Our minds are routinely preoccupied with the ornaments of our egoic existence, and the meanings we assign to it. Yet if we relax our hold on those meanings we drop into the original space of our being, only to discover it is the space we have always inhabited. This original spaciousness of being is the space of “things as they are,” perfectly rising and falling, before we assign our meanings. And, whether or not the mind concurs, that space is always and already holding us.
Thus, not by meaning—not by virtue of all the meanings we assign to things; nor by meaning to do it—but by an essential laziness (as the Taoists might be fond of saying), we enjoy moment by moment the original space that is beyond all striving and beyond all egoic necessity. Of this laziness the ancient poet Tao Yuan-Ming writes, “Leaning on elbows, we shall not harm the inward wholeness.” And, “If you can see how much height fills whatever you do, what need have you to climb the sacred mountains?”
Leaning on elbows, reclining in the Tao, no sacred pose or effort is required to force or resist what is already so. The moon doesn’t struggle to retain its shape, yet its nature is ever whole. As in the tai chi circle, perfect fullness contains the essence of its own transformation and demise, which in turn contains the seed of future ripeness.
So are we able to sit in the late-summer meadow as the tide of ripeness embraces and is swept by the new tide of decline. The perfumes of blossom and of birth have long been replaced by the perfume of summer grasses and of growth; and now the perfume of ripeness embraces the perfume of passing. The fragrance of rise greets with relaxed and familial love the fragrance of return. And every passing perfume lingers here a while for our enjoyment, but is not graspable; just as the finest incense is not truly tasted by “breathing deeply,” but by letting it be.
It is no longer a matter of externals or of ornamentals, or of the form and color of things; but of the essential and inward familiarity of being at home in our own skin. The whole of being and becoming is revealed as that same skin, familiar to our touch, in the laziness of the late-summer meadow. We already occupy our place, both beyond and within time and change, completely; not by grasping nor by any necessity, and not by anything that is needed to be known.