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

In the last chapter we were focused on the kind of comings and goings which allow us to fulfill our own particular kind of being. This chapter makes it clear that not all comings and goings do this. Some can actually take us away from ourselves.

There’s an easy way to tell the difference: I can notice what sustains my energies, and what dissipates them.

If I allow myself to be taken away by this and that so that I lose myself in the process, this dissipates my energy. But if I come back to my belly, I can come back to myself.

What does it mean to come back to my belly?

The simple answer is that instead of eating just for the flavor of it (or out of habit), I am noticing whether I’m actually hungry right now. But the answer goes deeper than that.

If I eat a fantastically delicious slice of chocolate cake right now, will it replenish my energy? …Or, what about this canteloupe, on this hot summer day? Flavors can be wonderful, but if the flavor of something overrides my ability to sense whether this particular food will replenish me and sustain me, the flavor has taken me away from something crucial.

Music is nice: but if the music functions to still an anxiety, keeping me from experiencing something inside that’s maybe not quite comfortable, I can lose track of valuable information about myself and my situation.

Any entertainment, and anything money can buy, can distract me from my own inner promptings.

It goes deeper still though: my belly is the center of my power when I am moving. If I stay with my belly, I’m staying in my power. My belly is also the open space at my center, where I am free for new possibilites, and am open to comings and goings in such a way that I remain precisely connected with my own nature and the universe.

too many sights
and the inner eye goes blind

too much music
and the inner ear goes deaf

too many flavors
and taste becomes jaded

hunting and chasing about
makes one mad with excitement

precious commodities
hinder one’s natural sense of rightness

the sage is guided by his belly
rather than those outer pulls
leaving those, to stay with
that which is 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

Often the Tao Te Ching seems to be skipping around all over the place.

Chapter 5 was the ‘straw dog’ chapter. There, heaven-and-earth are said to be ‘inhumane’. Then comes a detour to ‘valley spirit’ and ‘Great Mother’ in chapter 6, which is often translated so it seems the whole life-process turns on ‘emptiness’. In chapter 7 we’re back to heaven-and-earth again: this time, heaven-and-earth are said to be ‘not self-interested.’

In this common reading, ‘inhumane’ and ‘not self-interested’ are uneasy bedfellows and the Valley Spirit chapter seems to be stuck in between them arbitrarily.

But there’s actually a nice sequence to the chapters starting to show up when I stay strictly with how the text can make sense from inside the experience of my own life process. Read this way, ‘inhumane’ could actually be an invitation to a heartfelt, near-instinctive reverence for the natural world and human beings as part of it, instead of the rule-based ‘goodness’ (see chapter 5 commentary) implied by the word ‘humane’. The core quality of the ‘Great Mother’ could be ‘devotion’ instead of ‘emptiness’. We’re beginning to uncover a different, more heart-centered way of reading the Tao Te Ching.

And chapter 7 builds so easily on this! The chapter tells us that the sage acts without self-interest and thereby has himself.  I know that experience of acting without self-interest, and having myself more fully in those moments.  So how does that happen? -what’s going on there?

Immediately I get right back to devotion! When I’m devoted, my whole being is acting for the sake of something that matters; something I care about in a sustained way. And that devotion is self-sustaining. It feeds on itself. I’m energized by my devotion.

I think about the mother Inca dove I watched feeding her two fledglings in my windowsill a few weeks ago…  And the trees pumping sap up to the new buds, a few weeks before that. This beautiful world is fueled by devotion, if you look just below the surface!

Turns out we may actually need the valley spirit chapter in between ‘inhumane’ and ‘not self-interested’: with it, the whole thing opens up beautifully.

heaven is eternal
earth endures

why? what is their secret?

because they don’t live for themselves
they are long-lived

thus the sage puts his self in the background
and yet finds his self in the foreground
treats his self as incidental
and his self is safe

is this not because
he has no thought of self?
thus, he has the power
to realize himself.

— 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

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