38

The Master doesn’t try to be powerful;
thus he is truly powerful.
The ordinary man keeps reaching for power;
thus he never has enough.

The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.

The kind man does something,
yet something remains undone.
The just man does something,
and leaves many things to be done.
The moral man does something,
and when no one responds
he rolls up his sleeves and uses force.

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
     When goodness is lost, there is morality.
          When morality is lost, there is ritual.
               Ritual is the husk of true faith,
               the beginning of chaos.

Therefore the Master concerns himself
with the depths and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower.
He has no will of his own.
He dwells in reality,
and lets all illusions go.

Tao te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

I’ve hardly anything at all to write this morning. Nothing much to get started with.

Except this…

This verse No. 38 stays with me however as especially insightful. The loss of a people’s Tao, that “way-making” focus. This loss is both is both personal and communal.

I am a product of my place and my time, the result of this American society, as my ancestors were disaffected Europeans. We are descendants of vagabonds, self-righteous cast-offs.

Desperados – unwelcome in the English homeland, then dissatisfied to live as exiles in Holland, in 1620 the Mayflower, leaky and overcrowded departed for the “new” world. Among their assumptions were “America was a vast and unpeopled country…devoid of all civil inhabitants, there are only savage and brutish men” etc., etc, and equally important “a great hope and inward zeal for the propagating of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world.” After arriving — when they were able, the Puritans commenced to take what we believed “was ours” from peoples who had lived here for many generations. You cannot read Governor William Bradford’s History of the Plymouth colony without recoiling. At least I can’t. They massacred the Pequots in 1637.

Some things simply do not change, echos of which, come around once more to haunt us.

When our way-making, our Tao is lost, a domino-like concatenation follows. How does it all end? I cannot say. But hold on! Hold on tight!

No wonder we have the after effect of human-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, now his bro’, a moribund Donald Trump is ensconced in the White House,…

It’s time for me to return home and mow the back lawn. Also my desk stands to be put back into order, that mess of folders to be sorted and put away…

More latter. Maybe.