“Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.
The weak can overcome the strong;
The supple can overcome the stiff.
Under heaven everyone knows this,
Yet no one puts it into practice.”
                -Lao Tsu, the Tao Te Ching (translated by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English)

                It took me two years to wander from the first to the last entry of the Tao Te Ching. Sometimes I kicked myself for that. Part of me thought learning was like a staircase: step by step, straight ahead, and then I’d be done. I thought I was supposed to start on the first page, finish on the last page, and understand everything in between. Then again, I’ve never done that. I’ve never found a single line in a book and followed it, cover to cover, without turning off into another thought, and another, doubling back, and sitting for a while.  I’ve never come close to understanding all of it, either. There’s too much. There are caves and creeks and springs in every valley I’ve walked, or else there are rocks and shadows and an ant finding its way. I want to stop and look at them.
                Lately I’ve been struck by how little knowing seems to accomplish. I can know the health risks of packaged candy, know it’s time to get some rest, know I should write to my senator, and not do a thing. I can know the path I’m on leads somewhere I don’t want to go, and keep on walking.
                Maybe learning is less linear and more practice, more a returning current. You go somewhere, and you wander back; you go somewhere, and you wander back. The ideas in the Tao Te Ching do that: there are small arguments inside the sections, but all the sections together are not steps on a staircase. They’re a meditation. They’re a record of (a reminder to) practice. A book can tell me this, it can give me an idea that’s like a seed, and tell me to carry it. The Tao Te Ching gives me many seeds, and holds my hands as I spread them, and stands with me as I water them, and watches. The Tao Te Ching says learning isn’t an event. It’s time in the garden, time wasted and time gathered, time gained and time forgotten. It’s a walk through woods as different voices call. If there’s a line of experience, I don’t think learning stretches that thread from A to B. Learning ties the thread to a needle and dives in and out of thought’s cloth, in and out and back again, in and out and back again, creating embroidery beautiful enough to see and strong enough to hold together. Creating practice.
                In my first draft, I started by saying “It took me two years to read the Tao Te Ching.” That’s not true. In two years, I read every entry at least once and most entries many times, but I think I’ll be reading the Tao Te Ching for years and years to come.

                “It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.”
                                -“Virgins,” Danielle Valore Evans

                Individual. Identity. I wonder if those are more will-o’-the-wisps than guides.
                The first comes from in-, “not,” and dividere, “divide.” An individual is someone who cannot be divided. But I’m divided all the time: I want this, and that; my heart pulls here, and there. Part of me is at this desk, part of my is wandering down one misty lane in etymology, and if we’re friends, perhaps part of me is sitting there next to you.
                 The second comes from idem, “the same.” That’s why trigonometry has so many identities: sin2 θ is the same as 1 − cos2 θ. Then again, I think we have so many identities, too. If I stand next to anyone I’ve ever met, I can see some ways in which we’re the same. I can see some ways in which we’re different. I feel an identity in me, a sameness that continues, day to day, but I also feel changes and transformations. Whatever identity I have, I think it’s an identity of community, with different voices talking, an identity of transformation, with new plants growing. I might choose which voice opens my lips, which seeds I water, but I’m not a diamond or an atom. I’m more like a little storm system, pushed and pulled by the other storms around it and directed by the ground beneath it and held by the planet’s atmosphere.
                “It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.” I hope the other side is true, too. I hope it’s easier to be yourself when somebody else cares who you are. Maybe we’re not indivisible, we’re not the same (not always, not in all ways), but we can learn to be ourselves by sharing with the people around us. We can help them learn, help them be. I wonder if that’s a better guide than individual identity. I wonder if being is something we do together, not on our own.

