The Tao of Family

By Adam Rocinante

Never, has the living organism of Family been more under siege; more dispensable or irrelevant, as though its extinction were part of a final solution in some futuristic, grand scheme unfolding like the Second Coming. We are not bad people. Having been poisoned at the wishing well of desire, we are ships without a sail – meandering aimlessly…and thirsty.
Fundamental matters of conduct and conscience have long been exported to the realms of church and family, but both have withered beneath the weight – not because they are unworthy but rather because they have been weathered by neglect. The church has its saviors and advocates; the family has neither. But there is a window.
Taoism is not a religion; it does not parade a deity, it does not cleave us into 'chosen' groups and nobody is going to hell for dismissing it all together. Neither is The Tao of Family a novel, it is a tool; a method that requires your unique fingerprint to be understood and useful. It is not 'preachy' – there are not rights and wrongs, but rather decisions to be made and courses to be charted, each with a consequence.
Each day, we encounter quandaries that baffle us and entrap us within webs of confusion and stress – no shame here, we are only human and function within
the boundaries of knowledge and limited experience. The Tao of Family expands these boundaries but needs your individual signature to do so – your dilemma; the circumstance that swirls unresolved within the privacy of your own mind. You provide the raft; The Tao of Family supplies the winds but be mindful of the shoals.
Perhaps disappointing is that the book does not supply answers, only directions and methods which leave you adrift, but this time with a compass and a torch. Within
the hold of this ship is precious cargo, sufficient for the voyage but in dire need of a captain. Toss the coins (they're only coins), build your hexagram (it's just a vessel), and steer your course (it's only life). Bon voyage!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543942316

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Adam Rocinante

ISBN: 978-1-5439423-1-6

To Father and Mother

For Diane

Whatever else be true, the Self shines by its own light.

- BRIHADARANYAKA UPANISHAD

Prologue

Just as there are ninety-two properties that constitute the entirety of the physical universe, there are sixty-four permutations which comprise the entirety of human experience. In their composite, the former is known as The Periodic Table of the Elements, the latter The Tao.

When opening the door of the ‘Table’, one is flooded with the orgasmic biodiversity of the natural world. In every conceivable combination, from the tiniest protons and quarks to the spectacular explosion of the stellar universe we are left spellbound and overwhelmed by his sheer expanse, complexity and the awesome beauty of that which we struggle to comprehend.

When opening the door of the ’Tao’, we become bathed in the fluid reality of our substance as sentient beings. The Tao flows to the fissures of our beliefs and saturates the membranes of our souls like a tidal wave in Eden; she is at once deep and enduring and then rushing and violent. In grand fusion with the Table, we have named the thing God.

The Tao is the fulcrum of its written history, the I Ching or Book of Changes. The origin of the I Ching is obscured within the mist of the third millennia BC, thereafter molded, crafted, sculpted and refined by numerous eastern dynasties, luminaries and philosophers including Lao-tse and Confucius. While it’s enduring wisdom permeates the social customs, political gambits, meal preparations, medicinal applications and cognitive discourse of the majority of mankind, only a trickle of this wisdom has escaped to the western world. This is a tragedy in need of repair, thus, in sober and recoiling reaction is the Tao of Family. The Tao of Family is a translation of a translation of a translation ad infinitum for thousands of years, intended as a distillate made palatable to those who seek escape from the ‘tyranny of events’ that envelope us.

Disbelief is the only reasonable place to begin. Disbelief is incorrigible and incorruptible. Disbelief is clean of knowledge and knowing, creating space and the capacity for wonder. An illusion is a slight of mind done to us by others; a delusion is a slight of mind done by our self upon our self so it is good and it is healthy to be disillusioned, and as such it needs to be said that this is the place to begin and having been said, it is proper to acknowledge that there is a dark side of the moon and dreams in hieroglyphics, and rumors of unicorns but there is no such thing as prologue. That this revelation is enveloped in a prologue is of course contradictory; yes. That it is illusory; yes. That it is disillusioning; yes.

