Author Archives: Valerie

The Tao of V – chapter 1

By Valerie on May 10, 2012

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.

The only advice I got on Taoist meditation was: try not to try not to think. There are things you’re just never going to accomplish if you really put your head to them.

When I gave my friend this book, he complained of the poem-like verses, said he wished I would write stories to explain them instead (my 81 instalments is a bit of a friendly nod to that). But the reality is, this the ineffable baby! You can write treatises on it and never get it. Insight comes from the stripping away of the intellect not the furiously working of it.

It’s one of the things I love about poetry (and twitter, actually) the distillation tends to get the busy brain out of the way and get right to the heart of it. My favourite haiku (by Basho):

Even in Koyoto
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry
I long for Koyoto

 …takes my breath away every time I hear it. Now I could expound thousands of words explaining the simultaneous feelings of spiritual longing and connection, and all the deep passion and paradox and beauty in the haiku – which you would probably just smile and nod politely over anyway. But if you get it, you GET it.

If you’ve had that moment, your heart cries YES to this poem. If you haven’t, it will stick with you somehow, and perhaps years from now, you will have that moment and this haiku will come back to you (and you’ll be madly google-ing to try and find it again).

If you truly, deeply understand something, it’s simply and you can say it in a few words, or in a smile, a look, a laugh. If you lay a lot of words on it, you’re talking around it, of it, but it isn’t IT. The tao that can be told, well, that isn’t quite it.

So try not to try not to think, just let the words be.

 

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The Tao of V

By Valerie on May 10, 2012

The soft overcomes the hard.
The slow overcomes the fast.
Let your workings remain a mystery.
Just show people the results.


I found that quote pinned on a bulletin board at the Taoist Tai Chi Society nearly 20 years ago, and spent a decade trying to find the version of the Tao Te Ching it had come from. I found it in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, someone who deeply understands it’s principles, yet speaks them with a modern voice. it has been my favourite source of wisdom, insight, and perspective ever since.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about humility, leadership, selflessness, and non-striving. Showy glory versus moving behind the scenes and just getting it done. Lines from the Tao Te Ching keep coming to mind, but in conversations with people who have never even cracked a spiritual text.

So, I’ve recently bought my friend a copy of this book, but know it would be a cruelty to just give him all this metaphorical verse and set him loose. Glancing at it, he’s already said: but it looks like poetry, I don’t like poetry.

So to make this book a little more palatable to my friend, and a chance for you all to read along, I’m going to spend the next few months covering all 81 chapters, with a little expounding on what they mean to me and what I’ve come to understand of them so far (or what I’m still trying to figure out).

Go grab yourself a copy of this book (go on, you’ve got time, this project will take me well into the Fall) and read along with my friend and I, posting your comments and thoughts, as I share the Tao according to me – the Tao of V.

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What’s on Your Fuckit List?

By Valerie on April 20, 2012

No, that’s not a typo. There’s your bucket list, that list of things you should do before you die ’cause your life will be better for going out and doing them; but there should be a fuckit list too – for all that stuff you think is a good idea but your life would actually be better if you just let it go.

Fuckit. Had me a bit of a meltdown on Monday. Usual pattern of physical crisis precipitating spiritual crisis sort of thing. Got me questioning what I’m doing and why, ’cause generally I’m doing something stupid to wear myself out; and I get soul-weary ‘when I’m not listening to that inner voice that keeps me on track.

Granted that inner voice hasn’t had a strong calling to shout out lately, what it’s been telling me to do is nothing, and that mostly sounds like I’m not being told to do anything; so I’ve been dragging along feeling rudderless without firm direction. Turns out what has been nudging at the back of my brain has been to do nothing. Or to put words in the mouth of that inner voice as of Monday: I just want to be left the fuck alone to do NOTHING.

I’ve been plunking away at things I think are important and valuable and I should be doing, and it’s left me feeling disconnected and stretched thin all the time. I need what I always need when things go off the rails for me: trees and rocks and water, long solitary walks, time to stare at the sky, and time deeply connecting with people who fill me up and ground me. I haven’t been doing that, I’ve been doing lots of things I really care about and believe in, and even enjoy, but right now, they are not the things for me to be doing. They need to go on my fuckit list for the time being.

