dao dipper

dipper Bamboo dipper, granite basin. Crust of ice over inky reservoir. Moon shimmers in the dipper Until fullness drains away. Some people are like dippers. No matter what they try to gather up, it ends up flowing out again. For such people it is exceedingly difficult to accumulate anything in life. If you are like the dipper, that is all the more reason to concentrate the resources that you have. Poverty of any kind need not be a deterrent if you know how to utilize the wealth you possess. You must embrace your fate, work with it, and take advantage of it. Ultimately, we cannot truly grasp anything permanently in life. We are born naked, we die naked, and in point of fact we live naked. What we take to us—our clothes, our wealth, our relationships—are all external to us. They are easily taken away from us by bruising fate. We try to internalize our experiences and our understanding. Even that can be taken away by stress, senility, poor memory, disorganized thinking, drugs, or shock. Truly, we are all dippers. The little that life offers us dribbles away. Perhaps even the poorest of situations is rich, because all the futility of life leads us to embrace Tao. After all, it is bigger than all infinities and more subtle than the slightest wisp. To feel it requires great strength. To sense it requires a dragonfly’s delicacy. When you tire of trying to hold on to life, you will find the means to enter Tao. dipper 365 Tao daily meditations Deng Ming-Dao (author) ISBN 0-06-250223-9 duckdaotsu.org duckdaotsu blog tao hub support sustain recommended reading** Thatched Cottage of Dadi 1942 by Fu Bao Shi **Suggested reading of daoist texts ancient poetry and contemporary Chinese literature is available at the site. receive a full HTML copy of the daily meditation sent directly to your inbox, please send a note with the words "subscribe tao" in the subject line to duckdaotsu