We are the orphans of prophets. We do not languish because of the presence of malignancy, we famish under the paucity of knowing; too many orphans, too few prophets. That which follows is not prophecy and the composer certainly not a prophet; both manifestations are the prerogative of the reader, but the reader is enjoined to deny fission for only a moment to create the vacancy unto which the raw materials can combine and thereupon create the sacred equation. We are ninety-two elements and we are the Tao. All is all; nothing more and nothing less. Praise be the limitations of the infinite; enough is plenty. And praise be unto those who find repose in plentitude. From such ordinary soil are prophets composed. From such ordinary prophets are orphans consoled.

Forward

The Tao is not a religion, nor does it direct one toward what to believe but rather complements existing beliefs, offering portals I would suggest where none previously seemed to exist. It has neither color nor odor and one cannot touch it – it contains nothing while omitting nothing. It provides counsel not answers and in that regard, it may be regarded as useless and summarily dismissed. The Tao offers neither facts nor power to those who embrace it and it is known that many walk away from it in disappointment – He who is against it is not obliged to find it true.

The Tao is a life philosophy that ascended from the I Ching, an oriental text whose origin lies within the dim light of humanity. Some reference the I Ching as, ‘this great and singular book’ that represents an obelisk ‘of living meaning’ while others, ‘a conglomerate of superstition or, at least murk.’ The elegant mind of the quiet poet Hermann Hesse describes it thus:

This Book of Changes has been lying for half a year

in my bedroom and I have never at one time read more

than a single page. When one studies the combinations

or signs, immerses oneself in Ch’ien, the creative principle,

in Sun, the gentle, this is not reading or thinking, but it is

like looking into flowing water or drifting clouds.

Everything is written there that can be thought and lived.

No matter.

The I Ching is concerned with method, the posture of ones relations to others and the form of the ever-changing forces about us, with fortune or misfortune the consequent of our choices. Just as we know of frequencies of light and sound that we cannot perceive, we know of these forces that function upon us as the moon does upon the tides or the sun’s creation of the aurora borealis. They seem random and otherworldly however, and only marginally within our grasp – how do we, for instance, harness ‘opportunity’, and how would we be transformed if indeed we could. We can, at least to the degree that we can proceed in one direction or desist in another; we can free ourselves from the ‘tyranny of events’ that swirl about us like autumn leaves. Once accomplished in The Way, the wheel of existence comes to reflect for us, like the Shroud of Turin, an image of our likeness.

The I Ching grants access to the Tao through an alignment between one’s circumstances at the moment and insights concerning the forces that govern that moment, with sixty-four possible permutations. The moment is, as moments are, snapshots. The quality and potential contained within each moment rises upon the horizon, comes to full influence then fades beneath the glare of the successive moment.

As a ragtag compendium of the I Ching, The Tao of Family is principally a reference tool. While it can be read from front to back if the comfort suits you, its value is diluted by this approach. Seafarers once used a sextant for navigating great oceans fixing upon the stars for orientation, but quickly learned that the stars revolve like a grand pinwheel around a single point of light – the lodestar, Polaris - the North Star. The North Star is no more eloquent than its neighbors, in fact it is difficult to distinguish within the maze of our universe but it has a single defining feature; it does not move. Wherever on the planet you may be, the North Star is fixed in the heavens and can thus provide your location on earth; in the service of orientation, an indispensable feature of life in motion. Once endowed with this singular speck of light, you can begin to navigate the huge chasms of darkness surrounding you and loft your sail into the winds. You can feel the oak of the rudder within your grasp and chart a true destination, fettered only by the waves of change.

