The ancient sages let themselves be precisioned, moment by moment.

This is the surefootedness that crosses a river successfully in the winter, making each step with both confidence and also tentativeness. The confidence in each step comes from the body knowing it’s centered and its balance is solid. The tentativeness of each step is the willingness to be precisioned.

What about this rock: does it shift a bit? Is it slippery? Where, exactly, does the foot go? How does the body arrange itself to keep its balance in this step?

And more: our ‘next steps’ can be about more than just keeping our personal balance. They can also be about keeping the balance. We can choose to step with care and reverence, knowing that this world is precious and alive, enormous and beautiful, in ways we can only partially grasp.

Every moment, life is new in some ways; always something more than it was the moment before. If I lose sight of its newness and just feel my sureness, I’m lost. At some point I’ll step where the footing is slippery, and fall. I’ll treat familiar people as if they are as they ‘always’ were; and suddenly discover I’ve damaged them or our relationship.

I’ll act as if the way I’ve always done things needs no change. I’ll so identify with the shape I am used to taking, that I’ll feel as though if I give ‘that’ up I’d be giving up myself. I’ll try to keep from falling apart, and miss the chance for a new way.

If I have only my certainties I won’t feel the unresolved confusion which, if I slowed down and allowed room for it, could take me the first step toward a new understanding. Then new ways could arise, which make sense now.

long ago, there were sages,
deft in their doings
their subtle wisdom and mysterious power penetrating so deep
that it’s beyond ordinary understanding

truly not full of yourself
you can lose yourself
and be newly made

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

It is common to think of everything, even other people and our own selves, as a resource–that is, as something for ‘use’. Every time we take even a minute to pause, something in us says we are ‘wasting time’.

The Taoist approach offers a corrective here. One example is the well-known story of a tree whose wood was of low quality. No one ever cut the tree down, because it was ‘useless’. So it lived to a great age.

Yet this chapter is apparently focused on what makes things useful to us!

I think the mistake comes in translating the character ‘yung’ as ‘useful’. ‘Fulfills its destiny’ might be closer; ‘allows it to serve’ holds another bit of it; ‘expresses its nature’ touches on a slightly different strand; ‘in its power’ yet another.

A wheel is its own beautiful shape, but also its shape makes it possible for it to engage directly with the ground to move a vehicle forward, with as little energy expended as possible. Its generous circular shape is just right to do this.

But the wheel can’t do this by itself. In fact, in a sense the wheel doesn’t ‘do’ anything at all, other than to be the shape that it is. It has to be connected to the cart in such a way that it is completely responsive to the energy and direction that flows ‘in’ to it. The empty space at its center where it’s exactly fitted to the axle, makes this possible.

A clay pot is beautiful just in its own shape, too–and in its nature accepts the flow of something into it. It wouldn’t be a pot if it couldn’t do this.

The third metaphor used in this chapter is especially interesting because it’s not the empty space of the room itself that’s highlighed, but the doors and windows: the means by which we come and go from the room.

The Tao Te Ching is always about our own nature. If this chapter were only about what makes something work, that would be trivial. No, the ‘wheel’ and ‘pot’ and ‘room with windows and doors’ that’s meant here, is me!

–And far from telling me to ‘get busy’ and ‘make myself useful’, the text invites me to do the opposite: instead, to be the beautiful shape that I am, really.

It highlights that If I’m my own real shape, I will have room at the heart of me to welcome the comings and goings which are intrinsic to my particular kind of being.

The previous chapter is widely understood as being directions for meditation. And meditation is deep-related to this chapter as well: after all, in meditation we’re letting go of our busyness in order to be at rest, welcoming what comes and goes in us. The less we do and the quieter we get, the more connected we become to the ‘whole big thing’.

Meditation lets us practice our own natural shape and pace, and the awareness of when we’re ‘in shape’, and when we’re not. We become more sensitized to when we’re forcing things and when we’re not; when we don’t ‘have room’, and when we do.

Our ordinary doings also start to become visible as a way we’re in our own shape and pace–or not. As we play with this over time and learn to stay closer to our own nature in the midst of our doings, our regular lives become more and more connected to the ‘whole big thing’.

thirty spokes are joined
upon a hub
to make a wheel–

that hole in the center
is the source of its power

clay is shaped
to make a vessel–

in its hollowness
is its power

when windows and doors are cut
it makes a room a room–

those openings
make it habitable

being can be beneficial
only because of the open space
that lets it function

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

A skilled archer knows when he’s pulled the bowstring back just enough, but not too much. He knows if he pulls it too far, he may injure himself or the bow–and the arrow will not fly as true. The practiced archer knows with ever greater precision where to stop, because he’s devoted to the art of archery.

Where is the stopping point, though? How does he find it?

–He discovers it via his interested care for the effect of his action. He practices a restraint that doesn’t feel restrained, but attuned.

Writing’s like that too. I’m attuned to what this chapter invited me to say, and sensing ‘it’, I remove any excess that isn’t it.

Now I feel the point approaching where I’ve said it.  It’s time to stop.

overfilled,
a bowl will spill

oversharpened,
a blade won’t last

too much gold and jade
can’t be guarded

and worse,
you start defining yourself
in terms of an excess
that’s doomed to be lost

when it’s completed, stop!
that’s Heaven’s way

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

Technically, I’m late to write about chapter 2.  That was the chapter for last week.

How interesting!  How did that happen?

…wondering what happened, I’m not wondering about the story of my week: how first this happened and then that happened, so that only now can I sit down and write this post.  What I’m asking is, how did it happen that this simple notation on my list of things to do today–’write a post about chapter 2′–could become something-to-do-that’s-now-late?

When I began to write my way through the Tao Te Ching, I decided to do something I love to do, together with someone I like.  And to do something together, we need to show up at the same place at roughly the same time.

In US culture, we are big about doing things ‘on time’.  When we agree to meet, for us in the US it’s ‘good’ to be ‘on time’.  But for ‘on time’ to even make any sense, we have to have the concept of ‘late’.  And in the US, it’s ‘bad’ to be ‘late’.

I can write a post as something that’s ‘owed’ and therefore ‘late’ or ‘on time’.  If I write it that way, then there’s something unnatural introduced.  I’m forcing the process.

The interesting thing is that I can only show up when I show up, which is now–and there is no way I can make it be any earlier (or later) than it is.

In truth there is just this possibility of writing, and this keyboard and screen, and the sense of what I could say right now.  When I let that truth suffuse me, there is plenty of time.  I spread out and take up this whole precious time, luxuriously…

…just in time!

beauty as beautiful gives rise to ugliness
being gives birth to nonbeing

because of good there is bad
because of easy there is difficult

high and low position one another
sound and silence form a unity
future and past follow each other

so… the sage
lives his life without forcing anything

things come and go
and he welcomes it all
without judging it

he does his work
and lets it go
without claiming it

his actions endure,
because they are the actions
of the universe

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson