The Quality of Being Supple
Daodejing
by Laozi
–from Chapter 76
So the soft and supple
are the companions of life
While the stiff and unyielding
are the companions of death
trans. Jonathan Starr
If you want to know what life means and where you are in this life, your place in the grand scheme of things, the Daoists say the material for finding those answers are inside your body. We are unconscious bags of miracles sloshing around in our day to day affairs without the fuller conscious awareness of the integral nature of our bodies and minds, the one system if you will. I prefer the one system at times as opposed to “mind-body-unity.” The meaning is the same, but the one system helps me with Daoist renderings of ourselves, our interiors a microcosm of the outer world. Daoist imagery of the internal one system of who we are contain mountains, waterfalls, seas, valleys, moons, and suns. We are earth of this earth and something beyond it. In a set of complexities only a few of us will come to understand in this life, we are also the minute entity that gives the mind its life, and the unification of that entity among all living things is the vast intelligence that created this dream we call a physical world.
So you sit on a bus stop. It is an American urban scene. The people around you are an amalgam of hope and misery, as the saying goes, and it is a clear day, even a nice day. You sit and wonder what this is all about. You might be any age, an inquisitive child, a middle aged baby boomer making treaties with the aging process, or an elderly person nearing a century of life. Whatever your stage or condition in life, the larger gift would be to simply and happily sit there, to be alive in the moment, no matter the circumstances of life.
Ecology. The New Oxford American Dictionary that lives in my iPhone defines ecology as 1) the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings; 2) the political movement that seeks to protect the environment. Ecology is traced to the Greek “oikos,” meaning house. Organisms suggests to me a key word in this short talk of mine, which is supple. My dictionary says things that are supple bend and move easily and gracefully, and for all its simplicity that is the most difficult thing for me to explain and perhaps the most important to our lives today as we try to understand where we are and to value that over where we have been or where we are going.
Sitting there on that bus stop, what does it mean to be supple?
In the wisdom of their ways, the Daoists devised a system of physical exercises to develop our potential for self-realization that lives in our bodies. In Taiji, the goal is to cultivate the biochemical functioning of the body that produces the body’s energy so that an energetic body is formed inside the physical. It is this energetic body that gives us the supple quality of movement, and along the way to developing this supple quality, there comes the opportunity to embrace a deepening humility. One has the chance to realize the miraculous nature of our one system, that which we can touch and call the physical and the mind, which both defies definition and has the ability to be limitless. Daoists and Buddhists alike speak of the highest realization as having a mind without walls.
It is impossible to have this mind without walls without the realization of an abiding loving kindness, much the same as agape, the Christian concept discussed in the Corinthian letters and derived from the Greek word for selfless love. Sitting there on the bus stop, we have the challenge of extending our love to everyone we see, across the wide amalgam of who they are and beyond our own rootedness in our presumptuous attitudes, our prejudices, and our belief systems. It is a love without condescension or pity, as we cannot smile and say, “you poor thing,” as much as we might be inspired to say. It is not a love that seeks to avoid difference while imposing an intellectualized sameness and call it our common human quality. No, rather it is the ability to see and accept our differences as we present them to one another. From there–perched on those false, outer shells–we have a chance to glimpse the heart of the person, the person’s sentience, their attachment to something divine.
This is suppleness. This is the ability to move easily and gracefully while doing Taiji, and it is the ability to sit on the bus stop with love. I am speaking of poets directly, as I was asked to do today, but I am also speaking to all of us.
Suppleness is not “anything goes,” as is much of the popular misconception about Daoism. There is a rootedness, but it is not the rootedness of our presumptions, prejudices, and belief systems. It is the rootedness that comes in that humility we can experience inside our own systems. It is a reverence for life. It is working to make contact with our incomprehensible origins, which goes by many names, although many systems of belief warn against giving it names. In the West we somewhat romanticize the Daoist admonition against naming the Dao, but in my Daoist studies I have come to understand that this warning against the naming is no different than the rabbinical warning against naming that same incomprehensible origin.
Speaking its name is risking an utterance that will keep you from experiencing it, or as the Kabbalah says, “Wisdom begins above thought.”
So if it is not this “anything goes” reading of suppleness, what then is it? How do we make decisions in a time when decisions must be made? In a word it is about knowing our standing as sentient beings. By standing I mean the balance point on a compass. We touch the center of ourselves and realize that everything is constant change in a life where we cannot know what our good intentions will bring in the future. The most well-intentioned plans made in the present moment may bring incredible crises in the future. We might say that of the light bulb or the social security system, but touching our center is grounding ourselves not only in humility but an unrelenting faith in goodness and the will to selflessness, and that is all we can hope to bring to the table where we face the matters of global climate change, population growth, and rapidly diminishing resources. Our hope is to move in the constant change of life, rooted in our greatest possible reverence for and understanding of life. We become organisms with awareness acting with other organisms in their various states of the same, whatever that may be or may not be. It is ecology, the balance of realizing the slightest move we make affects an infinite number of entities, living and not living. Ecology is the hope for community.
We sit on the bus stop with a cold sandwich and five hungry beggars come asking for money, of which we have none. What then do we do? What are we becoming as we make these decisions? We find these answers along the way.
We realize that if the vast intelligence of our communal minds creates and sustains this dream that we call life, then we are perhaps a bit egotistical if we think we can correct this great and vast system as the key word here is communal, a democracy of the spirit. Global warming is being moved by the wishes and desires of billions of minds and spirits, all of whom taken together are governed by an entity very few of us will ever experience in this life. So we work for the best, rooted as deeply as we can be in humility and loving kindness. This is the Daoist path, but as for what the Dao is I can only say “I have no idea.”
Thank you.
Afaa Michael Weaver
蔚雅風
Leaves
The lines that make you are infinite, but I count them
every day to hear the stories you carry. These are not secrets
but records, things we should know but ignore. If I commit
the sin of tearing you from the tree, I find another world
inside the torn vein, another lifetime of counting the records
of who walked here before, of what lovers lay here
holding each other through wars and starvation.
Some days I stand here until I lose focus and travel,
drifting off out of the moment, too full of it, and my legs
are now like trees, mindless but vigilant, held
into the earth by the rules of debt, what we owe
to nature for trying to tear ourselves away. I drift
and the pleasure of touch comes again, layers of green
in the mountainside a tickling in my palms.
The pleasure is that of being lost here in the crowd
of trunks and pulp, the ground thick with the death of you,
sinking under my feet as I go, touching one and another,
linking myself through until the place where I entered
is gone. When I am afraid, my breath is caught in my throat.
When I am not afraid, I lift both hands up under a bunch
of you to find the way the world felt on the first day.
Afaa Michael Weaver
Previously published in Orion Magazine
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