The I Ching itself is no more mysterious than the Chinese in which it was originally written, thus requiring translation rather than divination. The Tao of Family is an attempt to provide this translation, using the ‘yellow book’ of Richard Wilhelm as a template and authoritative source. The sovereign principles are presented first and remain faithful to the form and the essence as revealed in the I Ching. They are perhaps upon first acquaintance unsettling because of their tongue, which while having been adopted by English speaks through a dialect of thought that for lack of a better term can be said to be Eastern but I would urge a rejection of this distinction. It is more as if we had savored an exotic fruit for the first time and though deciphering it as foreign, found our tongue thoroughly capable and enchanted by the flavor.

The visual depictions and stories that follow, like the I Ching itself present themselves in the everyday dress of a common person as a kinsman of nature, and as such both subject to and in symbiotic relation with the everlasting transformation we endure day-by-day, moment-by-moment.

The Tao of Family was not written about the family but rather of The Family; not my family but the family - those whose breath we breathe daily as well as she who first arose from all fours to better cradle her offspring, Lucy by name; those of good fortune who we cannot embrace tightly enough and those whose suffering is endurable only because it is not ours; those who murder us and those who we murder, with whom henceforth we are charged to forgive and forget. (I no longer remember – did you kill me or was it I who killed you? Abel asked. Here we are together again, just as we used to be. Now I know for sure you’ve forgiven me, said Cain, because to forget is to have forgiven. I’ll try my best to forget, too. Yes, said Abel, speaking slowly, You’re right. As long as there’s remorse, there’s guilt.). And vengeance.

Inescapably male in its perspective, The Tao of Family was also written of Father; there are fathers without fathers and there are those who had fathers who were never fathered. There are young, childless fathers who long to father and there are aged, solitary fathers who sit in painful bewilderment of times now past. Mostly, there are fathers who walk submerged within the more important affairs of life (or so they are told) who have come to sense that something is amiss; a dizzying asphyxia – the tainting of tribal blood that accrues from being poisoned at the wishing well. Layer by layer, I am all of these fathers.

It is also for the women of these fathers and for those who also sit, quietly or noisily within the void. Whether this comes too soon or too late or just in time I do not know, and I will admit to some discomfort in this regard as I know little of women and grandmothers and daughters. Please forgive me if I regard you as one who is listening in - there are no secrets within these pages, yet it is a matter of privacy and I must trust you with the nakedness revealed as you will see; my adoration of the female, in form and function and sanctity overwhelms all reason but my capacity for trust is a work in progress.

It was written now because when I awoke this morning I found myself closer to my death than my birth. Within this I found both confusion and urgency but I also discovered that I had lost the fear - the fear of being discovered a fool, a circumstance that may eventually be found to be true. But I spoke to an ancient man whose long silver hair lay in rivulets across his pillow within a room dimly lit by the setting sun. I have spoken to him many times throughout my life and he has not once deceived me although, on occasion he has refused to respond. This time, the color had drained from his eyes once sharp and clear as it had from the paper-thin skin that barely concealed his fragile bones. I asked him why all this – the politics and papers, and I saw his little finger twitch. I asked him about the misery of life and the smoldering ruins and the hunger, and he blinked but once. I told him that God was nowhere to be seen and that I’d grown thin of the reasons and tired of the excuses and disgusted by the whimpering sound of my own voice, and I demanded that just cause reveal itself, or else.

Through the small, easterly window of the room I was distracted by sounds of laughter that poured in from the courtyard and looked up to see children frolicking foolishly in the grass. When I looked back, the bed was tightly made with crisp white sheets and military corners; the pillow flat and rectangular with the dusty sheen of weathered marble. Shadows, long and drawn hung within the room like moss dripping from the branches of a southern oak at dusk. It came to me, not me to it; the outermost boundary of waiting had arrived, quietly and without incident, solemn and absolute. Like a dead dog in the road, there was nowhere left to run. The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao. I shall not speak of it again.

Introduction

I’ve been an ancient thing as long as I can remember; probably before that, but I don’t remember. I did boyish things as a boy and then eager, rapid-fire things after that while I burned bright and he had a tough time keeping up, but he made due. Truth is, he was always one step ahead - sometimes out of sight but never gone.

