Quitting

We like to quit when things get hard and the fun runs out and we run aground and look around and see no reason for going on. He called her from a hotel phone to ask how she was doing and all. “Why hell no I didn’t walk all the way from Salinas! I got on a plane and into a cab, guitar and all. I sang my way here just like I said I would.” “That’s nice,” she said, “But it won’t do you no good, cause you’re still drinking. You had one before you called. Some people quit the wrong things, but I quit the right one. I wish you well and love you, too, but we’re always leaving something and I left you when you ran out of chances and I ran out of rebounds. And now you’re in a hotel and I’m in a home with a son in the backyard and a daughter due in May, and I hope they grow up to always get themselves walked outta there when it’s time to go and don’t look back wondering how happy they might have been if they’d stayed through one more night of being treated like you treated me.” “I should’ve had another one,” he said. “You should’ve squared yourself up to how it is and known what’s what and that is you can’t get things back like you wish they were. Let it go and go on with it, with wherever it’s going and what happens next. Whatever that is, I hope it’s good for you, but it won’t be me because I had enough when I said I had and walked away.” “Have enough when you say you have and walk away. Could be a song in there,” he said. “If anybody could write it, you could,” she said before wishing him well forever again for the last time.

Five

Put everything on the table and consider the table. Find the center of all the contradictions, reconcile the contraries, integrate the opposites by regarding everything with compassion and allowing what needs to happen to become apparent over time. Right action cannot be hurried, but flows naturally from right seeing, right hearing, right understanding.

The flow of The Way, of Life, is this: Right Seeing, Right Hearing, Right Understanding, Right Knowing, Right Doing, Right Being.

We bring compassion to life in offsetting the ruthlessness of life, in compensating for the way nature works and giving mercy, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, justice and peace a place in the world. We are yang to the world’s yin. Together, we produce and serve Tao, and all is one.

Four

That which can be known is both open and closed. The surest fact is shrouded in mystery. Everything is a doorway into the unknown and unknowable. We look and think we see, we look again and see we do not see. We swim in an ocean without shore or floor, trusting ourselves to the waves and relishing the wonder of more than we can know, see, or say.

Facts are to truth as words are to music.

Three

Maintaining right relationship between our “reach” and our “grasp” keeps us vitally stabilized between how things are and how things need to be. In each situation there are forces encouraging and opposing movement and growth, transformation and alteration. What needs to happen here, now? It takes listening to know, and then only time will tell if we heard correctly and heeded well.

Two

More work is done in silence, with silence, than in 10,000 lecture halls and instructional centers.

Life is lived in the space between mutually exclusive opposites. The opposites are without and within. The psyche is at odds with itself. Nothing is one way only. Good and Evil are a perspective shift from becoming the other. We live within the tension of extremes, and in bearing the pain create new possibilities born of the anguish of immobilization. Truth is contradictory. The way things are is counterbalanced by the way things also are, and the two together produce a third, unimaginable, unpredictable, miracle child called The Way, which is found by those who have what it takes to live on the boundary between yin and yang, waiting for the darkness to produce the light necessary to see.

Truth is symmetrical. The polarities of existence are basic to existence. Consciousness integrates the opposites by bringing them together and requiring each to acknowledge the other and seeing where it goes from there. Complimentary opposites are not the essence of contradiction, but of life.

Permission to be is the primary gift. It recognizes the interplay of all that is—of that which is true and that which is also true—and seeks, not eradication but integration, synchronization, harmony, wholeness, completion.

There is how things are (yin) and how things also are (yang), and that is how things are (Tao). Yin plus yang equals Tao.

We live on the boundary between yin and yang, embracing contraries, integrating opposites, reconciling contradictions, serving/producing Tao.

When we do not serve/produce Tao, there is the way things are and there is the way we wish things were, the way we want things to be. When we serve the way we want things to be, we produce a world that is not conducive to life.