TAO TE CHING 53

  

                     53

The great Way is easy,

yet people prefer the side paths.

Be aware when things are out of balance.

Stay centered within the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper

while farmers lose their land;

when government officials spend money

on weapons instead of cures;

when the upper class is extravagant and 

irresponsible,

while the poor have nowhere to turn ---

all this is robbery and chaos.

It is not in keeping with the Tao. 

                       tr by Stephen Mitchell

*

TAPPING THE FLOW

        alexandre istrati, composition en vert

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things...
it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real
by imitating its exterior surface.
                                            ---Constantin Brancusi



One of an endless list of reasons I love the mountains is that they are "nature" that cannot be overlooked. It's true that back in the time of Jesus it was possible to move a mountain by prayer. Now in West Virginia and E Kentucky they move mountains one dumptruck load at a time. No prayer about it. It's like emptying a sandbox with a teaspoon, but it gets the job done. Living in the mountains I see long streams of cloud roll down the side of Bullhead from a lake of low-flying cloud backed up at the long ridge from Bullhead to Green Mountain to Laurel Springs. The cloud seeps through the gaps in long streams like smoke sometimes, other times like a big conscious white blob that crawls over the ridge between Bullhead and Green Mountain, the site of the firetower before satellites. The cloud crawls into the valley below, Glade Valley, over to Pine Swamp and Gap Civil, until it fills the whole basin with white cloud seen from above at Air Bellows. It's colorful at sunrise.



The way of the Tao is the way of what we call nature, from galaxies that float in infinite space like smoke spirals, moving like smoke, like water, to the rocks I walk on from the house to the car, to the birds at the feeder, Caterpillar the cat who only watches the birds at age 14, the changes that come over us at certain ages, like spilling food and drink on the front of one's shirt starting around 60. I think of it as natural and go about with spotted shirts in front like it's not any kind of issue. I think of that as an expression of being with the flow of the Tao. Accepting those kinds of changes is going with the flow. Resistance to such changes by wishing it wasn't that way or hating getting old go against the flow. We have the Tao te Ching and a library full of scriptures as visible and comprehensible accounts of the nature of the flow of life we are part of.



Down through civilization we've had monasteries for people who wanted to get out of the chaos of mind and into the flow. Our civilization has been pushing the envelope through the 20th Century to see how far collective humanity can go ignoring the flow. One thing we've done is come to the time we're in now, when it's time to pay up, and foreclosure is the consequences. We've lost craftsmanship in making things. Everything has gone over to machines and hierarchical corporate/military structures. When the skyscraper made of cards falls, our basic self-preservation skills will be forgotten. We will have to relearn how to take care of a farm. Books in libraries and used book stores on gardening, composting, keeping orchards, growing grapes. Global warming is making the mountains good for growing grapes for wine. It's also making the mountains unfit for fraser firs, the Christmas tree that has been so successful here making a lot of money for a few and giving cancer to the many. This part of the mountains is as far south as they grow.



Like Amos Wagoner at Farmer's Hardware is reported to have told a customer who was griping about this town and these people, ignorance, the cliches, "Nobody asked you to come here and nobody is going to miss you when you leave." This is the entire county's attitude toward Christmas trees. Nobody will miss them when they're gone. County government will miss the tax from them. Then they can tax grapes. Perhaps the future of the mountains is to look like the Tuscan region of Italy with few trees, rolling hills and grapes growing everywhere. Growing grapes makes more sense when it comes to concern for the topsoil. A tree, you cut it down, you have a stump and topsoil ruined by years of pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizers. Grapes, you pick them and they come back next year on the same vine. Making sense isn't the issue, however; it's making money. The way of money is contrary to the way of the Tao, the spirit, the way of nature. I don't think it's because it is money, because money has a flow too. It's the love of money. That's where everything starts going haywire.



Bernie Made-off lived the high life for quite a few years. Now wife hates him, son killed himself, name made into a bad word, and a cell in a prison for a home. In the way of what we might call the spirit, the poor can hold their heads up. It's free for everyone. I think of all the people in my country alone, let alone the rest of the world, who have a natural, God-given talent and slim possibilities for expression, especially born in the working class. For myself, to honor the way of the Tao, I must give expression to my natural-born talent for visual art or be frustrated. I've not done a great deal and I've certainly not distinguished myself artistically. That's not been my purpose. I don't believe in competition. It's been a good thing in this time of inventive creativity, as wars, too, advance discoveries in science and other fields. I've come to see that living the Tao, or the way of the spirit, has more to do with attitude toward life than proximity of trees.