I harbor the belief that all of us were born a certain age and stay that way. Many reach their peak in childhood and were the most marvelous of children; they peaked out early and then endured for the next sixty years or so. Others were mothers or fathers already, inborn with the precious gifts of parenting and thereafter hovering about their children, knowing no other way to be. I can be told otherwise, but I wouldn’t believe it.

While presumed vestigial, I’ve been thinking. People of my age are dropping like flies. If they were celebrities, there would be public memorials and newscasts accompanied by video clips of their touchdowns, rock ‘n roll heyday or years of public service; they were important people – the terminal word being ‘were’. Some leave legacies; all leave ashes, the distinction relevant mostly to the owners of the ashes who would be amused by their mountain of days reduced to a handful of dust, yet they knew. And we know. The ashes themselves are silent on the matter.

Mama did not bear an angry child – there is proof of it. At the mere suggestion she would haul out the super-8 home movie that featured the boy on this fifth birthday racing around the corner of his house, his legs a blur on the pedals of his red tricycle and the propeller on the goofy beanie on his head whirling as though it could propel him into outer space at any moment. The vision of his face proclaimed, This is my day! and so it was as the sun poured down on him alone, and as he sped toward the flowing abundance of gifts and ice cream and as we watched we would all laugh at the goofy beanie and Dad would remind us that we weren’t laughing with me we were laughing at me, and we’d all laugh some more. They’re all dead now. And when I leave my eyes open for too long ice water gushes in as through a torn bulkhead and explodes as it crashes against a soul that, too often, is white hot. There will be ashes for sure, but right now there’s steam.

I don’t much care for ‘experts’ who are usually paid to sell something and besides, I seldom stop for directions and usually tune out people who are trying to tell me how to run my life. But it seems dishonest somehow and this isn’t about any of that. It’s about decades of time spent with parents and children in a private office, sealed off from the eyes of neighbors and the tongues of coworkers. It’s about husbands becoming strangers to their wives and children becoming strangers to their parents and everyone becoming a stranger to their self. And it’s about the long-term result of trading dollars for dimes and it’s about the space once filled with nourishment that’s now just filled with space, dissolving; not the presence of something evil but rather the absence of something essential.

Parents may howl in protest at the following, but I stand by it – children as a whole are not particularly creative, they are imitators. Usually when we are impressed by a child’s creativity, it’s not the painting or the story or the musical piece that is creative but rather that a child produced it. I would underscore this by stating an absolute - that I have never seen a child’s behavior that was not modeled by the adult world. And much of this is wondrous, like watching a circus parade with the clowns and the music and the elephants, and the zebras pulling the brightly spangled wagons with the roaring tigers but when the crowd goes home, I’m the one left leaning on the shovel.

It may be said that I have a skewed perspective. After all, there is an occupational hazard in working day in and day out with troubled children and after a lifetime of it, this may be a bad time to realize that I should have been a plumber, or shouldn’t have been a parent. Fellow clinicians would say that when you take it home with you it’s time for a break, which is wise counsel, but the rub is that, ‘kids are like a handful of frogs in a roomful of turtles’ – they’re everywhere! Certainly, I make a distinction between my blood children and the children of others but like most of my fellow humans, that distinction is frequently blurred; I know of very few people who wouldn’t reactively risk their life for the life of another’s child - we just do stuff like that. Then there’s the membrane.

There seems to be a filter, a membrane of sorts; thicker in some and thinner in others that screens things out – the offensive and the painful; swastikas, and kids crawling with flies and crucifixes stuck in the gully by a hairpin turn on a country road, the ones with plastic flowers that wail endlessly until we filter it out or simply don’t let it in. It’s like psychological skin, and for some of us it’s nearly transparent.

