my world is round

Waiting at the station

She was waiting at the station, wearing her best pink dress. Her hair was coiffed neatly and tucked into a tiny pillbox hat with a lacy black veil. She wore clean white gloves on her hands and a pair of sensible black pumps on her feet. She was ready. She had spent years getting ready for this day.

She checked her watch again and stretched out over the rail, peering down the track that ran to the horizon. She had family waiting for her. There was somewhere else she was needed. She had arrived here to do a job. And through years of love and laughter, tears and sorrow, she had persevered until her work was done. Now she was tired. She was ready to go home.

She sat down primly on her suitcase and waited.

wu wei - action without action

Tao theory includes the concept of wu wei, acting without acting. Roughly meaning that when one is in complete harmony with nature, no specific action is needed because the very act of being causes the necessary things to happen without effort.

In the original Taoist texts, wu wei is often associated with water and its yielding nature. Although water is soft and weak, it has the capacity to erode even solid stone (see Grand Canyon) and move mountains (see landslides). Water is without will (i.e., the will for a shape), though it can be understood to be opposing wood, stone, or any solid material that can be broken into pieces. It can fill any container, take any shape, go anywhere, even into the smallest holes. When falling as rain in thousands of small drops, water still has the capacity to reunite as it eventually joins the endless seas.

From the wu wei Wikipedia entry.

shedding vanity

In my search for inner peace, my best friend sent me a copy of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea for my birthday. A short, inspirational book written by the wife of Charles Lindbergh fifty years ago. She starts off with saying she wrote this book for herself, not realizing that the conflicting emotions of a busy family life that revolves around the mom-unit (stress vs. love, nurturing vs. needing time away, etc.) was a duality shared by many, if not all women with families. That got me interested right off the bat.

Lindbergh starts with the simplification of material items. This tenet of course being the basis for everything from Taoism to Wabi Sabi. But I liked the way she boiled it down. Packing for a weekend trip and then wearing those clothes for a few months (washing them, of course) -- was a great example. Clothes then become utilitarian and unimportant except that they meet the need -- to cover you, to keep you warm or cool, they protect you from the sun. And through this reduction, we get to the heart of it all -- the elimination of vanity. Brilliant.

Remove the need for clothing as a sense of who you are and focus on what you are doing. Forget about the color of your sofa and think about who is going to snuggle up with you on it. These are hard to do as we like to dress and surround ourselves with those things that make us happy -- every woman feels better about herself if she feels that she looks good. But what if your wardrobe was nothing but white t-shirts and blue jeans? What if brushed your hair and teeth in the morning and skipped the makeup? What if that time, energy and money was spent on LIFE?

Is clean and comfortable enough? Would you be happier? And more importantly, would you be more at peace?