*       

SPECTRUM

ghosts of spring

The light outside is gathering in the trees along the ridge out my window to do again what it did yesterday at this time. I look at the picture posted yesterday and the same trees today and they're just trees in pink buds. None of that display of intense colors. That's what the light did to the buds, brought out their inner being or something. Now that the light is approaching the same place, a golden glow is gathering as a kind of haze in the trees. The sunlight is coming in at a slant through a long stretch of atmosphere, which now has a kind of rust orange tint, like colored spotlights on a stage. Yellow-orange light projected onto a wall of pink pixels. The color is different tonight. The air was clear last night after the rain, or even during the rain, because it was sprinkling when I got the picture. It was nice tonight, but spectacular yesterday. It had one end of a rainbow too.

One reason I would like to have gone to a big university was to be able to take a course on something about light. It would be in the art department. I have a book on light, but don't read it on my own. Some of what I've noticed without schooling is mixing all the colors together in pigments, paint, makes black. Mixing all the colors together in light makes what we call white light, clear as daylight. Pigment is substance of this earth. Light is from the sky above, the heavens, the sun. Purists say black is not a color. My question is, what is it that's emerging from the tube of paint labeled black? It's not cosmic azure. It's black. Rouault seemed to think it was a color. Impressionists were big on not using black, except for Manet and then Rouault. Who says we can't use black? Look at this. For me, the bottom line is, if there is white, there is black. This is duality and that's just how it is.

We live our lives in the tension of opposites, much like colors in the rainbow are varying degrees of the tension of opposites of white and black, light and dark. And the Taoist way of looking at it, without the light there is no dark and without the dark there is no light. They create each other, are bound together in the yin-yang symbol of two circles going round each other, one black, one white. Stirring a can of paint with a stick, I notice every time it makes the yin-yang in the paint going round and round with the stick. It made me wonder if stirring in a pot might be the origin of the symbol in motion.

It stays with me that the nature of light and the nature of pigment are, in that taoist sense, opposite each other. My mind inevitably shifts to what it is that makes the Tao Te Ching so difficult for beginners, that it appears to hold up the opposite of everything as we know it. It tells the way of the spirit. What we learn getting along in this world is the way of the body, the earth aspect of our dual nature of earth and the heavens. The way of heaven, you might say, is different from the way of earth. That's why we have scriptures to point out the ways of the spirit. They're invisible to us. I've found people divide up very neatly as giver or taker. Every one of us has one or the other dominant. It's revealing about oneself to look and see which is dominant in you. I tend to see it's about half and half. It's not to say one is good and the other bad. It's just one of those checklist characteristics. Are you this, or are you that? What about neither and both? Them too. Masculine or feminine. One thing I find very interesting in this time we're in is the distinctions are blurring. Most obviously in the masculine / feminine issue. I tend to see it as perception. It's the perception of what is masculine and what is feminine that is changing. Perception is reality.

I believe that culturally we take dogs and cats to be opposites, when it looks more like we perceive dog nature masculine and cat nature feminine. Invariably it is said, Is that your new dog? What's his name? Or somebody sees your cat and says, What's her name? That's almost 100%. I don't see cat intelligence and dog intelligence very far apart. They're just different from each other. They're only opposites in human perception. The cats and dogs don't know that. Cats hunt alone and dogs do best in packs. Get a couple of dogs together and you better watch them. Get 3 dogs together and watchout. 3 or more dogs rambling together eventually get killed.

I opened the book, the Tao Te Ching, with the confidence the first verse my eyes noted would be the one I'm looking for to illustrate for you what I believe I'm getting at. And it was. I'll put on here what my eyes fell upon. When it says "The Tao," think the way of the spirit/heaven/sky/light.

#37

The Tao never does anything,

yet through it all things are done.

If powerful men and women

could center themselves in it,

the whole world would be transformed

by itself, in its natural rhythms.

People would be content

with their simple, everyday lives,

in harmony, and free of desire.

When there is no desire,

all things are at peace.