                “She’s a bit…oh, stars, there isn’t a good word for it in Klip. Issik. You know that one? […] Literally means ‘egg soft.’ Like a hatchling’s skin, when it first comes out of the shell.”
                “So…inexperienced?”
                […] “Yes, but not quite. It implies that you’ll toughen up in time.”
                -Becky Chambers, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet

                Last semester I gave my students an assignment: find something that needs a word but doesn’t have one, and make one up. Looking back, the one that sticks in my head is “pedserilus,” a low-level frustration that stays with you because you don’t stop to deal with it–like a rock in your shoe. My student put that together by googling the latin for foot, misery, and small, and he liked his word so much that he snapped it to some of his friends. ‘Snapped’ means sent via snapchat, for those who, like me, didn’t know that, all of which goes to show how we create the new words we need, and then climb through our experience using the handholds these words give us.
                I think we need more words that are about becoming instead of being. Issik isn’t just something you are now: it marks part of a transformation, a pattern of growth. I can’t think of almost anything that is truly static, and yet most of my words say is, not change. I think we should celebrate the undecided as well as the developed, the inchoate as well as the collected. I think we should celebrate the young and the soft, the fresh from the egg, as well as the old and the–well, come to think of it, I don’t have a word for “old and worn” that also implies the beauty and grace of the aging and acting that has caused that wear. Perhaps Becky Chambers will give me that one, too, as I keep reading. If not I hope someone else will. It’s a word I’d like to have. You know–like your grandmother’s hands.
                Until then, I’m not going to confuse issik with weak, or with incapable. I suppose something that wasn’t soft might have a hard time climbing out from the egg into a new world.

                “There is a weight of impossible description that falls away and leaves [Gabriel] bare and exposed to a frightful realization. It is a trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to withstand. He begins to dance. A slow, strange dance, eerie and life-giving. A dance of atavistic signature and ritual. He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech.”
                -August Wilson, Fences

                Throughout Fences, Gabriel carries a broken trumpet and the brain damage he suffered in World War I. He believes, wholeheartedly, that he is the Angel Gabriel, and that he’ll use the trumpet to open the Gates of Heaven on Judgement Day. When his older brother dies at the end of the play, Gabriel finally tries to blow the broken trumpet. He’s waited for this moment for more than twenty years. It has to work. He knows it will. It doesn’t.
                When I first read the end of Wilson’s play, I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I looked up the scene online, and watched the end of the movie. In the movie the trumpet just works: we get the religious answer that Gabriel believed in. We get the parting of the clouds, the shining of the light. But in the play, Gabriel gets silence. He gets an empty space where he thought there was the floor. I thought about this more and more. I started to fall in love with it, because afterward, Gabriel gets to realize that what he believed in wholeheartedly is not the same as what there is in the whole of his heart.
                Troy, Gabriel’s older brother, is trapped by the ways he sees the world. He’s trapped by the prejudice that others bound around him. He’s trapped by how he’s been hurt. When Troy’s son asks, “How come you ain’t never liked me?” Troy responds, “Who the hell say I got to like you?” He adds, “I owe a responsibility to you.” That’s the same thing Troy says while trying to understand his own abusive father: “he felt a responsibility for us.” Troy can’t stop reaching towards the only concepts he understands, the only patterns of interaction–between men and women, fathers and sons–he’s ever learned. These patterns pull him apart.
                Gabriel can see something new. Gabriel, the crazy brother, the lost soul, reaches out for the God he believes in–and finds nothing. He should break, but he doesn’t. He falls through the void of his expectations and lands in something else, something older. In August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, when a priest’s exorcism fails to stop the ghost haunting a family, an American child of slaves calls upon her own ancestors. Her ancestors, or her love for them, or her belief in them–or the history of her people, or her realization of something behind her own belief–does what the prayer cannot do. The ghost leaves. In Fences Gabriel dances. He goes back, back before his beliefs, back to ritual, back to movement, back to sound, and pours new life into the world.
                Sometimes I try to build the tower of my theories taller. I try to put in windows, and look out from the new heights of my belief and understanding. Troy’s tower–like mine, sometimes–becomes a prison he will not, cannot leave. Beneath that tower of philosophy there is earth, and body; history, and blood.  Gabriel’s tower comes crashing down–and beneath its foundation, he finds something that gives life. He finds more than he–or we–had yet understood. He howls into song and sings back into speech.

