In its essence,
the Way is without words.
All this talking and pointing
and carrying on, only signposts.
Gather too many of them
and they’ll weigh you
down. Just be
silent.
You
can now buy
Wei wu Wei Ching as part of a
five-app bundle of Taoist classics
for iPhone or iPad for less than
the cost of one hardcover
book.
A rat race
is for rats. We’re not rats.
We’re human beings. Reject the insidious
pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties
to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence
in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of
self promotion and self advancement. This is how it
starts and, before you know where you are,
you’re a fully paid up member
of the rat pack. The price
is too high.
We
have lost the
power even of imagining what
the ancient idealization of poverty could
have meant: the liberation from material attachments,
the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way
by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to
fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—
the more athletic trim, in short,
the moral fighting
shape.
Life is short,
though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place
beautiful.
