A Living Topiary of Things like the Way of Heaven and the Footgates of Sages.

 

I happened upon Kexon beating his cloak against the rocks by the river, and thought to give him queries of life and justice, temperance and the way of heaven.  However, I noticed the toenails were unkempt, and I wondered if a toilet defined a sage, or as it were, the sage defines his toilet.  Did it reflect some indolence or sloth in his person?

I sang over the water while he continued, while villages women came with their baskets of wash, and is it happened, i was accosted to some extent, and the one of them even condescended to show me the middle way to heaven.

I thought fortune and grace were certainly revealing something to me, and then there was the principate tax evaluator doing a kind of analytic project on how much time a day he spent breathing.  He sat in the sun, pumping his great legs like a sore ass, and trying to tally, so many seconds by so many minutes, into hours, and the waking concourse of reality then tallied, and he would have an analytical, quantified result of something that seemed particularly astronomical.

At prefecture, they had grafted a limb onto the tree, so many, and watching the latest bear fruit, and pondering another, that another would have sort of a faith and hope like the other, and come to bear fruit in the province gardens; this was wear the women bathed, of course, among cherry blossoms and so forth, sort of a living topiary of things like the way of heaven and the gate of sages.

I was feeling my rice wine and tooting from a reed, perhaps silly so, and villagers came and wanted to ask of the way of heaven, and how to hold air inside one's clenched fist.  I was drunk enough to entertain the notion that I could spontaneously answer such profound questions; however, I broke into song, forgetting for the moment the substance and issue of their questions.

I looked to the sky, and it seemed like even the sky was smiling: indeed, I was partly in my cups, as it were.

It seems that it is as was said, that one can say a million things about the tao is NOT, but to grasp the tow is to hold fresh air tightly in one's hand like a fading daydream.  One can say so much of what goes against the tao, while the tao itself is all around, and even, whether realized or not, inside of us all, that little sliver whisper of the way of heaven.