                “And though the two sang in their Orient language I knew by way of feeling that their song was about fleas and lice and vultures and blue jays and marmots and coons and cougars and grizzly bears, and through their soothing melody all these once frightful and malevolent creatures streamed into my heart as though it were Noah’s, and nested there harmoniously.”
                -Claire Vaye Watkins, “The Diggings,” Battleborn

                There are creatures that frighten me, that feel harmful. I love a kind of art that, instead of helping me fight against these objects of my fear, creates a harmony between them and me. A kind of art that makes my heart a wide, open enough place for the cougars and the grizzly bears, the fleas and the lice.
                Of course, that’s not what we “have” to do. It’s not the only option. We can fight, too–shoot the wolves, poison the spiders. We can, we often do, and in my own life I have. I’ve taken something that frightened me and pushed it away, covered it up, lied about it. But then I live without clawed footprints in the forest. I live without maggots, who bring old meat back into the web of living things. I live without whatever it is I could have learned from the monsters I killed or locked away. I miss the melody.
                I feel (and see) a driving desire to make things mine, to make them as expected, to make them the way I see them. But there’s no harmony with just one note. I want the vultures. I want the grizzlies back, though sometimes I’ll be scared of them. I want lice. There will be trade offs, of course, that come with that. I’ll have to be more careful. But there were trade offs that came with ending those things, too. A naturalist told me years ago that the thing to do with a bear is talk to it, so it hears you coming up, because then you can be going this way while it’s going that way and no one’s startled. A bear is still a bear. I don’t want it tamed. I don’t want it killed. I have my fears, but I want a larger heart and the streams that flow past it, and a song that lets in all those other things to nest, here, harmoniously.

                “I’m only guessing. As you get older, Gemma, you’ll understand things that don’t make sense now. Think how much you’ve changed since you left Iceland. You’re going to change that much again in the next ten years.”
                -Margot Livesey, The Flight of Gemma Hardy

                 “Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future.”
                -Quoidbach, Gilbert and Wilson, “The End Of History Illusion”

                I don’t know how much I understand. Here I am at the end of my twenties, and I’m at the same place Gemma was at the beginning of her teens. I know that the me of a decade ago was very different. I still expect, somehow, that the me of a decade from now will be much the same as I am today. And of course, he–I–won’t be.
                I wonder if I do that out of fear: to contemplate changing so much is a little like contemplating death. I wonder if it’s just lack of imagination: wanting something now makes it feel important, and if it’s important, it’s hard to imagine not wanting it. In any case, as Q. G. and W. point out, it’s just silly for me to think that now is the end of history. It’s not. It’s another year, another spin. I remember studying Martin Luther King, Jr–a historical figure, for me–and feeling the world twist when my mom mentioned listening to his speeches first hand. Someday I’ll be on the other side in a conversation about Obama or George W. Bush–figures who are, for me, now, and who will soon be then. I’ll be on the other side of me, too. The things I thought I knew will seem different. The things I thought were essential to who I am and how I behave will be peripheral. I might have a new career. I might have a cat. I might have become a coffee drinker.
                That’s frightening. It’s hard to plan for a world that will have changed so much. That’s something to remember. The choices I make will become the history someone else has to live with. That’s rather nice. There will be more (and less, and different) than I expect. And of course, I’m only guessing, because I’m a child, listening and trying to understand.

                “Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing–going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. […] the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature’s warm heart.”
                -John Muir, My First Summer In The Sierra