It’s a funny thing, taking the good, healthy, beautiful, inspiring and putting them on a fuckit list. I think most of us have figured out how to identify unhealthy, toxic, draining pulls in our lives and to disconnect (or just plain flee) when you know it’s not good for you. Bad relationships, bad habits, bad jobs, clearly a time to put a fuck that shit field all over that crap. But what about things that seem good, heck, really are good, but maybe just aren’t your thing to do? Fuckit darlin’!

post-it notes on my bathroom mirrorI have a post-it practice. Notes stuck on my bathroom mirror, daily reminders of the really important stuff I tend to forget. I’ve got three up right now (lots of important things I forget these days). One of them is a reminder of my path: to help people find their path, with a sub-reminder not to get caught up in other people’s paths. It’s easy to get attached to that enthusiasm and inspiration and want to go where they go, but with so many people going in so many directions, I get strung out trying to tag along. Very wonderful and valuable things going on and very worth doing, but not by me. Hard to let that go.

Another post-it note reminds me I can’t change the world, but I might be able to offer a little place of peace for people in it. So that’s what I’m off to do. The rest of it, well, that’s for the fuckit list.

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Structure, Cage or Bones?

By Valerie on March 18, 2012

I’m a little at a loss these days, dealing with the delightful problem of feeling better. Seriously, it’s a rather strange and foreign feeling after over 6 months of decrepitude.

My current dillemma is one of how to rebuild my life, and into what? I have so many interests and things pulling at me, I’m trying to remember: while I can do pretty much anything, I can’t do EVERYTHING. I’ve been around long enough to know just making choices based on what’s most on fire at any given point doesn’t always further what’s really important. So yeah, I know that. I’ve spent a goodly amount of time these days thinking about what my priorities are in this current iteration of my life. I know the what, but I’m not sure about the how. I seem to want to set aside some blocks of time for my various priorities, to see that my time gets spent there, but I also recognize I’ve created the flexibility I have in my life for a reason. Sometimes my body says no; it doesn’t care about no frickin schedule, there’s no point in me getting uptight about that.

And I move in a delicate and complex dance with my muse; when I try to force myself to write, I often write cerebral monkey-mind driven pap, and I don’t want to waste a url on that. The flip side of that is the period last summer where I posted every day put me in a space where I wrote things I never even knew were in me. It was an inspiring and transformative time. On the other side of that (flip again!) the strain of that imposed structure ultimately lead to the kind of cognitive burnout that left me with panic attacks and unable to fathom negotiating the complexities of downtown traffic (on FOOT for crying out loud!). So, yeah, I’d like to not do a repeat of that.

So, I’m putting it out there as a question to you all: you contract workers, creative types, beautiful weirdos who are bucking the system and making your own rules. What rules do you make for yourself, what kind of life do you build when you can build any life you want? Hm, that last is maybe a question for us all, really.

When is structure the thing that constricts and impedes you, and when is it the bones of what you can build on?

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Standing Strong

By Valerie on March 4, 2012

There were a pair of spruce trees in my neigbourhood, grew up side by side, entwined. The wind storm last fall took one down, and the remaining one, having spent decades growing in a shared space, stands now with an implied emptiness of the tree fallen. A space made up of places where branches used to overlap; now there’s only half as many, standing alone. It always seems to me a poignent reminder of what a life shared looks like, and what it’s like to carry on alone.

I lost someone I love this week. 95 years, he’d lived a life that was long and full. A decade ago he lost his wife, and that now-solo tree stands and tells the story of what that must have been like for him. Sometimes the second half of a couple doesn’t stay long in this world after they’ve lost the companion of a lifetime; but sometimes, like that leaning tree, they still stand strong for years afterwards. They continue to grow, fill out a bit in the spaces left behind, but the shape of who they are will always be influenced by the life they shared. He carried on, living the life he loved; but like the space implied by those empty branches, the space where his wife used to be was always there, filled with memories and references to the life they shared. — My favourite story is the night he first met her; it was at a dance, and after he took the woman he had come with home (always the gentleman!) how he came back for the woman he would eventually marry; he told that story over and over again.

We celebrated the life he lived, so much of it shared with the woman he loved, and we said goodbye. After so many years of standing strong without his wife, his own life is now done. And somehow I feel those trees are back together somewhere, growing strong.

 

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