanding of it in our own terms. 

 The example often used is of a plant. When is a daffodil a separate entity? As a bulb? As a shoot below ground level? As those promising green stalks? Only when it flowers? And after you've cut the brown leaves back, do you still have a daff, or only a daff bulb? 

A daffodil can be seen as a process in time, a continuous event which we observe and enjoy at different stages. There is nothing static, if you use the right time-scale. It gave me a jolt when I realised that there is nothing eternal about mountains, nothing, in geological time-scales, particularly long-lived about them. In the Nant Ffrancon valley, high up below a ridge, there are the marks of wave action in solid rock. Two thousand feet above current sea level. 

It's all another way of saying that everything is change. Everything depends on what came before and will come next. The "I" that is writing this is formed at this point in time, and then lapses into another self-perception. Everything originates in something else.

Emptiness. A dear friend of mine once said she preferred using Lectio Divina, using short excerpts from a significant text, as a basis for meditation, rather than "emptiness." I see her point, it's a common-sense one.

It seems to me that emptiness, in meditative terms, is a challenge; it tells us that nothing has a solidity, a discrete existence.

I think science may support us here; apparently, if you took all the "space" out of my atoms, and just left the substance (OK look I know it's energy, not stuff like wood is stuff - give me a break here) you'd have a little pile of dust on the floor that weighed as much as I do. 

I'm only those interactions between nuclei and electrons and...all the other particles. Then I'm only the interactions between the elements those atoms make up, then the elements mixed into compounds, then... etc. 

So I am not one thing, I have no discrete single existence called "me." It just seems as though I do. But care is needed here. I'm not saying I am an illusion, and so is all the rest of the observable universe. I'm saying that I have no ultimate fixed identity. Me, this keyboard, my pen - we are empty of any unique fixed existence. We are only processes, only change,  en route.

I think "emptiness" is a misleading term for this understanding - but needless to say, I can't think of a better one!

Can be a bit scary, living, even for a little while, in an understanding that nothing has a fixed form and identity, but it's also liberating.

That's why the book I'm stumbling through that is about this stuff is called "Seeing That Frees," by Rob Burbea. It's wordy, it's not easy, but it's - well, there's a clue in the title. I'll grapple on.