Introduction

This is my first and perhaps last full length work of fiction. My intention in presentation was not that the story should be dissected and picked apart to find any “inner meaning”, nor was I attempting to create any literary masterpiece. Hopefully, if I have achieved my objective, the words will merely dance off the page in playful exuberance and softly whisper to you. So, read it lightly, and I hope that you enjoy the reading as much as I enjoyed the writing.

Sincerely ,

wayfarer

Forward: The Old Man and Me

I had met the old man when I worked as a sack boy at Hodgkin’s Grocery Store. He would always schedule his shopping for right about the time I would get off work and offer me a cup of coffee if I would go along with him and put away the groceries. After I went to work at the warehouse, I didn’t stop taking him to the store and putting away groceries once or twice a week for him. I would always stay late into the evening visiting and helping the old man with cleaning and whatever else he may need done around the place. I had grown fond of the old man and enjoyed our conversations immensely. On grocery day when I’d show up in that old beat up truck to get him, his eyes would be glimmering just a bit. This told me the old man had gotten rather fond of me, as well.

The evenings I spent visiting with the old man had become my favorite nights of the week. His humorous yet stern demeanor and country dialect had grown on me. His little snippets of backwoods wisdom had infected my thinking and I often found myself doing or saying things that directly reflected the old man. Although he seldom entered into discussion much more serious than basketball championships or the latest events in Washington that he learned from the news programs, sometimes the old man would spit out a line of witticisms that would strike me as extremely profound. Though they were usually few and far between, these moments of insight from the old man would continue to have a lasting effect on me.

© 2005 wayfarer

In the Taoist philosophy there is a concept called Wu-Wei. Wu-Wei can be translated as “without action”, or “non action”, but I think a better translation as concerns the intent of the words would be “effortless action”. Wu Wei is the sort of action that you see a highly skilled athlete demonstrate. If you go to a demonstration of the martial art of Aikido, you will see it personified perhaps better than anywhere else. The Aikido practitioner uses such elegant movement and astounding timing, it seems as if he is doing nothing at all. He is trained to use the effort of his opponent to dislodge any defensive, and then to harness that very effort put forth by his opponent against him to lodge an almost undefeatable offensive series. I have with my own eyes witnessed a very small and petitely built woman place a two hundred pound man squarely on his seat and commence to twist him up like a pretzel using these techniques.

Another case for Wu Wei would be the artistry of Michael Jordan. When he took to the basketball court and found his zone, he put on a display of seemingly superhuman feats. His movements were subtle, his focus on the ball and basket were unshakable. He utilized the other four men who shared the court with him in such a way that even their actions became perfectly timed with his so that it seemed as if all five men were just an extension of one man’s actions. Everything he did on a basketball court was done with a seemingly supernatural knowledge. We watched him fly, we watched him place people out of his way without ever laying a hand on them. When Jordan found his zone he was unshakeable and unbeatable.

Wu Wei is not limited to physical action, however. There is also the “effortless action” of thinking. The willingness to allow one’s mind to think intuitively. The natural flow of one’s thoughts that occurs when we aren’t trying to be overly analytical about anything. Just thinking the way we think and not putting any conceptualized notion behind it we can see the world as it truly is; the world that lies beyond the borders of our definitions of it. When our thinking is not obstructed, it naturally goes into a place we can not touch. It sees things for what they are and not what we want them to be. When a person allows their mind to think without laboriously trying to dissect every little thing the world will be revealed to them in a way that they have never seen it before. In the words of William Shakespeare “There are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamed of in your philosophy.”

When we learn how to think effortlessly, without the burden of preconception we can find the potential of our mind in full bloom. The mistake that most of us make, and I am no exception, is focusing all the creative power in our minds on one point and trying to get there. Trying is the most destructive thing a person can do to themselves. Trying to accomplish something places all the effort on the end result and causes you to rush through the process of doing to get to the end. All the focus that we put on beginnings and endings is what puts us off from ever accomplishing lasting and positive results. When in the act of doing anything one should allow their minds to just be focused on the thought processes that go into accomplishing the goal. Once you focus on one particular aspect of the thing you are doing your actions become clumsy and you stumble and falter. If you just allow your mind to take over and do the thing intuitively without putting forth all that strenuous effort, you find that your body flows, you mind flows, and your very actions flow forward to the fruition of the thing you were doing.

Wu Wei can be seen in the most mundane of things. From a painter who allows the brush to flow over the canvas creating an eerily real landscape, to a poet placing pen to paper and allowing the words to fall out onto the page in beautifully descriptive passages that go beyond the meanings of the words written. A jazz band improvising on a riff and finding the flow and breath of each other, becoming a singular, organic being. In my estimation, Wu Wei is nothing but an instinctual way of thinking and doing. It is us being the way nature intended us to be. No effort in the world can compare to effortless effort. It is what the Taoist philosophers meant when they told us to be like water. When things are accomplished in this manner, nothing is ever disturbed in the world, and all things remain at peace.

I just watched the movie “March of the Penguins” and I have to say I loved this film. The filmmakers did an excellent job of capturing these cute and complex creatures’ struggle to preserve their species. The narration provided by Morgan Freeman is great, and whoever wrote it was very good. I sat in awe at the beauty and scope with which the film was shot; wide angle shots capturing the simultaneously beautiful and forbidding Antarctic landscape. In short, it is a beautiful spectacle and in my humble opinion a very entertaining and informative movie, and if you have not seen it, you should. I watched as these penguins came up from the ocean on to the ice and began a trek across the white landscape toward their breeding ground. Nothing stood in their way as their navigation skills were put to the test by an ever changing landscape. These little persevering creatures go on however, and eventually find their destination. From all over the continent and virtually at the same time thousands of birds arrive at the place that they were all born. I was amazed at this concept.

