TAO TE CHING #34

                               

tj worthington

 

 

                                      34

 

 

 

               The great Tao flows everywhere.

 

               All things are born from it,

 

               Yet it doesn't create them.

 

               It pours itself into its work,

 

               yet it makes no claim.

 

               It nourishes infinite worlds,

 

               yet it doesn't hold on to them.

 

               Since it is merged with all things

 

               and hidden in their hearts,

 

               it can be called humble.

 

               Since all things vanish into it

 

               and it alone endures,

 

               it can be called great.

 

               It isn't aware of its greatness,

 

               thus it is truly great.

 

 

                       ---tr by Stephen Mitchell

 

 

tj worthington

 

 

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CHANGES

sophia in the window

 

Every day I see something on Facebook of somebody wanting change. Seldom does anyone name the change they want, only change. When they do state what changes they want, they're at odds with changes somebody else wants. So many different changes perpetually dissatisfied Americans want, put them all together and the result is chaos, what we already have. I saw a good meme of the appearance of several ventriloquist dummies sitting in a theater. The caption said these are liberals waiting to be told what to think. I thought it would be more to the point if they were in a coffee shop. I've stopped going to any coffee shop from refusal to watch my language for superficial reasons. They want changes in other people, never themselves. I hear John Lennon singing, If you want to change the world, change your mind instead, from the Beatles' song, Revolution. In the time it was new, early 70s, every band was required by social trends to have a song about revolution on a new album that year. Lennon was essentially saying to the pretend call for revolution, bullshit. The song was dismissed by many trend-marionettes as the Beatles sold out.

 

 

It brings to mind in the late 60s a year every band was required to have a song on the new album about Jesus or risk the publicity of so-called Christians burning their records on tv so-called news. The Rolling Stones, like the Beatles later, met the trend requirement with a song, I don't want to talk about Jesus, I just want to see his face. These were the only words to the song, in my imperfect memory, repeated over and over. I thought it clever of the Stones to meet the requirement, yet in a way that says it is bullshit. It doesn't matter if Jagger wanted to see the face of Jesus or not. I thought it a masterful way, as with the Beatles in Revolution, to concede to a social trend and call it nonsense in the concession. The period called the Sixties, 1965-1975, was, indeed, a kind of revolution. It revolutionized the possibilities of an electric guitar. Since then, the length of a guy's hair is a matter of choice. Before, all males were required to be barber shop shorn. Optional long hair did away with barber shops like amazon did away with bookstores. I see redneck guys going to beauty shops for hair cuts. I go to the Cutting Corner to get my hair "done" by Crystal's friend, Morgan, who has a new baby, Emma.  

 

 

Through the years before the hair length revolution, I never liked it that there was no way around a barber's shearing, marching as to war. It was objectionable to a born pacifist. I don't know if mother set me in the pacifist way as a baby from fear during WW2 or if it's from past life experience. Going by where I suspect last lifetime might have been, I can see how that person would return at odds with war and its glorification. If mother inspired pacifism, it was not by intent. It was likely through fear the great motivator. If she had a hand in it. It doesn't matter where it came from, it's that deep. If what I thought mattered beyond myself, the change I would want for "the world" would be no more war. What a radical change it would be. The Arts would flourish unimaginably like entertainment flourishes in a martial society. The human as an individual might have value. Being, itself, might have value. A change I'd like to see and believe will see over several hundred years would be regarding all life forms people, the same as us, just living in different forms. Let them be, let them live as who they are. Learn to communicate with them wordlessly, a language course in school, the inter-species language of silence. Best-selling books, Conversations With Birds At The Feeder. 

