Tao Te Ching XVI

I do my utmost to attain emptiness;

I hold firmly to stillness.

The myriad creatures all rise together and I watch their return.

The teeming creatures all return to their separate roots.

Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.

This is what is meant by returning to one’s destiny.

Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.

Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.

Woe to him who willfully innovates while ignorant of the constant.

But should one act from knowledge of the constant,

one’s action will lead to impartiality,

impartiality to kingliness,

kingliness to heaven,

heaven to the way,

the way to perpetuity,

and to the end of one’s days one will meet with no danger.

There are those who debate whether we are formed from nature or nurture; they are pedants.  The sage knows what she came from and where she returns to.  So often do the banker, the comedian, the farmer, the hairdresser, the addict.  This origin and return can be seen as life’s progressive narrowing or it can be seen as the stuff one is made of and one becomes.  Root and destiny, past and future, are the center and circumference of the way.

Yes, there is the great return, the return to earth.  Yes, most spend their lives resisting this return, building structures of resistance which, in turn, follow their creators into earth.  Some of these structures, like bodies, are beautiful; some, like bodies, destroy.

Each creature has a separate root in the earth, a root that allows one to say, That is him, this is her.  Most roots are common, most flowers are common, and while we may take one home and put it in a vase and it thus attains distinction, put beside its kind it is almost indistinguishable.  A few roots are rare, with strange flowers and exotic smells, as if drawing on nutrients from another world.  The sage is rare because she devotes her life to tending her roots, delights in feeling them extend further and further into the earth.  Should they extend sufficiently to the center, where the memory of all roots reside, she is granted a vision of the teeming physicality of all things and she is still.

By placing herself in movement—the movement of rivers, the movement of bodies—while dedicating herself to no specific movement, the sage aligns herself with the constant and from that vantage point of radical stillness—the place where radical movement and radical stillness meet—she sees all claims, all creations, all forms, all movements in their partiality and by doing so does not dismiss them but gives preeminence to none of them.  Hence she is a sage.

Creation only becomes destructive when the creator loses sight of the inevitable destruction of his creation—not by him or others necessarily, but by the gradual decay which is the gift the earth offers to all.

Look at the distance between kingliness and perpetuity.  The commoner views presidents, CEOs, and renowned entertainers as high.  But the sage sees how close they are to earth, how far most of them are from impartiality, how far all of them are from the way.  True regality is the ability to distinguish the botanical forms of the soul, make judgments and walk through life based on these distinctions.

The same circumstances, beneficent and detrimental, surround the sage as others; but to the common person, the rewards are good, the penalties bad.  To the sage, none of this exists; there is only root.  Thus, in being in her root, she meets no danger because there are no dangers.  All dangers have disappeared into the light above the soil.