Tao Te Ching - Ursula K. Le Guin
Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin
Story by @sarah.king.creates
I’ve spent most of my life ‘doing’: living in my external world and either out of my body, pressed to action, or in my head, thinking. Later in life I developed all over severe chronic body pain, some people would call Fibromyalgia, which later turned out to be autistic nervous system burnout.
It was devastatingly hard to not be able to ‘do’, and instead my body forced me to slow right down and just ‘be’. ‘Being’ led me down a path of minimalism, not just in materialism, but in actions; constantly weighing what was important enough to spend my very limited energy on.
Slowing down even further led me to meditation and stillness. It helped me to cut out people in my life that couldn’t ‘be’ with me and opened up a big space for the tribe that could.
My friend Qin Qin, who is part of my new tribe, gave me her copy of Tao Te Ching. It is a priceless and unexpected gift and was the last of my 5 in 50 this year.
The book Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition of Tao Te Ching is by her own account not a translation. Instead she has taken other translations, including one that is word for word, and has created her own intuitive and poetic version.
The book and its writings are, like a lot of poetry, very open to the reader’s own interpretation and is quite intangible. It hard to get a firm grasp on the meanings described, so delicate is it written. The 81 verses lay out ‘The Way’, essentially a way of living.
My generalised interpretation is that it is a way of living that brings peace to one’s life, both internally and externally. It reminds me to a large degree of the practice of Buddhism.
Be humble, don’t seek out life’s extravagances nor shun unpleasantness. Just be.
To quote Ursula in her footnotes ’The Way is more than the cycle of any individual life. We rise, flourish, fail. The Way never fails. We are the waves. It is the sea.’ A way of life, observing the rises and falls, the joys and sorrows, the pleasures and agonies, like the ocean watching the waves.
The ocean doesn’t seek to be the waves. Be the ocean. Observe the waves
