The heavy is the root of the light,
the still is the lord of the restless.
Therefore the gentleman when travelling all day
never lets the heavily laden carts out of his sight;
it is only when he is safely behind walls and watchtowers
that he rests peacefully and is above worries.
How, then, should a ruler of ten thousand chariots
make light of his own person in the eyes of the empire?
If light, then the root is lost,
if restless, then the lord is lost.
But what of the one who tosses like an unmanned dinghy on the soul’s dark seductive ocean? Who abdicates his roots or has them torn from him and, by choice or force, explores the rootless air? The untethered poet? The raving prophet? The nomadic bum? The capricious trickster? The feral adventurer? Are these any less part of the Tao?
No. They are simply, from the Tao’s perspective, lost. Lost from rootedness and stillness. Are the lost less necessary? Are they any less grand? insignificant? confused? hapless? No—they are simply not sages. The sage, she places her roots in the heavy silent center; she casts the chaos of her desires and thoughts—their violences, contradictions, and unpredictabilities—into orbit around the mysterious still center. The center of what? The center that you don’t find in the body’s death, in desire’s insatiability, in the intellect’s tsunami.
In an age when almost all is inverted, the sage still plants the flower in the ground and while she hardly ignores the insects and rain, the seasons and trampling, her attention is drawn to that which is below the ground, and that which does not move, that which does not have a name and never will.
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