6
Heart beating
her blood, your blood
my blood, our blood
Lesson # 6
The Tao is our mother.
It is mother to everything.
Her blood is your blood.
Stop looking for it.
You are it.
From: 81 Lessons from the Tao Te Ching
Number Six: The way of the feminine
The Tao is called The Spirit of the Valley
Mother to creation
it gives birth to everything
Empty and yet unlimited
The more you seek it
the more elusive it seems to become
and yet it is ever-present in everything
Find it in you
Use it
It is inexhaustible
NUMBER SIX
The Spirit of the Valley dies not, it is called Mother-substance of the Deep.
The Door of Mother-substance of the Deep is called the Root of Heaven and Earth.
Continuously, continuously,
It nourishes and preserves.
Use it,
Thy strength shall not fail.
Isabella Mears, The Tao Teh King, A Tentative Translation from the Chinese, William McLellan, Glascow, 1916.
Number Six (commentary) How do you honor the feminine energy?
Let us forget all that social junk which gets attached to gender. Let us pretend that there is an eternal dance of the masculine and the feminine in everything and it has nothing to do with social roles, bodily organs, self-image or what gender you were told that you are.
It is the dance of electricity, negative and positive charges in an eternal tango.
It is the dance of magnetism cycling between poles.
It is the dance of paradoxical quantum mechanics, with light being a wave and a particle at the same time.
It is the dance of light and darkness, both essential to life.
It is the dance of birth and death unfolding everywhere: stars, protozoa, babies.
The Tao is not about who or what is dancing.
It’s about the dance.
Tangent and Tool #6 Gratitude practice #1: (Reflective exercise) You were born and given this one life to live. You can see, hear, taste and touch. What a miracle! True there is pain and suffering, within and around you. That is a part of this bittersweet gift. This is the gift of awareness, sensation, presence and aliveness. Make today (or tomorrow if you are reading this at night) Mother’s Day for the Tao. Feel the gratitude for this gift of consciousness, of aliveness, a gift that the dead and the unborn cannot experience.
Today, share that gratitude with some other folks, even if it is in a simple greeting of, “Glad to see you.”