The movie goes on to show the trials and tribulations of being a very small bird in a very cold and harsh environment trying to procreate. Each female bird only lays one egg per mating season. If that egg is lost, then the trek across the continent is in vain. The amazing thing to me about all of this is the thought that these birds do this because they know the ice in this particular area is thicker, lessening the chances of their babies falling through the ice. These penguins go through great pains and hardships that even we would shy away from simply for the survival of the species. And their journey is quite remarkable.

Now, as I was watching these cute little birds battling it out against this harsh and unforgiving environment, I found my mind waxing philosophical. The first thing I thought of was how much a flock of a thousand penguins walking across an icy landscape resembled the yin and yang wall paper I had on this site the other day. Then, I started thinking about our species. I began to speculate once again about how it seems to be our nature to remove ourselves from our nature. We don’t want to be natural things in a natural world. We want to be special and different from the world around us. We have gone to great lengths to create intricate languages so we can use the fact that we created intricate languages to convince ourselves that we are apart from the natural world. (Have you ever wondered if penguins are impressed that we can talk a blue streak and never get anything accomplished?) I believe that if some major catastrophic event such as Noah’s flood or the giant meteor were to happen right now, humanity would be in dire straits. We could not survive in our comfortable, balmy environment without the use of electricity and all these other amenities. It is, to me, a sad irony that a little bird can live in an environment where the average temperature is a balmy 58 degrees below zero, while the self appointed “master species” does not fare too well in temperatures much cooler than 70 above. In short, if our little bubble that we’ve constructed around ourselves ever gets popped, we could be at a slight disadvantage against Mother Nature’s fury.

Where I think we made the biggest mistake is in allowing the knowledge we gained of ourselves through communication to instill in us the thought that we are somehow bigger than the world around us. We think everything that we conjure up has to be accurate because we conjured it up in our minds and we are the only beings that we know of that are able to conjure up things in our minds. I think we have allowed ourselves too much leeway here. We have gone from a purely natural organic creature to the most unnatural beast that has ever darkened this planet (at least in the history of the planet that I know). We use the excuse that we are conscious (a concept created by the human mind) so we must have free reign over the planet. We have actually constructed the fallacy in our collective minds that we can beat nature. I think we think too much.

There is one purpose for humanity, as I see it. It is the same purpose that every other species has on this planet. Procreation and acquisition of food. Instead we have allowed ourselves to be tricked into thinking we rule the planet and therefore we have no place in nature. We have gone through such great lengths to remove ourselves from nature and being natural we have even invented ways to make plant life appear unnatural in our little bubble. (When’s the last time you went walking through the woods and observed a square bush?) The point I am making with all of this is simply to say that when you really get down to the brass tacks of our little situation you find that all these questions we ask ourselves concerning our “place” come from one place; our minds. We have sat around, amazed and in awe of our own ability to form languages, and decided that we were not of nature because we can talk. Once we decided we weren’t of nature, we had to sit around and decide what we were and where we came from. While all this was going on we created a bubble around us and removed ourselves from our real life support system in lieu of one that will inevitably crash. In our arrogance we think our intellect (yes, yet another human concept) will save us from the most horrendous of natural disasters. We have placed so much faith in our little brains that we “know” it will save us. Of course we “know” it will save us. It’s the brain that we are doing the “knowing” with; the very same one that got us into the mess.

I have maintained for quite some time that humanity is on the brink of overpopulating the Earth. Overpopulation of any species is a serious and deadly phenomenon. Nature has a way of dealing with it, though. The penguins (remember the penguins? This was a post about penguins!) don’t all make it in their quest to procreate. In fact, quite a few of them don’t survive the winter. The natural process dictates that some make it and some don’t. This is life in the natural fast lane, and it is a big reason why humanity got off the freeway. In nature, humanity would be put in the same boat with penguins in that we would actually have to fight in order to reproduce and eat. In our natural state, we wouldn’t have guns to kill food (or each other) from a safe distance. We would be at odds with nature in a battle for survival. And the shape that humanity is in right now would stack the odds greatly in nature’s favor. We have settled ourselves into our little bubble, all snug and secure in our unnatural square houses, with the square bushes outside the square windows that look out upon our neatly compartmentalized and segmented world.

Penguins don’t worry themselves too much with philosophical concepts (or at least as far as I can tell). They are content to do what nature tells them to and get on with it. Their species has survived just fine in an environment that is extremely harsh and unforgiving for a very, very long time. They don’t shake things up (well, okay, the occasional tail feather when they’re doing that cute little “penguin boogie”), and life goes on just fine for them. I think there’s a lot to learn from penguins.

Consciousness floating

Thinking itself into existence

Fading out

Fading in

Never faltering, never failing

Universal and infinite

In all, of all

Questioning itself

Always needing to know

Boundaries constructed

Of its own volition

Are the only things that

Keep it from its goal

Fading in

Fading out

Thinking itself out of existence

Consciousness floating

Along a rocky path I walk

With a bubbling stream flowing beside me

I see a giant hill looming

Like an ancient beast ahead

And feel the smallness that I am

I have heard it said that the universe is infinite

But, somehow, we are the keepers of a special place

Within infinity

I wonder how it is that a small colony of ants

In a far corner of an infinite universe

Could be so important?

wayf