7:12PM Night. Had the weird experience of seeing Oscar winners announced at 4:30PM.
Tripped and fell in the ocean. Got wet. Of course. Mumbled. Then, ah, what would one expect when in the ocean.
Have a burgeoning collection of coral, have found few shells here.
This morning on the way to Hanalei I had just passed the taro field after crossing the one-lane bridge and there in a field was a painted pony with an egret sitting happily on his back. A few miles further on I noticed a field with horses had several egrets. Is there something about their relationship?
It looked like a fable.
The tao continues to make inroads into my thought process. It’s almost Platonic, in that this feels like stuff I have always known. My intuitive processes have led me here, in spite of my rational faculties which spent so many years concentrated on Christianity because I wanted to read religion in my own cultural idiom. It didn’t occur to me that my own personal faith language may speak in a different tongue than the Judaeo-Christian.
Here are a few things. All things are one. This means, in simplest terms, that things that may seem separate, light and dark, good and bad, men and women actually compose a whole when we realize each is necessary for the other to exist. Without light, no dark. Without women, no men. Without bad, no good. Those of us married to the Western logical paradigm which has the law of excluded middle, something is either this OR that, this concept may seem troubling, even scandalous. As Alan Watts points out in Watercourse Way, our dichotomized thinking has lead to idealism which imagines that good must made bigger and bigger until there is no bad left in the world.
As one whose path has followed that line of thought, it becomes clearer and clearer to me why Christianity surprised me with its intellectually sophisticated approach to reality. Christianity linked up so well with my leftist politics because leftist politics are based on the linear view of time, a time that runs out and therefore seems to demand an ending; an ending which may be good or bad. Yikes! Better work for the good one.
All over Kauai there are churches with signs: Jesus Is Coming Soon. If that’s your paradigm, that the big guy is on his way back and watch out, then you have to work on yourself and on your society to make sure that good triumphs over evil. This is not true only of conservative Christians; it is true of liberals, too. This thinking made me sick.
How? I began to see the world in black and white terms, with them over there and us over here. Taoist thought helps me reintegrate myself, to find some of them here and some of us over there, until, gee, we all look like part of the same world.
My first intuition of this came in high school when I wrote a bad poem, The Test. In it I questioned the nature of a god who only gives a person 7o years plus or minus to determine how eternity will be spent. The math didn’t work for me. Not long after that I knew that if I could describe one flower I can describe the whole universe. Today I discovered that Lao-Tze said, “If I sit in the house, I have the whole universe available to me.” Hints of this way of seeing the world. But I couldn’t put it together.
So, I backed into it all by leaving Christianity, then becoming more and more Celtic. When I found Unitarian-Universalism, I found Emerson. His essay Nature demands that we find our own relationship with the gods today, rather than rely on the experience our ancestors. Emerson and the Celtic embrace of cyclical time lead me further and further away from a progressive view of history, until it began to recede as the dominant view in my thinking.
When I began to start art history, Chinese and Japanese art captivated me. In studying them, I began to search in the various schools of thought that inspired the aesthetics of these two cultures. The art that grabbed me had Taoist influences. Song dynasty landscapes. Chan Buddhism teaware. Zen Buddhist prints. Chan Buddhism comes from Buddhism’s collision with Taoism in China.
As I do, I began to plow backwards, into Confucius and then more seriously into Taoism. What had long attracted me finally began to occupy more and more of my thinking and, even more important, my heart. Now I’m diving deep and it just may be I won’t come up at all this time. At least not as the me I’ve come to know.
Oh, well, if you read this far, it’s your own fault. I’m on a tear here, I know.
