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’s said that the sage treats all nature as straw dogs. This sounds at first as though the sage treats nature with contempt. Not so.

A straw dog in ancient China was a sacrificial object. It was treated with utmost reverence before its sacrifice. But once it was sacrificed its time was over. It was no longer treated as something alive. It might then be gathered up by the fuel gatherers. When its time was over, it was over.

So the text actually invites me to treat everything in nature–human beings included–with great reverence while they are alive. (And not reverence as merely a feeling: reverence as something active, which actually gives the highest I have to give.) But the invitation is a challenging one at its core. It requires me to recognize that we, just like the rest of this whole precious-cargo, insanely beautiful world, are not permanent.

If I really take that impermanence seriously, it only deepens my reverence and cherishing of all nature–including myself and other human beings–rather than making it contemptible. We have so little time. And when our time on earth is over, it’s over.

I don’t think this means that we should forget those we’ve cared about after their deaths. The fuel gatherers don’t forget the straw dogs–they use what’s left, for fuel.

It’s in our nature to continue to love what we love. A cat or dog will mourn a lost loved companion and we’re no less than that.

What’s here is simply an invitation to accept impermanence as basic: an invitation to love what we love with all our hearts as the creatures we are, to know that now is what we have, and to lay down our own lives when our time is over.

Coming from here is very different than relating to others as a ‘good’ person doing ‘good’ things.  That’s an obligation which grows out of an abstraction about what I ‘should’ do.

But if I embrace the way of the world, how can I do anything but cherish the new mockingbird I saw last night singing his first songs? –then my heart just does what it does, without thinking of  ’good’ or ‘bad’.  It’s in this sense, that the sage is ‘inhumane’, if ‘humane’ is seen as a kind of ‘being good’ that is put on like your best clothes. That’s sentiment. The sage is not sentimental, but reverent.

Now if I feel for what reverence needs in order to be alive in me, I find my way back to the quiet again. Reverence needs a quiet space. Quiet makes room for it to express itself as a living impulse, instead of dead sentiment.

heaven and earth are not sentimental
seeing all creatures as straw dogs
the sage isn’t sentimental either
treating everyone as straw dogs

the empty space between heaven and earth
is like a flute from which our breath produces music
because of its very hollowness–
or like a straw with which our breath can feed air to the fire

that emptiness is never exhausted
the more it works, the more comes forth

now, many words–those fill up the silence
those lead to exhaustion
many words make it hard to hold fast to the center
to the inexhaustible emptiness within

— 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