Hold On Loosely

Hold on loosely

Don’t let go

If you cling too tightly

You’re gonna lose control -38 Special

I love this song. If you’re ever wondering about the philosophy of Taoism, just recall these lyrics – might as well be the Taoist Rock Anthem. Sure, the song is about relationships – romantic ones – but Taoism is about relationships, too – our relationships to nature, to each other, to ourselves, and to the way things are. Instead of constructing our identities as individual billiard balls knocking against others, Taoism rightly, I believe, offers a more nature-oriented, realistic picture of a person as consisting of a meshed web of relationships, a paradigm that meets up nicely with similar anti-Cartesian (dualistic, mechanistic, oppositional) ideas developed out of quantum mechanics theory and remembered from Native American worldviews.

Yes, that was a mouthful. Which is why I happen to be so appreciative of this song – it so simply touts an idea that an academic-prone philosopher-wanna be like myself can so easily and eagerly turn into a complicated spaghetti-tangled mess, getting high off eating up the pasta-carbs of Deep Thoughts. Which is kind of antithetical to Taoism’s simple style.

For instance, my girlfriend asked me the other day how Taoism differs from Buddhism, and these lyrics have a possible answer. I wouldn’t say Taoism and Buddhism are starkly different or at all opposing, more that they strive for the same things and work within the same universe but with a slightly differing emphasis. So, while Buddhism – and I’m being overly reductive here, I know – emphasizes letting go of desire, for instance, Taoism is more about holding on, but loosely.

Life is a Highway…
If you are a rider on a horse, Buddhism would suggest that you let go of the reins and get off the horse and go meditate, give up trying to get anywhere, the effort of expending your energy toward a goal is pointless, you can’t reach enlightenment by riding your horse.

Taoism, on the other hand, would say that you should keep riding the horse and holding on the reins, but you should try to ride with the horse, not on the horse, directing and guiding, not forcefully, but in a flow that matches the pace and rhythm of the horse’s gait as well as your own heartbeat, within the context of the landscape around you. Taoism would say, sure, ride the horse, but do so knowing that it is what it is, don’t make it more than it is. The Buddhists are right, you’re not going to escape death or reach eternity, but hey, you’re alive, might as well have a good time riding the horse… (And yes, so many ancient Chinese poets were also winos…)

And that’s what I like about Taoism vs. other religions. It embraces the philosophical stance of realizing that we as individuals are not at the center of the universe and that clinging to materialistic desires is futile; at the same time – and that’s the key, at the same time - both/and - Taoism encourages the acceptance of reality as it is, with all its transience, pain, and joy.

For many Christians and Buddhists, this life on Earth is something to grit your teeth through till you get on the elevator of salvation or zapped in the microwave of enlightenment. Taoists aren’t looking to the next life or the erasing of life; they look to this life with the ease of someone who has accepted that she belongs here, that this is home.

Do You Realize?
All is sacred; all is mundane. We are made of starlight; we are made of mud. When we can hold both views of reality – seemingly opposing views – in our heads at the same time, when we can take the importance of things lightly, while at the same time understanding everything as valued and significant, then we can fully be alive, with all of our senses, with all of our hearts. This is Taoist enlightenment.

Keep on Moving
When you try to hold onto something, squeeze it to fix it in place, keep it from changing – an idea, a relationship, a person, a situation, a feeling – you kill it. Which is why the Taoist meditation is Tai Chi or Qi Gong – a moving through the world, not sitting it out. It is also why the yin-yang symbol intends to show fluidity of opposites merging into one another. They are not static categories, mutually exclusive pieces, but part of each other, in constant motion.

Finally

a) If you can correctly identify the song titles in my headings, you win a free yin-yang symbol drawn on your arm with a Sharpie.

b) Later I will actually quote the Tao te Ching, discuss the Vinegar Tasters, and rant about Niels Bohr. So watch out.

c) I’m truly not trying to bash the Buddhists.

Let Go, Let Taoism

I heard a person say the other day a phrase familiar to me from my Christian past: “Let go and Let God.”

Immediately I thought about the Taoist concept of wu-wei, not-doing, which means that you don’t work against the flow, but move with it. You let go of trying to force things – you let the universe do its thing.

It’s not often I feel like Christianity and Taoism share concepts, but when it comes to Christ admonishing his followers not to worry, because God dresses the flowers in the field and feeds the sparrow,  I think Lao-Tze would nod his head. “God” or “Tao,” here, refers to this mysterious and yet totally natural and mundane aliveness – Dylan Thomas’ green life force – that doesn’t die when one of us dies, that doesn’t stop. We can worry or not worry, but the storm will come, the sun will shine, the ozone layer will diminish, babies will be born, people will die. We can have a temper tantrum about it, or we can accept it, and enjoy it while we’re here. We have that choice. When you see yourself as living within the whole, whether you picture that whole as being the hand of a benevolent deity or not, you see yourself, I believe, in the right perspective. Worry becomes irrelevant. Your relationship to the whole matters more than whether you get your way about a small particular or not.

