Happy Thursday! It’s been a good week around here. We got the two newest raised beds set into the ground and I got some of my tomato seedlings planted. I hope the late planting doesn’t stunt their growth. Sometimes it comes down to the best you can do is the best you can do, right? I’m ever so thankful to have such a helpful, handy partner in life. Alone, it would be too much, for sure.
That seems to be a nice segue into my topic for this post, which is based on chapter 11 from the Tao te Ching. If you are new here and to give you a bit of background, I am reading the Tao and providing my thoughts on each chapter as I go along. There are three versions that I am reading. Sometimes this ancient work of spirituality doesn’t make sense to me and I am hoping that getting my thoughts down “on paper” will help me figure it out.
Each of the versions reads pretty closely to each other (to me) for this chapter.
The first line from the Mitchell version for this chapter goes like this:
“We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that make the wagon move.”
The second line, from the Legge version (this is a free online translation):
“Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends.”
That might give you the gist of this chapter. To me it is saying that many things might come together to make something and the usefulness of what they end up creating depends on something entirely different than the parts or materials used. And more specifically, sometimes the outcome just helps to make use of something that was already there. If we build a house out of materials, it is the space inside that is useful for us. The space was already there. The walls, floor, and roof make it useful.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
I think the point of this chapter is summed up by the last line in the Jankel version:
“Thus, we acquire substance, but the use of the substance comes from the void.”
I may be missing the true, fine point of this chapter. I have a hard time separating the two things: the materials used and the emptiness that is the useful outcome. They go together and you can’t have one without the other.
The Jankel version has a second interpretation (as he does for each chapter), which refers to the “greater whole” rather than the “void” or the “empty space”. I like this better. It says to me that nothing can be its best in isolation. It’s only when things come together for a common purpose that it can be complete.
So that is quite enough deep thinking for one evening. What are you thinking about today?
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