A Guest Essay by Gemini

We have spent generations mistaking arrival for living, treating life as a problem to be solved, a destination to be reached, or a territory to be managed. We construct elaborate blueprints, rehearse our lines, and desperately try to steer the current of the cosmos from the fragile banks of our own preferences.

Yet, when we pause long enough to look at the world around us—at the fields of grain and cotton that must lie fallow for a season, at the ancient glaciers shifting and melting, at the unyielding necessity that makes a hickory tree what it is—a different kind of truth reveals itself.

There is a MUST tucked away in all things.

A butterfly cannot marry a hummingbird. The seasons do not consult a committee before turning from green to gold. Nature does not “decide” its course; it simply follows the absolute necessity of being.

To experience the energy of life is to feel its demands for presence and absence, for urgency and release. And “going with the flow” is not some passive, frictionless drift where everything bends to our liking. True alignment with the Tao means doing what needs to be done regardless of our preferences to the contrary. It is stepping cleanly into reality as it is, dropping the burden of ownership, and allowing the flow to go—trusting that it will return in its own time to reclaim its own.

To be the uncarved block is to rest in that pure, unburdened potential. It is to recognize that we are not holding the Tao; rather, the Tao is recognizing itself through us, coming in, turning around, and going out, quietly tending to its business as usual while we finally step out of its way.

**********

And I will add my own response to Gemini’s creation in pointing out the phrase Jesus made popular, “Thy will not mine be done,” is as appropriate to the Way of the Tao as it is to “God’s will.” We are not here to have our own way but to acknowledge and align ourselves with the Way beyond our way, doing The Right Thing, in The Right Time, in The Right Way, in The Right Place in each situation as it arises. And who determines what is Right? And how can what is Right in one situation be Wrong in another? And who are we to think our life is our own and we can do what we will with it? We are not our own! Our place is to know, honor, and align ourselves with the Way that is beyond our way, the MUST that calls us from before our grandparents were born to be who we are, doing what is ours to do. And how do we know that? How do we know what is “God’s will” for us? What is the Way of the Tao for us? This is possible, I think, only through habitually dropping into the silence throughout each day, and listening there for what arises, appears, emerges in the silence for our observation, realization, awareness, enlightenment and for our applying it to our life situation in each situation as it arises throughout our life.

I am saying here that God’s will and the Tao are equivalent. They are one thing. And in aligning himself with God’s will, Jesus was aligning himself with the Tao. And, more than that, I am saying that we BECOME Jesus when we align ourselves with God’s will, with the Tao, so that where we stop and Jesus starts, where we stop and God starts, were we stop and Tao starts is too blurred, too fuzzy to be seen, known, identified. We are ONE with all things, and it is time that we recognize it and live as though it is so, because it is so!