If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountains, desert, and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot
Posts Tagged → time
if there’s any possibility
If there’s any
possibility for enlightenment,
it’s right now, not at some
future time.
your time is running
Please
let me remind you,
who study the inconceivable:
Your time is running fast.
Don’t ignore
it.
try to praise the mutilated world
Try
to praise
the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads
of exiles.
You
must praise
the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts
and ships; one of them had a long trip
ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners
sing joyfully.
You
should praise
the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when
we were together in a white room and
the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to
the concert where music flared. You
gathered acorns in the park in
autumn and leaves eddied
over the earth’s
scars.
Praise
the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays
and vanishes and
returns.
know what came before time
Looked
at but not seen,
listened to but not heard,
grasped for but not held, formless,
soundless, intangible: the tao
resists analysis and defies
comprehension.
Its rising
is not about light,
its setting not a matter of
darkness. Unnameable, unending,
emerging continually, and continually
pouring back into nothingness, it is
formless form, unseeable image,
elusive, evasive unimaginable
mystery. Confront it, and
you won’t see its face.
Follow it and you
can’t find an
end.
Perceive its
ancient subtle heart, however,
and you become master of the moment.
Know what came before time, and
the beginning of wisdom
is yours.
from The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu,
ebooks & apps of the Tao the Ching, I Ching,
Hua hu Ching, Wei wu Wei Ching,
You
can now buy
Tao te Ching as part of a
five-app bundle of Taoist classics
for iPhone or iPad for less than
the cost of one hardcover
book.