                About three years ago, for the first time since I was six or seven, I started having trouble sleeping. I wasn’t (and I’m not) sure why. I lay awake, worried about not being rested, angry at not being asleep, and then I lay awake some more because I was angry and worried. I closed my eyes (or covered them with a pillow) and told myself: lie still! Be asleep! It didn’t help that much. After about a month, the sleeplessness slipped off without explaining itself. I still slept with the blinds closed and a t-shirt over my eyes, because that had become my habit. Otherwise things went back to normal. A new normal, I suppose.
                This weekend I slept outside. It got down to 33 degrees, I think, and it was windy, so the tip of my nose and the top of my head were cold as I fell asleep. I put down my sleeping pad on a slopey part of the backyard, because that’s where I was most hidden from my various neighbors’ lights. I woke up every now and then, to the wind chime that kept ringing, to the cold hand of the wind, to a possum (I think), to sliding off my pad. And I slept wonderfully. The stars were bright and the trees were whispering. When I woke up, I was aware of them for a moment, happy with them, and then I was asleep again.
                I think I fell into the habit of looking for peace by covering my eyes, by insisting there be no light around me, no outside sound. That’s one way to look for peace. But I think I found more when I decided to stop fighting against all those outside shifting whispers, when I went out from my house, got my toes cold in the grass, and lay down to listen (and yawn) with a smile. When we’re young, we’re not rocked to sleep by stillness. There’s so much flowing around me, through me, over me. I can look for peace by shutting my eyes to the movement. I can look for peace by being part of the current.

“May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.”
                -Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home

                This morning I skipped breakfast–I told myself I was in a hurry–went to a meeting, taught a class, and sat at my desk to make some ramen. Just as I started the noodles a student came by: a thoughtful, playful young man who wanted to talk about communicating and scuba diving. He mentioned an old teacher who used to make tea, and I thought, aha!, I used to make students tea. Why did I stop? I got some more water, and invited him to sit down.
                In my life, at least, tea is largely a reminder to sit quietly for a little while, to watch the interplay of leaves and water, to taste the subtle changes. I had a good tea drinking habit going for almost a year, and then, in all the hurly burly, I started thinking I didn’t have time. Perhaps the truth is I didn’t have time not to make a cup of tea, because in the months I hurly-burlied straight through the morning, the hurly-burly got to me. (That’s dangerous. Remember Macbeth?). But someone asking me to talk about something that matters–well, I’m foolish, but that’s one way to pull me right out of my foolishness. So, for the first time in a long time, I made some tea.
                We talked.
                We listened.
                It was nice, and then I found myself in the curious position of having a bowl of chicken ramen next to a teacup of excellent jasmine green tea. I had a bite of one, a sip of the other. And then my student and I realized we had to talk about this strange combination. It was, I think, symbolic of my life, and my culture, and my failings, and maybe of other things that are perhaps yours as well as mine.
                Ramen gets its punch by being very. Very salty, very easy, very cheap, very everything it is. Jasmine green tea, on the other hand, is all about shades fading into one another. The clear of the water slipping toward the soft glow of the tea. Ramen is so very that it reaches out and grabs my attention, even when I think I’m in a hurry. There’s always time for ramen. But when I sit, for a moment, with a friend, tea reminds me that there is enough world and enough time to sit with the quiet, steady growth of a leaf in water.
                Maybe I’ve been holding too many of the words I know, instead of tasting the shape of strange ones. Maybe I’ve been eating too often, instead of smelling the food I’m helping to cook. I want to eat less ramen, and drink more tea.

“Scoop: You want other things in life than I do
Heidi: Really? Like what?
Scoop: Self-fulfillment. Self-determination. Self-exaggeration.
Heidi: That’s exactly what I want.
Scoop: Right. Then you’d be competing with me.”
                -Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles

“In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu—the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others.”
                -Nelson Mandela