Becoming jaded must be a godsend for many but for a mother or a father it’s verboten and anyway, I can’t get away with it. I know that anger comes from several places; injustices or the need for self-defense and we learn a bunch of it as a tactic for getting our way, but most of it comes from fear, propelled by pain. And it’s bad enough to think of myself as an angry brute but worse still to admit to a penetrating fear that seems more consumptive by the day. Death? The wrath of God? Nuclear War? Not even close.

Before my eyes, I see the withered remnant of family; not my family or your family but the family looking as though they’d just stepped through the gates of Auschwitz. Tired and drawn and vacant, and stunned with disbelief at the two remaining options before them – they can have the creature comforts, or they can have a breast-fed family; pick one. And above their heads the twisted illusion, Arbeit Macht Frei; ‘work will make you free’, as though the greatest evil facing mankind is the laziness of the common person. In fact, for most there is no more tyrannical environment than the workplace; never have so many labored so long to produce so little of value and its ever-increasing seepage into the family space/time is the most corrosive element of modern day living. The calling that awaits us at home dwarfs whatever may be produced on the assembly line and that the latter wrings us dry of the former is the greatest perversity of our day. But I make a decent living, my kids eat well and when the wolves howl they do so from a distance – why should I care?

Well, it’s the membrane again. As a professional, I’m not supposed to use certain words, so I do hope you won’t tell – It’s CRAZY (Not Otherwise Specified) to sit in the shade of an oak while warming my hands by the heat of burning acorns. The story goes that in colonial times there was a test for determining insanity. The accused person would be brought to the town square in which there stood a large wooden vat of water, at the bottom of which was a spigot. On the spigot hung a bucket and in the bucket there was a ladle. The spigot was opened, which allowed water to gush into the bucket and the accused was told, under penalty of fire, not to allow the bucket to overflow. No matter how furiously the accused ladled the water from the bucket, he was judged insane if he failed to turn off the spigot! Why should I care? – because this is not a culture of arranged marriages; my children and yours will tell us that they will marry whomever they damn well please, and because you and I are one sweaty night away from an entwined gene pool and because I don’t want to barbeque with crazy in-laws, and because the time is upon us.

Within this time, insurance companies have reduced the concept of family to a marketing slogan and prey upon the hunger within us to join their family. We’re encouraged to despise the slovenly stereotype of welfare mothers with barely a glance given to the fathers who abandon their children by the millions and burn the dreams she had of family to a dry ash while her babies plunder the streets like packs of wild dogs. Like Vietnam, the average age of our casualties in the war on drugs is nineteen; we watch these big kids reduced to vermin on our fifty-inch TV’s and endure the scene of helicopters spraying poison on the peasant crops of Bogotá, with the implicit understanding I must assume that the Columbian military can do likewise to the tobacco crops of Virginia. With a few more zeroes and ones, we can finally calibrate the Hubbell telescope to peek into God’s bathroom and prove once and for all that He’s just another Bozo on this bus. I’m old and I’m poor and I’m tired…and I’m pissed.

I needed that.

You would have guessed it anyway. Unpurged, it would have gurgled up like magma in a field of daisies, hissing and vile. But with time, perhaps oddly, most of life’s great toxins can become more of a perturbance than a grind. In most cases, we can relegate them to the uncomfortable truth that as a specie we have the tendency to shit where we eat - the creation of deities who knee-groin one another and wrestle in the gravel like teenagers in pursuit of female spoils; the distillation of business to a substance once reserved for the mafioso to cloak depravity in the astute threads of ‘business’; unbridled greed masquerading as ‘supply and demand’; the beguiling siren of usury who applies her makeup while coiling about our young, squeezing them of their breath as they flounder from our nest with ponderous debt and credit score tattoos on their arms like Nazi captives; the machines of expediency great and small which ‘save time’ by compressing it into explosive little balls; speaking brazenly as did Melville’s deranged Ahab ‘All my means and methods are sane: my purpose is mad’

I am, I am told, not in my own best interest and left to my own devices I would quickly run amok. I must be placed on a wheel like a hamster and pitted against my fellow hamsters or they’ll have me for dinner. I must be led to the well and forced to drink or else become an atheist or a gentile, or an infidel or any of those beyond my chosen tribe unworthy of existence. I must offer sacrifices of gold to bloodlines purer than my own because if I do not I will starve or be cast into an eternity of burning sulfur or be marched to the field and shot through the head, the only bequest to my children that the potatoes beneath become particularly succulent.

