Another Tao

After Reading T'ao Ch'ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass

Dry spring, no rain for five weeks.
Already the lush green begins to bow its head and sink to its
knees.

Already the plucked stalks and thyroid weeds like insects
Fly up and trouble my line of sight.

I stand inside the word here
As that word stands in its sentence,
Unshadowy, half at ease.

Religion's been in a ruin for over a thousand years.
Why shouldn't the sky be tatters,
lost notes to forgotten songs?

I inhabit who I am, as T'ao Ch'ing says, and walk about
Under the mindless clouds.
When it ends, it ends. What else?

One morning I'll leave home and never find my way back—
My story and I will disappear together, just like this.

-Charles Wright


I like to get up early and sit and write. I'm not very talky in the morning. I like to let the day show me what it is before I get lost to the day to day bustle of stayin' alive, stayin' alive (inner city bakin' and everybody shakin').

If you look at the above poem, there are several things going on. (Forgive me if I come across as insulting, but I want to bring you in on some of the secrets that turn in the inner mindspring that is me.) The T'ao Ch'ing is a very old piece of writing that lays out some of the basics of Chinese Philosophy. If you haven't read it I will lend you one of my several copies. "The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao." Very simple yet often opposing ideas rest next to each other in the same sentences. Paradox is very important. There is the surface and then there is the whole. Another way to say it is: "The god that can be understood is not God." The only way to truly know something is to give up trying to know it and accept that the mystery is safely beyond human comprehension.

Notice in the title the capitalization of the word "Untethered". The Tao will do this to you. You have to get comfortable with the lack of permanence to be unconnected and really notice what the world is without our subjective identification to meaning. This opens you up to what can come next. It allows you to really see what you are stepping on.

Notice the relative simplicity of the ideas. There are a few tough ideas...what are "thyroid weed"?..but generally all very clear and simple words. There is trouble here, but the idea of impermanence allows the author (and hopefully you and I) to come to what is generally thought of as a terrifying idea - death - with a kind of nobility. There is no mention of safety. There is no safety. He knows as did the writers of the Tao that we are here now and at no other time, and when we cast our thought out to beyond here, the ultimate reality is that all things will become what we cannot know. I love the way he brings this home with the last line.

This is an ideal for me. I am more than any other descriptor, a Taoist. There is no religion, no formula, no dogma. There just is what it is, though it is not what it may appear. There is in me the strong identification with what the world constantly tells us to think.

I want you to always feel comfortable with the idea that I want you really to be what you already are. I don't want you to think that I want to change you into something else, even if those kinds of words will sometimes tumble out of my mouth. I want in my life to be more at home with my dis-ease. I have a chronic condition which is terminal (life), and I want to enjoy the sensations that I have while I have them. This is why, when you want me to declare something, I always pause. It is in that pause, that expectation, that between what-has-been-asked and what-is-then-said that the universe reveals itself for what it is to me.