Vs. 52

The beginning of everything
is the mother of everything
Truly to know the mother
is to know her children,
and truly to know her children
is to turn back to the mother.
The body comes to its ending
but there is nothing to fear.

Close the openings
shut the doors,
and to the end of life,
nothing will trouble you.
Open the openings,
be busy with business,
and to the end of life
nothing can help you.

Insight sees the insignificant.
Strength knows how to yield.
Use the way’s light, return to its insight,
and so keep from going too far.
That’s how to practice what’s forever.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Ursula K. Le Guin

The translator, Le Guin subtitled this chapter Back to the Beginning. The phrase is no less than an oblique reference to a beginning that is everywhere, and continuous. Could I dare say, – the “Never Ending Story”?

These lines are a challenge orienting us, to calibrate the mind/heart, cultivating a sensitivity to natality, both an ending and a beginning, which attends to all things. The sun rises in due time to follow the darkness of the night. Experience, my life and your life is a shuttle, loom-like, every moment becoming a new opportunity, another chance to apply what we learned of late… Trial and Error!

Our mistakes are our best teachers, since on a good day, I am never more than partially right. So, I welcome another chance, to begin again! To risk another tweak of my work!

Or as the Old Master (Lao Tsu) wrote paying attention to detail, those insignificant dimensions, one yields to a whisper to do things differently! Strength is yielding. This amounts to a return, a recursive kind of openness…

To echo the Old Master, there’s a sweet-spot, the tale of porridge ‘not too hot, and not too cold’ – the practice of eternity; a resonance with the ever present mother…

Courage friends! We shall press on! Together we are to build the livable future that we envision. The practice “of what’s forever” is our never to be finished art!