i love words. i love paraphrases. and i love it when something beautiful lands because such things are possible and, because, for all our ignorance, often, we are sage beyond conception and in it, perfect even as we think ourselves most pitiful and impossible.
here, the gift and its ancestor…
not-knowing is true knowledge.
Presuming to know is a disease.
First realize that you are sick;
then you can move toward health.
The Master is her own physician.
She has healed herself of all knowing.
Thus she is truly whole.ttc 71
Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.
The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 71
i will add briefly that i smile to make a new friend. if you read here, you know how i celebrate such things, and in them, glory and delight in all the multiverse of possibility that remains and shimmers, shines so long as i will refuse to set labels on any of it.
my last disaster rose because i refused to set labels and another insisted on them… though not as identifiers, rather, as dubifiers. promises not to be, rather than to be.
it was no less possible. or ruinous.
one of many lessons in it has been to be defiantly insistent upon label’s lacking. the stubbornness for such a thing has grown exponentially in the face of that one’s passing.
i will not make the same mistake again.
but in this moment, the tenderness and delight rise for a quote given in paraphrase, or perhaps translation, that in literalness not only fails to lose meaning but gains still more.
a kind gift from a new friend, and received with humble surprise and a soft thankfulness that it is possible to be unconstrained… here… now… free.
smile. smile. smile.