Can You Hear The Music?
What is the Tao?
There is the tao of heaven and there is the tao of man.
Doing nothing and retaining all is the tao of heaven.
Straining with action is the tao of man.
The tao of heaven is the sovereign and the tao of man is the attendant.
The tao of heaven and the tao of man are far apart.
They ought to be clearly distinguished from each other.
Zhuangzi, trans. by Hyun Hochmann and Yang Guorong, Heaven and Earth
Sunday morning and ten days future will be Christmas morning. Christmas is the great festival of newness which is shared by Mediterranean countries, formerly Christian Europe, the Americas, and Canada.
I am painting with a broad brush and I realize that. All to say, no matter the distraction of commercialization this is the great celebration of newness. That a child born to unlikely parents, thrown into a wretched circumstance of a filthy stable becomes a mythic symbol of resistance to a Roman hegemonic empire. Rome’s empire came with benefits to a lucky few, but was a house maintained by, and built upon blood, lots of blood.
As you may know, this hasn’t changed. Empires concentrate power at the expense of the many. Rome reached a checkmate in the quiet assertion of one of it’s colonial subjects: “everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice”. The imperial governor can only respond, “What is truth?” Then summarily permits the execution of the quiet man offering an alternative way of life.
So we pause to remember a child, indeed all children are symbols of beginning again, newness, of abiding in the impartiality of nature’s give and take.
We reverence the child: symbol of liberation, empire buster!
The morning registered -2 degrees Fahrenheit, and sunrise promises to be magnificent. The retention pond behind Starbucks is frozen over. All that we label “nature” sleeps in this northern hemisphere of the planet as the axis tilts away from our star.
