From a paper on Korean poetry comes this poem by Ko Un, “Ode to Shim-chong:”
Indangsu sea, shine dark blue,
come rising as a cloudlike drumbeat.
The waters, the sailors who know the waters, may know
the dark fate of the world beyond
that lies past the path that sometimes appears,
the weeping of children born into this world,
and the sailors may know my daughter’s path.
How can the waters exist without the world beyond?
Full-bodied fear
has now become the most yearned-for thing in the world,
and my daughter’s whimpering stillness in the lotus bud will be such;
might love be a bright world and my eyes be plunged in utter darkness?
Daughter, already now the waters’ own mother,
advance over the waters,
advance over the waters
like the mists that come dropping over the waters.
My daughter, advance and travel through every world.
Shine dark blue, Indangsu. Weep dark blue.
Are we not called to be in those waters, as sailors who know the dark fate of the world beyond, willing to stand in the full bodied fear that this world craves?
There is a lovely new translation of the Tao te Ching online, which I discovered thanks to the ever mercurial wood s lot. From the introduction to the Book of the Forest Path:
I am trying to accomplish a couple of things in the translation that follows. First of all, I have a particular philosophical interpretation of Taoism, and I am trying to see how far it can be reflected in a translation. I think it is not compatible with the translations I’ve seen. Second, I’ve tried to make it plain and cool English. My objection to the existing translations is basically philosophical and it is fundamental. I think the going translations (even the ones I like the most (Mitchell’s and Red Pine’s, for example)) still reflect a dualistic metaphysics. They take Taoism to privilege emptiness over existence, inaction over action, yin over yang, and so on. That is understandable and does emerge from the text. But I think the reasons for that are, from a certain view, historical accidents: they reflect a Taoism that is dedicated to a critique of Confucianism. Nevertheless the considered position of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu (another great Taoist sage) is that, finally, both yin and yang, both the world and the emptiness at its heart, must be approached with a perfect affirmation, and that they are, in fact, the same thing. I have tried to apply that insight – surely fundamental to Taoism, throughout the text. So, for example, the first chapter in my view just can’t possibly say that namelessness is good and naming bad, that desirelessness is good and desire bad, and so on. Such views would be more proper to Buddhism, for example.
In addition, the Tao Te Ching is an anarchist political text, and its radical attack on political authority and wealth have often been obscured by translators: I have tried to restore a sense of its pointed political critique, its direct attack on inequalities of wealth and power in ancient China.
Finally, I regard the work as more playful and aware of its paradoxes than most other translations make it out to be. There is a touch of irony, emerging in part from the self-awareness with which it says what it says cannot be said.
I never get tired of reading this book, in its myriad interpretations and translations. It is the best life guide I know of, and has the best sense of itself of any sacred text: what I am about to tell you is a teaching that cannot really be told. It exhorts us to practice.
My own version of the classic, The Tao of Holding Space, is free for you to download, and this summer I will be releasing a printed version as well.
[tags]taoism, tao te ching[/tags]
The Wayfarers
by Rupert Brooke
Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
Oh, I’ll remember! but . . . each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.
. . . Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,
The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
Into the waste we know not, into the night?
Photo by zyber
I am pleased to announce the release of a small book I have been working on for the last three years. It is called “The Tao of Holding Space” and it is a collection of interpretations of the 81 short chapters of the Chinese classic Tao te Ching as they apply to my experience of holding space. I started this book three years ago, when I began noting parallels between Lao Tzu’s words and my experience of leadership, facilitation and living in Open Space, something many of us have done. In some ways this book chronicles the essence of my own emergent practice of Open Space. In looking over it one more time, I realized that almost everything I know about Open Space is somehow distilled into these chapters
The book is to be shared, so feel free to pass it along and use it whereever that makes sense
Download: The Tao of Holding Space in English
Download: The Tao of Holding Space in Chinese
cultivate eyes
that enable you to see
through the storms that are right here
to the storms that are coming
in that depth –
great beauty and peace.
photo by damaruc