Which reminds me of this paradoxical quote:

What you do is of little significance, but it is very important that you do it.
-M.K. Gandhi

And I will bow to the flow and let this post go right here.

leaves, leaving

The leaves fall, fall as if from far away…
And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.
And we all fall. This hand must fall.
Look everywhere: it is the lot of all.
– from Rilke’s “Autumn”

This is what the leaves teach us:

To preserve is not to live.

(someone says under her breath: take a look at a mummy, dummy)

You can’t save them. They fall and fall, ignited colors, red, fuschias, oranges, golds – leaves striped and swirled and pockmarked with the handwriting of disease – my throat constricts with desire to hold them, to consume them into my body, to shallack them, to keep them, make them stay exactly as they are, so over-the-top gorgeous -

but, as a pocket in my pocketbook attests, leaves drain of their color and crumple into papery flakes. The glory cannot be saved.

The art preservationists pipe in at this point, to protest their worth, the aching hours of time they spend restoring and maintaining Great Works of Art, the air so hungry to eat away at the painted genius on the chapel ceilings…

And the monks sifting colored sand into wispy mandalas -

I am enough of a child of the Western World to want to explain why Art exists, why we want it to persist.

Word association takes me to preserves – to canning. My mother’s shelves.

And I think: certainly, nothing we attempt to Keep Forever will. However, like peaches or tomatoes, blanched and prepared to last way past their natural edible prime, we have developed the skills to keep some things for later, for when we need them. Food, of course; art as well – beauty, that is. And experience of.

Not all things. And not forever.

A picture of fallen leaves is a way to preserve their shape and color till and through and past the winter.

Still, the picture itself will fade and follow the disintegration. We all go the way of the leaves.

leaves

But that is life. That is living. Living is change, change includes dissolution, dying. We know this. The opposite of life is not death but stilled life (- a Still Life – art not life? -) preservation – Snow White in the glass case; a frozen cryogenic head; the waxed bagel. Clinging to the version of the thing we love in one form, not accepting it will become another.

Not accepting that the monk, the wind, will take a breath.

And we will feel it. Cool and sure.

And we will fall away.

Cheating at Azalea Park

We went to a different park today, and I missed having my camera with me. Brown sunflowers sullenly hanging their heads in a frozen posture of depletion; a cracked white bucket sprouting the wreckage of a garden hose.

S & M tree

It’s autumn, glorious and full of loss; always feels like the first time; always feels another layer is being pulled off, and I’m even more tender than I was the year before. The winter will come, bluntly.

Thinking about grief and sadness, I realized that there are people I have lost that I don’t mourn any longer. But if someone asked me, “How did you manage to get over your grief?” I wouldn’t have a self-help mantra or a five-step easy soul diet to share; the only agent at work on the various broken places in my heart has been good old Time.

Seriously: Time heals all wounds is one of those true cliches that describes – well, what happens.

You don’t have to DO anything about your grief; you don’t have to fix it, change it, nix it. Let your grief be what it is, and eventually, it will seep. Time will suck it out, like poison from a snakebite. Sure, you can resist this very natural process – feed off the poison, so to speak. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything.

I was reminded, as we picked our way through the shambly community gardens, that I appreciate Taoism because this kind of Let it Be attitude negates the ego’s pride in human efforts without any snarky finger-wagging.

The trees will let their leaves go.

This loss is not a trauma.

Pain is not an aberration.

And so, it is easier now to think of my father, ten years’ dead this year. I will always, always miss him. Something will always feel Not Quite Right because of his absence. I still have moments of thinking that I’ve forgotten to call someone, and I wrack my brain trying to think who I’ve forgotten, only to realize it’s him.

But it has been ten years. The pain has lessened. It went of its own volition. In some ways, I did want to cling to it, because I didn’t want to let go of him, and the sadness of his loss was almost comforting, it was a way to think about him, to make him keep existing.

But he does not exist. Even his effects, his papers, notebooks, crosses, ink pens, books, the box of ashes – the physical evidence – they are scattered, and drying up. There is no cohesion. Because there is no him.

Hiking a year ago

There’s more open sky at this park; a creek; a dog park. We take it all in.

This current sadness, I wish I could take a picture of it.

But really, there’s nothing I can do about it.