This morning I was delighted to locate on my shelf a text book from my college days.  I was introduced to the words of the Tao te Ching from A Source Book In Chinese Philosophy by  Wing-Tsit Chan.  I’ve not opened the book in many years.  Finding it was like receiving a phone call from a long lost child.  I annotated the margins of the translation of the Tao te Ching with the ideas that seemed worth remembering as I read many years ago.  I reviewed the old notes, and am gratified that I recognize that version of myself when I was not yet 30.

I would like to think that the words of the old master contributed to the man that I became.  And, the journey continues.

Here are a few lines from verse 4 of the translation by Wing-Tsit Chan.

Tao is empty (like a bowl),
It may be used but its capacity is never exhausted.
It is bottomless, perhaps the ancestor of all things.
It blunts its sharpness,
It unties its tangles.
It softens its light.
It becomes one with the dusty world.
Deep and still, it appears to exist forever.
I do not know whose son it is.
It seems to have existed before the Lord.

And then a final few verses from Wendell Berry. I believe these words echo the spirit of Lao Tsu.

VII

There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.

This is the last poem in A Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry