7:12PM\u00a0 Night.\u00a0 Had the weird experience of seeing Oscar winners announced at 4:30PM.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tripped and fell in the ocean.\u00a0 Got wet. Of course.\u00a0 Mumbled.\u00a0 Then, ah, what would one expect when in the ocean.<\/p>\n
Have a burgeoning collection of coral, have found few shells here.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 A few miles further on I noticed a field with horses had several egrets.\u00a0 Is there something about their relationship?\u00a0<\/p>\n
It looked like a fable.<\/p>\n
The tao continues to make inroads into my thought process.\u00a0 It’s almost Platonic, in that this feels like stuff I have always known.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It didn’t occur to me that my own personal faith language may speak in a different tongue than the Judaeo-Christian.<\/p>\n
Here are a few things.\u00a0 All things are one.\u00a0\u00a0This means, in simplest terms, that things that may seem separate, light and dark, good and bad, men and\u00a0women actually compose a whole when\u00a0we realize each is necessary for the other to exist.\u00a0 Without light, no dark.\u00a0 Without women, no men.\u00a0\u00a0Without bad, no good.\u00a0 Those of us married to the Western logical paradigm which has the law of excluded middle, something is either this OR that, this concept\u00a0may seem troubling, even scandalous.\u00a0\u00a0 As\u00a0Alan 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Yikes!\u00a0 Better work for the good one.\u00a0<\/p>\n
All over Kauai there are churches with signs: Jesus Is Coming Soon.\u00a0 If that’s your paradigm, that the big guy is on his way back and watch out, then you\u00a0have to work on yourself and on your society to make sure that good triumphs over evil.\u00a0 This is not true only of conservative Christians; it is true of liberals, too.\u00a0 This thinking made me sick.<\/p>\n
How?\u00a0 I began to see the world in black and white terms, with them over there and us over here.\u00a0\u00a0Taoist 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.<\/p>\n
My first intuition of this came in high school when I wrote a bad poem, The Test.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The math didn’t work for me.\u00a0 Not long after that I knew that if I could describe one flower I can describe the whole universe.\u00a0 Today I discovered that Lao-Tze said, “If I sit in the house, I have the whole universe available to me.”\u00a0 Hints of this way of seeing the world.\u00a0 But I couldn’t put it together.<\/p>\n
So, I backed into it all by leaving Christianity, then\u00a0becoming more and more Celtic.\u00a0 When I found Unitarian-Universalism,\u00a0I found Emerson.\u00a0 His essay Nature demands that we find our own\u00a0relationship with the gods today,\u00a0rather than rely on the\u00a0experience our ancestors.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
When I began to start art history, Chinese and Japanese art captivated me.\u00a0 In studying them, I began to search in the various schools of thought that inspired the aesthetics of these two cultures.\u00a0 The art that grabbed me had Taoist influences.\u00a0 Song dynasty landscapes.\u00a0 Chan Buddhism teaware.\u00a0 Zen Buddhist prints. Chan Buddhism comes from Buddhism’s collision with Taoism in China.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As I do, I began to plow backwards, into Confucius and then more seriously into Taoism.\u00a0 What had long attracted me finally began to occupy more and more of my thinking and, even more important, my heart.\u00a0 Now I’m diving deep and it just may be I won’t come up at all this time.\u00a0 At least not as the me I’ve come to know.<\/p>\n
Oh, well, if you read this far, it’s your own fault. I’m on a tear here, I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
7:12PM\u00a0 Night.\u00a0 Had the weird experience of seeing Oscar winners announced at 4:30PM.\u00a0 Tripped and fell in the ocean.\u00a0 Got wet. Of course.\u00a0 Mumbled.\u00a0 Then, ah, what would one expect when in the ocean. Have a burgeoning collection of coral, have found few shells here.\u00a0\u00a0 This morning on the way to Hanalei I had just … Continue reading So, This Guy Trips and Falls in the Ocean<\/span>