The great tao is not named.
The great argument needs no words.
Great benevolence is not benevolent.
Great modesty is not humble.
Great courage is not destructive.
The tao that is displayed is not the tao.

Argumentative words do not achieve their purpose.
Benevolence that is predominant is not comprehensive.
Modesty that is demonstrative is not genuine.
Courage that is destructive will not achieve its end.

These five seem to be round and complete
But tend to become square and rigid.
Therefore knowledge that stops at what it does not know
is the greatest.

Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou, trans. Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong, The Way of Heaven

A new year, twelve “blank slate” months are ahead of us. Five days remain in our year 2025. The year has proven to be one of upheaval. In the United States the body body politic continues to regress. At present we tolerate the metastasis of dictatorship, a good portion of the White House has been bulldozed! It’s as if the society suffered a stroke, losing abilities we imagined that were settled by surviving four years of civil war (which didn’t truly end slavery), a great depression, the dust bowl, two world wars, etc., etc.. Has all that was gained now been lost? Time will tell.

“We the people” are no longer able to write cogently upon the pages of time. Our story even if flawed was meant to be about freedom, personal responsibility, and the near sacred status of the individual. But now, we, similar to a pre-verbal toddler, compulsively mark page after page with random, slashing, formless hash-marking. Our fathers, on the page-surface our story, left chapters of The Emancipation Proclamation, of The New Deal, of The Great Society. That was then.

Some “thing” monstrous, dark, chaotic, lethal has been gathering strength concealed by surface appearances. Surfaces, – the fine words of elected officials, treaties, trade deals, our laws, why not include New York Harbor’s mythic Lady Liberty…

The passage quoted above in Book 12 of the Zhuangzi is the echo of another older Taoist text, the Tao te Ching:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Tao te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

Perhaps we will discover how we have managed to “fuck up” our story. How by our “naming” we’ve paid no attention to our heart’s desire for hegemony, unlimited power, another way of saying we’ve desired a pile of money higher than Everest.

Where ever great wealth is found, there’s great injustice.

Or maybe we’ll simply run out of time? No time left to discover anything else?

Then it will be time for us “to go.”