T'ai, Tao, and paradoxes

One day, seven-year-old T'ai got off the school bus and walked slowly down the driveway with a deep wrinkle in his brow. "What's wrong, T'ai?" I asked. He shook his head slowly. "Something's really bothering me, mom." "Oh, sweetie," I say with concern, "what is it?" "Well, you know how there's nothing at the end of the Universe? If you try to think of what that means, you're picturing something. And it's not something; it's nothing. That really bothers me."

Around the same time as he was working on this "something" and "nothing" paradox, T'ai made two drawings. On one side of a sheet of paper is "Chaos," seen above. Though the drawing represents chaos: zee, ding, bang, powee! boom! -- it is also kind of tidy, orderly.

On the other side of the paper is T'ai's drawing of "Order." I love that this depiction of order is almost as chaotic as chaos -- "order" comes out of various instruments, but they still make sounds like "KERCLASHEROOZI." And there's still a big boom in the middle of it. These two drawings get at some sort of paradox that I'm running into: if you seek order, you'll find chaos. If you surrender to chaos, you will find order.

I feel like I've been living that paradox while I've been fighting cancer.

Taoists* are familiar with -- and even seek out -- the empty space contained in the core of paradoxes, as in this passage from the Tao Te Ching:

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

The many paradoxes in the Tao Te Ching are often quoted. Here is another passage:

If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.

In an early chapter of the Tao Te Ching, it says "The Tao is the gateway of all understanding." This blog is for me a gateway to understanding what is going on as I deal with cancer. I also believe that, "Thoughts and feelings disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips or fingertips." Processing my thoughts and feelings through the blog has allowed some lasting disentangling to take place in my mind and in my heart.

However, since The Tao also says:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name,

I will note here that "The experience that can be blogged is not an experience."

Final paradox for the night: I'm getting better and I'm feeling crummier. More when I've resolved that one.

*(By the way, I should finally acknowledge that it took a bit of nerve for me to name my blog "tao te chu." I have no sense of how familiar people are with Tao Te Ching, the Taoist canon attributed to Lao Tzu, written three or four centuries Before the Common Era. "Tao" is generally translated as "The Way." "Te" translates to something like "virtue" or "character." And "Ching"  translates as something like "great book" or "classic." 

Since it's pronounced Dao Da Jing, I took advantage of the blog name sounding a bit like "the way of," stealing a fragment from the French "de." So there are two loose translations, in my mind, of tao te chu: the way of chu, and the way of chu's character. I make no claims on virtue; just character.)