                Perhaps competition is often a silly system. That’s a big claim. I’m making it.
                Neil Simon has a scene (adapted from Chekhov) in which two old men argue over what would make the best lunch. In a quick tangent, one of these Russians describes picking up a newspaper and finding “only good news:” “France is having political trouble, they’re starving in Ireland, England is in a financial crisis…but here everything is good.” Competition is supposed to bring out the best in us: it’s supposed to inspire us towards new heights and new ideas. More often, as far as I can tell, at least the way we do it today, it just makes us wish for and delight in other people’s failings. It makes us defensive, and scared for ourselves, and mean. It makes us cheer as a player from the other team gets hit really hard, and maybe hurt; it makes us think more about winning than about what we’re doing. It makes us glad that they’re starving in Ireland.
                If I’m not careful, Wassterstain reminds us, then your self-fulfillment seems to threaten mine. ‘There’s only so much power and wealth and control to go around, and it’s mine,’ says a greedy desperate brat inside. If I follow that voice, I lose, or I end up the king of an empty world. If my idea of living well involves living in a world with other people–if I imagine myself with parents and siblings and lovers and friends–then the competition really isn’t there. Heidi understands that, I think. Scoop can’t see it. We build our competitions, but before them, within them, there’s cooperation. There’s ubuntu, and I am–I am alive, I am fulfilled, I am here–because we are. I don’t want a kind of self fulfillment that puts you on the sidelines. I want a kind of fulfillment that celebrates you and the world as much as it celebrates me. Look around. I want a kind of fulfillment as full as all that.

                “I have ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice. For satyagraha and its off-shoots, non-co-operation and civil resistance are nothing but new names for the law of suffering.
                The rishis, who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence, were greater geniuses than Newton. They were themselves greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms, they realized their uselessness, and taught a weary world that its salvation lay not through violence but through non-violence.
                Non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering. It does not mean meek submission of the will of the evildoer, but it means putting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant. Working under this law of our being, it is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save his honor, his religion, his soul, and lay the foundation for that empire’s fall or its regeneration.”
                -Mahatma Gandhi, Young India

                Well, we talked about fear last week. Let’s talk about tears. Tonight, while I was talking to someone I love, they said, “You sound like you’re soldiering on with sadness in your heart. We don’t need to talk about that, but I want to recognize it.” And I thought, “Yes. I am.” And I hadn’t really known that I was. I thought I was stressed at the work in front of me. I thought, because I’m often pretty silly, that my stomach was hurting after dinner. But it wasn’t my stomach, not really.
                There’s a scene in Firefly that keeps coming back to me. Shepherd Book, a kind of futuristic monk, has fallen in with a crew of noble outlaws. (“I call him religious who understands the suffering of others,” writes Gandhi). Book has tried, in whatever fumbling ways he can, to share his insight and courage; he’s also felt a world more complicated and confusing than the simple, black and white teachings he learned in the abbey. He’s hurt someone. He’s seen someone killed. Book tells another traveler, “I believe I’m just…I think I’m on the wrong ship.”
                “Maybe,” his new friend says. “But maybe you’re exactly where you ought to be.”
                Back at Amherst, Professor Mehta once told me that Gandhi was the most radical thinker he’d ever studied. In explaining why the little, smiling man was so different from the other voices around me, Mehta eventually said: “Gandhi believes in suffering. He believes in it as part of life, and not just as something to be avoided.” I listened, and didn’t understand. Now I think back to Shepherd Book. I read a little more Gandhi.
                Suffering hurts. That’s what it does. But I inflict a second wound on myself when I think that the pain is wrong, that I am wrong for feeling it; that it shouldn’t be this way. I don’t need that second wound. I don’t need to tell myself that I’m on the wrong ship because this ship has shaken me, because what I see frightens me, because there is sorrow in my heart; this is my world, and this is where I belong. And sadness–suffering–self-sacrifice–is a nurturing part of my world. Part of me has known that ever since my friend died, and I went on, still loving him, sometimes laughing with the memory of him, sometimes crying. The hurt of losing is part of the seeds he gave me. The sorrow is part of the joy. It’s all one, and I’ll keep it. Part of me knows that every time I see people hurting each other, or themselves, and choose to care. That hurts. Love has its tears. But this is my love, my ship. Once I stop telling myself that the pain means I’ve somehow chosen wrong, I stop cutting the wound deeper. Once I recognize Gandhi’s ancient law of honor, of non-violence, of self-sacrifice, I’m free to learn (as he tells me I must learn) how to bleed. And the truth is, for love, for this, when it is needed, I don’t mind bleeding.
                “Maybe you’re exactly where you ought to be.”