Along with others, I have struggled to understand the nature of my relationship to the Federal Government. This ancient dialog between Confucius and one of his students illuminates the topic. What frame-of-mind is feasible toward a autocrat, and the high-handed murderous administration for which he is the “front man”? The autocrat’s party regards compromise…
Serendipity is coincidence of circumstance that is unexpected. Perhaps occasionally that happens to everybody. Earlier in the day preparing for a session later in the week I composed several questions related to the relationship between life and death. Then, when turning to consider this post was this ancient account of a funeral. The funeral…
The pheasant of the marshes has to take ten steps to pick up a mouthful of food, and thirty steps to get a drink, but it does not seek to be nourished in a coup. Though its spirit would (there) enjoy a royal abundance, it does not think (such confinement) good. Zhuangzi by Zhuang…
Perhaps there is nothing more satisfying than to observe a skilled artisan work. Here is a widely known Taoist story. A humble cook instructs the ruler of the realm on the art of ruling by his manner of dismembering an Ox in the course of meal preparation. No further comment needed. Cook Ding was…
The Mastery of Life There is a limit to our life,but to knowledge there is no limit.With what is limitedto pursue after what is unlimited is a perilous thing; and when, knowing this,we still seek the increase of our knowledge,the peril cannot be averted. There should not be the practice of what is goodwith…
The Penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, ‘Formerly you were walking on, and now you have stopped; formerly you were sitting, and now you have risen up: how is it that you are so without stability?’ The Shadow replied, ‘I wait for the movements of something else to do what I do, and that something…
The lyric penned by Chrissie Hynde is more true now than ever. Resist temptation, irrational faith in “the system,” that’s going to take care of us. The system is an abstraction, a collection of imagined, dream-like benefits, (democracy protects everyone’s rights, captalism-gets-us-all-ahead, etc.) quite divorced from the way things actually work, the sharp-edged reality….
Monday, a mild day with 45 degrees F at 6:30AM. The poet James Dickey suggests in his poem To Rise To Walk Again that non-human mammals live in a perpetual paradise. That is, they live in a state of perpetual renewal. A consciousness that is filled with each successive moment would be one that…
The Heaven of Animals By James L. Dickey Here they are. The soft eyes open. If they have lived in a wood It is a wood. If they have lived on plains It is grass rolling Under their feet forever. Having no souls, they have come, Anyway, beyond their knowing. Their instincts…
Under heaven there is nothing greaterthan the tip of an autumn down,and the Thâi mountain is small. There is no one more long livedthan a child which dies prematurely,and Phang Tsû did not live out his time. ~*~ Heaven, Earth, and Iwere produced together,and all things and…