 

 

It is fantasy to think I could make a difference that mattered toward no more war. In such light, it is absurd to waste thought time on the matter. Another way of looking at it, change your mind instead, I can bring it home and say I want no more war in my world.  No silent, unsettled disagreements that linger, no arguments with vehemence, no settling scores mentally, no more wars in my mind when somebody pisses me off severely. That's a big one. The trick: don't set somebody up to piss me off. Easy. I can't give any sound advice to myself on the matter. A decade ago I fell into a mental rage that lasted a year, until realizing, finally, the other had done me tremendous service, on a platter with a smile service, and it took a year to see it. One of them times I have a sit-down with self and talk about being a little slow catching on. Could it happen again? Yes. But it is worth being aware of, reminding self when needed, war does not cease outside self before it ceases inside self. Keeps me reminded that war ends inside self first or not at all.  

photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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POSSUMS AND PUNK ROCK

trees without leaves

 

I'm putting out food for possums and coons that pass through in the night. A homeless kitchen. They can and do make it very easily without my support. I put out snacks for them. Sofia's catfood left by end of day is dry and stale. A time comes it fails to appeal to her, and I don't blame her. I'm not one who says, she gets hungry enough, she'll eat it. Why would I want to do such a thing to my friend? It's bad enough to serve it to her cold. Possums are the garbage eaters of the world. I never put anything edible in the trash. Outside it goes for anybody passing through looking for a snack. The food kitchen is communal. All in the neighborhood or passing through are welcome. Sometimes a dog gets something. That's ok. Anybody passing through. I even put the water from a can of tuna in a small bowl to give a possum a taste treat. I like having possums around the house. They keep snakes away. I say thank you with a snack. They waddle along taking slow, deliberate footsteps, no schedule, no hurry. They look like small barrels with a long funnel for a face and a hairless tail, walking on four little hands.

 

 

 

They pass by at different times of a night without pattern, checking out the birdseed area in their meanderings. To me, they come and go like butterflies, I know not whence nor whither, come out of nothingness and go back to nothingness outside my field of vision. They have lives and family. They know where they are. They know where they are headed from here, another place they know that's pretty reliable, like a hunter's bait pile. They will follow their noses in their continuing search for the scent of something to eat. I was raised to have a hard attitude toward the creatures that live in the wild, outside domestic control. I came up believing everything in the wild was looking to kill me on sight. Even today, National Geographic tv shows wild animals killing wild animals, like crocodiles killing zebras, lions killing gazelles, killing and getting killed. Of course, if they showed the animals living in peace among one another, ratings would drop to zero. Kinda helps explain why we don't live in peace. Peace is boring tv. Since Rupert Murdoch's hostile takeover, National Geographic channel will more than likely be featuring sex among the animals. Possum sex, panda sex, elephant sex, bug sex, plant sex, amoeba sex, gorilla sex.

The world of adult humans has baffled me beyond any kind of bafflement I've known. In childhood, I believed I needed advanced education and intelligence to live in the adult world. It was one of the great surprises of my life when I grew up and found out knowledge is stupid. Only geeks read books. Art? Art who? Younger, I wanted to take the academic way, but lost confidence in American education too soon to go to graduate school. Actually, too soon to graduate undergrad, but the man I worked for talked me into staying with school by way of sound counsel. Much press these days of why schools are failing; it's the schools, not the kids. I'm inclined to see it both. Along about 1968. I worked in a bookstore. 68 was the year college students stopped reading on their own, but for pop culture assignments like Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Tolkein. Richard Brautigan was the hippie rendition of Rod McKuen in poetry, can't leave out Jim Morrison, all of them wastes of the trees cut down to make paper. After 1968, the books college students bought, before, turned yellow on the shelves. A major wave of anti-intellectualism swept the land. 68 was the year the first children born with a television in the house turned 18.

Can't leave out rock n roll as an anti-intellectual, counter-cultural influence on the generations since the mid-1950s. Looking recently at what is coming in as another is going out, I see in rock n roll a highly creative art expression taking up the slack as other expressions of art are left to fall away by the society at large since television. It seems unlimited what can be done with three chords. Though I appreciate traditions, old-time music of cultures all around the world of humanity, I recall a song by the Rolling Stones, Time waits for no one and it won't wait for me. Traditions tend to lock in place a moment that was better left to its own time. Jesus telling Peter not to build a shrine where an apparent miracle occurred, it's not about a shrine. It is about the moment only. Old-time music, itself, evolved over time. First was the fiddle to play for dances solo. A century later came the banjo. Half a century later came the guitar and later came the bass. Then blues. Then country music. Then rock n roll. Punk rock is old-time evolved to electric in a time when bands write their own songs. Old forms of intellectualism evolve too. Cycles, cycles and cycles.  

