I enjoyed the afternoon at the racetrack.

I mean the environs of Great Lakes Dragaway located off of State Rt KR outside of Union Grove Wisconsin. Opened in 1955 the venue was the nation’s first purpose-built and is the oldest continuously operating dragstrip. The track was inspired by California racing. I was six years old when this double lane of asphalt was opened for business. The boy in me remembers Hot Rod Magazine showing glossy photos of Gartlis and Muldowney side by side at Great Lakes. Generation by generation of Americans have been inspired and bedeviled by the mystery and the physics of quarter mile competition.

Bring as much horsepower as your pocketbook can afford, and as much engineering genius as you’ve learned:  discover “what its worth”, a screaming starting line launch, then an insane few seconds to reach the timing lights… It defies description really. But enough!

Drag racing and the Tao…

What of an attitude and practice rooted in the history of China, juxtaposed to America’s romance, the hands-on satisfaction of constructing, of building an automobile to express what one finds beautiful, elegant, performance too, worth admiring… There’s a connection, a link there. I glimpsed the connection yesterday.

To revisit a Tao Te Ching quotation from yesterday’s post:

The gentlest thing in the world
overcomes the hardest thing in the world.
That which has no substance
enters where there is no space.
This shows the value of non-action.

Defying what seems obvious, – the softest, the invisible, the patiently unobtrusive is the most important and critical dimension of “reality”… That the “soft” dominates the “hard.” The Taoist sense of things, that which holds, binds, connects, enlivens is what you cannot see, and what just works without “doing.”

After the thunder, the violent fury of a quarter mile dash the car is returned to its parking space in the pits. Valve covers are taken away, and each rocker arm is checked with a gage. Did the interval between the rocker and the valve spring hold, did it loosen? The invisible, the un-seeable is the care, the delicacy of the experienced touch required to check and to adjust the gap of each rocker arm. The gentle, delicate touch is essential. Other relatively non-hard, insubstantial elements come into play too.

In precise proportion air, and fuel and fire are the natural components to produce explosive energy, harnessed to overcome inertia, the stasis of a standing start.

Care, air, fire and fuel those virtually unseeables, are the heart, the gentlest of connection naturally and so seductively make real what surrounds us, what we take for granted as our habitation.

Nothing less than “Tao”: impossible to label, and what is meant by beauty, by

meaning.

If you cannot directly explain it, – you can observe and feel awe in the variety of ways you and I take note of such, at the track, here at Starbucks, in your own kitchen, children at play in the park…

Enjoy this day!