Vs. 20 How much difference between yes and no? What difference between good and bad? What the people fear must be feared. O desolation! Not yet, not yet has it reached its limit! Everybody’s cheerful, cheerful as if at a party, or climbing a tower in springtime. And here I sit unmoved. clueless, like…
Today is Friday. A twenty-four hour quantum of life, that consciousness apprehends in order to value, to honor and appreciate the varied relationships, the web that sustains and secures me, body/mind. Starbucks is alive; there’s a hubbub of voices, and a ceiling speaker mounted almost directly above me transmits in crystalline timbre, the lyric…
Midweek. I add another project to the “to do” list contained in one of those tablets I learned to keep years ago when I carried day to day responsibility for a company. Write it down. Memory oscillates, – how much is lost to distraction? Keep a list. Or forget. The entire point is to…
Monday, in midsummer! The day manifests as magnificent, an idyllic copy of a memory from childhood. I recall a summer’s day, maybe I was five or six and not yet allowed to leave the yard. On that day the dew moistened grass felt so delicious to my bare feet. I remember delight on the…
Sunday, and summertime is unusually busy. Who doesn’t desire to fill warm days with as much outdoor activity as possible… As it happened my morning session at Starbucks was occupied with conversation with friends. It was time well spent, even without the writing. No one is alone in the madcap adventure of life, unless…
v. 69 The expert in warfare says: Rather than dare make the attack I’d take the attack; rather than dare advance an inch I’d retreat a foot. It’s called marching without marching, rolling up your sleeves without flexing your muscles, being armed without weapons, giving the attacker no opponent. Nothing’s worse than attacking what…
It is Monday morning. The storms of the holiday weekend are a memory (unless you suffered rising water, or splintered trees). Still the first day of a work week is a beginning, and beginnings are worth attending to. One of the prose poems of the Tao Te Ching suggest as much. Here it is….
Friday is supposed to be an unlucky day. Was not Judas the thirteenth guest at the finale dinner party? Thursday evening was the time for that gala. The next day, was anything but “good”. Never be beguiled by convention, a tagline foisted upon unsuspecting by a faceless, and self-interested priest-craft. Because it’s old does…
Thursday at Starbucks, seven baristas, each is performing his/her task. To my eye, the vibe received, a choreograph of patterns purrs. Parked vehicles move in turn to the open drive-up window. A beverage with breakfast item ordered just a few minutes before is handed through the window to the customer. This is an effortless…
The Great Way runs to left, to right, the ten thousand things depending on it, living on it, accepted by it. Doing its work, it goes unnamed. Clothing and feeding the ten thousand things, it lays no claim on them and asks nothing of them. Call it a small matter. The ten thousand things…