That's the Stephen Mitchell translation. Thank you, Stephen. The Tao (the way of the spirit) never does anything, but through it all things are done. When there is no desire, all things are at peace.

There's nothing I can say after this. Again, my Mr Rogers World where everyone is important.

TAO OF JR

air bellows tree

The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows that he is going to die,

and he has nothing left to hang on to:

no illusions in his mind,

no resistances in his body.

He doesn't think about his actions;

they flow from the core of his being.

He holds nothing back from life;

therefore he is ready for death,

as a man is ready for sleep

after a good day's work.

-Tao te ching #50

Flipping through a beautiful copy of the Tao te ching, one illustrated with Chinese paintings and translated by Stephen Mitchell, opening the book randomly to see which verse I happen upon, I saw, 'The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings.' Immediately Jr came to mind. This is what it was about Jr that helped him master everything he put his mind to. He was wholly present with whatever the moment brought.

No illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body, was Jr again. He knows he's going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to. I stared at the white paper with these words printed on it, held by surprise to find Jr described in the Tao. Not when I think about it, but surprised because I didn't have time to think about it. There it was. He didn't think about his actions; they flowed from the core of his being. Precisely. Jr didn't perform premeditated action except at work. Making decisions, he followed his feelings foremost.

He held nothing back from life, therefore he was ready for death. He went face forward into every moment as it came along. His bearing was calm as pond water while he cut up and pulled pranks, told and laughed at jokes, bought and sold tractors and parts, operated a "bull-noser" with artful skill and picked bluegrass banjo. He understood water too. I've found not many people understand water, but Jr understood it very well. In a sense, he lived his life like water, like in the first line above, gave himself up to whatever the moment brought. It was how he made his music and how he lived his life.

Jr never asked that anything or anyone be anything other than what and who they are. At age 24-25 he was working with a construction company in Decatur, Georgia, working a gang of twenty-some black men. He liked them all and they liked him. When one of them killed another, Jr testified in court on his behalf that it was self-defense. He said that after working with those men, getting to know them as men, he came to respect them and appreciate them. He never was one to down black people after that experience. I don't expect he was before, either. The Browns of Browns restaurant Jr held up as high as anyone he knew in the department of respect and appreciation. Jr measured a man by his character, not superficial matters such as pigmentation, financial worth, how important he was. A man was just a man in Jr's way of seeing.

As a man is ready for sleep after a good day's work. Yes, Jr did put in a good day's work. He worked until he was 80, sawmilled into his late 70s, sawmilled the old-time dangerous way. He loved sawmilling. Jimmy Gibson told me he saw Jr almost fall onto the turning wheel, but caught himself in time. Jr told me of different sawmillers he's known who have fallen on the blade, got an arm or hand cut off, killed in one way or another. He told me about JC Kemp, a banjo picker from Buffalo township in Ashe County, who almost cut his arm off. They put his arm back together and he can continue to pick, just not as good as he could before.

That was Jr's issue too, not as good as he could before. The day he slapped the side of the spinning blade to get a measure of its temperature, it peeled the palm of his left hand off in a nanosecond. Skin-graft on the side of his left leg. Noting the banjo was excellent physical therapy to bring his fingers back. But he never was as good as he was before. This doesn't mean he wasn't any good. He could pick the fire out of the banjo. Don Reno was his favorite banjo picker, but he played more like Earl Scruggs. Bluegrass musicians will tell you audiences prefer the Scruggs style picking to the Reno style. Yet the musicians tend to prefer Reno.

I never would have imagined I'd find a description of the Master in the Tao te ching that could be titled, Wiley P. Maxwell, Jr. (1922-2009). I understand that it could easily be that a verse of the Tao could describe Jr. It's just that I'd never allowed myself the presumption to suppose it might be. This description of the Master tells why I came to regard Jr a Master I was guided to in a Grasshopper kind of way to learn something from this man about the Way.

I learned plenty and served him as I would an official Master. I only told a few people I know that I suspected this to be the case in my time of knowing Jr. This verse of the Tao confirms for me what I've been believing about him. I had the impression that other people saw me staying with Jr a detour from my own path. I saw my time there my path. It was nice to see that I was on my path. I'm so grateful for the entire experience of knowing Jr, I feel a need to honor him for who he was. He continues to be present tense in my mind. I won't argue with it. I'd just as soon it be that way anyway.