How is a thing right?
It is right because it is right.
How is a thing wrong?
It is wrong because it is wrong.
How is a thing possible?
It is possible because it is so.

How is a thing not possible?
It is not possible because it is not possible.

Things have within them what makes them right
and what makes them possible.
There is nothing what does not have its conditions
for being right, nothing with does not have
its conditions for being possible.

But without the words which flow daily as from a cup and without our nature being aligned with heaven, what could be made of these characteristics?

Things are divided into various genera and develop successively into distinct physical forms.
They begin and end
In an unbroken circle;
But how this occurs we cannot fathom.

This is called the balance of heaven.
The balance of heaven is the heavenly element in our nature.

Zhuangzi trans. by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong, Book 27 Metaphorical Language

I was a child and I remember how it felt. I would ask my father: Why I could not have, why could not do something. His answer usually was, “Because I said so.” This reply never felt ‘enough’ to me. The feeling generated in me, to say it plainly, “You are a child, small, weak and ignorant and I, well I am adult,- big and powerful and thus I know.” The bigger and more powerful the more one gets to determine what goes and what doesn’t go; what is right (possible) and what is wrong (not possible).

My father’s words were appeal to naked power as an ‘argument’ for appropriate thinking/behaving. You would agree that thinking and behaving are related would you not? It seems to me thought and action are related.

I do not believe the above quotation is an attempt to say, as ex-President George W. Bush once declared “I am the decider.” The lines featured cannot be another declaration of force, – Because I am your father, I get to say what goes, or because I am the Commander-in-Chief, Definition of ethical permissibility and the forbidden originate with me. Clearly more than a few of us subscribe to such a notion: Strength Makes The Right.

With this in mind we return to the matter at hand. To be right and to be possible, the parallel between the appropriate and the effective do not refer to who has the most power, or what nation possesses the biggest pile of the most lethal weaponry. Rather, there’s the matter of context, – the manner in which something is related to everything else, whether it “fits”, receives and transmits support to other individuals, or neighboring nations, etc., etc.. The ethically approved, and moreover the behavior forbidden depends entirely on the context. One who asks “why” and the one who responds “because”, each has his/her judgment. And isn’t much of any given context hidden? There are infinite viewpoints possible and I can inhabit only the one that is my own. Everything, especially what I cannot see, supports and is supported by everything else.

What is right/possible is rooted in alignment, in a delicacy of balance with all of our species, with the earth and sky itself and indeed with the very solar system and our galaxy…

Well I feel a bit dizzy you might be thinking. Vertigo! Like Jennifer Gray balanced on the palms of dancer, Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing.

Then you are getting it!

This tune is about alignment, about having nothing except the joy-of-being, alive and present, aware upon this earth, a place and time in the cosmos… The Load Out STAY by Jackson Browne.