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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OUTSIDE THE COMI-TRAGEDY

sophia watches the chipmunks and birds

 

I saw a possum out the window. Saw another one earlier. I put leftover catfood outside at the end of the day, the possums and coons pass through in the night and have a snack of factory made domestic food. The possums are huge. Both had gray-black hair on their backs with ghostly white spots. One has a big white spot that distinguishes it from the other, and it's bigger than the other one.  Both had pure white faces. I don't know that I've ever seen possums this big. Their feet are pink like the palms of our hands. I thought about how vulnerable are the critters of the wild we take for granted. Recalling a scene in Akira Kurosawa's film, Dersu Uzala, the story of a Siberian hunter in northeastern Siberia above China. He meets a Russian surveying team and travels with them as a guide. After a meal, some of the Russians were shooting at a glass bottle swinging from a string. Dersu Uzala stopped them, talked to them about broken glass cuts the feet of the forest people, the animals. He shot the string. Seeing the possum walking, showing the bottoms of his feet as fleshy as my hands and feet, I thought of how careful the possums must be around human habitats. Coons walk on bare hands and feet too.

 

 

the movie above, the book below

 

 

 

I've been turning on the light outside above the door at night to give Sophia something to see out the windows. I had not anticipated seeing the coons and possums living their lives unaware they are being surveilled. I hold the three month old kitten and think of how vulnerable is this small life form of bones thinner than pencils, bare feet, dependent on the world of humans. I think of the forest ranger forty years ago telling me God give us dominion over the animals, which he took for the right to kill them. It shocked me when he said this. My interpretation of dominion is responsibility to care for. I took it the mind he was coming from saw dominion as power-over. The mind he was coming from is the world I live in as an outsider with strange ideas about things. Of course, I would think it an ideal world if the norm were the other way around, more in line with my thoughts on the matter. Seems like it would be a nice world to live in where it is the culture to be respectful of living beings and one another, taught from birth, mother's milk.

 

sofia's morning yoga

 

It is unrealistic thinking to imagine everybody living by what I think is right, a world to my liking. Sounds kinda like Kim Jong-un of North Korea. It seems more practical to allow everyone his/her right to see it by way of whatever makes the best sense. This is how I feel like it is in what we call freedom. On a subject like the meaning of dominion over animals, we have the freedom to decide for ourselves which way suits us, individually, the best. I get images of three faces in my head, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and old man Cruz, Cuban father of Ted. They come to mind as the most ignorant people in front of the cameras in this time of an abundance of ignorance calling attention to itself. They're a Mt Rushmore in my head, Ben Carson to make the fourth, caricatures of ignorance. American politics makes the evening news a comedy to the rest of the world. The American military killing poor people in defenseless countries provides the aspect of tragedy to the news. Classic entertainment.

 

 

 

I cannot have the world the way I want it to be, and would not want it. It appears to happen when a religion is new that the early devotees live in peace among one another for a span of time. Everything changes. To everything there is a season. When I realize that the only world that matters to me directly, experientially, is the world of my everyday life, the people I interact with, my home, the woods, the meadow, a cat and two donkeys, it's not so big a world. I have some control in my house, in my car. I am happy with my world. I have friends I like to spend time with. We exist in peace. I like seeing people I know by chance in the grocery store. In my world I know people person to person, face to face. The same squirrels, chipmunks and birds partake at the seed distribution station every day. They don't run and fly so far away when I go out the door as they did in the first year of feeding them. They used to run and fly all the way home when I stepped out the door. Now the squirrels sit on a fork in a small tree trunk and watch to see what I'm doing. Chickadees fly to branches just out of reach where they can watch. The chipmunks run, but they're not afraid of the giant anymore. This fulfills me. I don't need to want all the world to have what I have. I'm the only one who wants it. And I've got it. My world is what I want the world to be.  No wars, no mind games, no guns, no killing, no fights. I have it. That's enough. Like Mr Rogers, we live in peace and love in my world.  

 

sophia in motion

 

 

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