I can live with this because I can swallow something, snort something, inject something or just have a glass of wine to clip the spikes in my anxiety, move to the country and pretend that it’s all so very far away. But how far away is away? Those in our culture consume more pain killers and antidepressants than everyone else on the planet combined. Run to where? Away?

I can live with this because I must; I couldn’t amass an army if my life depended upon it. And I am young only when compared to quartz; in no time at all I’ll be dead. Live with it, yes but silently, no. I choose not to discover my voice posthumously. This is where the membrane comes in…therefore the fear.

Therefore, the fire. The very distinction that has peeled the face from my body is that which kindles the remaining spirit. I may rise to greatness if driven by war or hunger, but I will never aspire to it, preferring instead to raise children who are more than I am. I am a common man and worldly stupid, but I have been blessed by the insights of thousands of children and parents. Not one has complained of his failure to grasp mathematics, program their gizmos or the lack of sufficient technology in their lives – not one. Some, especially the children want things that they should not have or which we are ill prepared to give them, usually the result of economic pedophilia that cultivates mindless consumptive patterns or chemical dependency. The older ones feel life’s magic slips-sliding away – they went to bed one evening as ‘the hope of tomorrow’ and awoke as objects of ‘brand loyalty’ and rooks on the chessboard of power mongers. The parents are just tired. More often than not, they’ve spent the day beneath the wheel of the object they produce with half hour lunch hours and flat tires resulting in the lashing of an ‘occurrence’; four of which will result in termination – they will leave, the machines will stay.

Most of us have more than a passing acquaintance with the sense that life is spinning out of control. According to our temperament, we either express this out, through explosive acts of anger and frustration – You’re to blame - or we express it in, through acts of implosion - sadness or guilt or an emptiness that echoes in a withering voice, It’s me. As tempting as it may be to find the root of this in some grand conspiracy, that way of thinking is nonsense – it is not by design but rather by default; not the presence of something bad but rather the absence of something essential.

In his brutally accurate discourse on the use of political power, The Prince, Machiavelli was perfectly aware that morality too has its role, but it does not exist, never did and never will, at the cold core of political behavior. Are they ‘to blame’? Yes! – the self-serving extinction of independent and interdependent life skills in favor of cultivated dependency, the coagulation of corporate control over all life-sustaining activities, and the perpetual furnaces of war that are stoked with our children, etc., etc., etc., are, by design, a celebration of the nature within us to eat our fellow man.

Are we to blame? – Yes! - in that we do not have a single nature but rather many, the most profound of which arises when the mother and father within us are called upon - the safety of our children, a neighbor’s house fire, 9/11. Moreover, it is we who choose, not they; who is truly dependent upon whom? But when a choice is forced, is it still a choice? The current swing of the pendulum is indeed discouraging, but pendulums swing in both directions. Our collective imprint can reflect whatever nature we choose and value the most – were it not for the militaristic environment in which he lived, Alexander the Great would merely have been remembered as Alexander the Wife Beater, or most likely, not remembered at all. It also needs to be stated that for the earth, the seas, the air that we breathe and the children that we nurture, time is truly of the essence. Sometimes, pendulums gasp for time and then…don’t swing at all.

‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesars’, the cold core of political behavior – it corrodes the container in which it is carried. Gladly give it unto Caesar if he insists. With diligence and sincerity, we can come to discern the whisperings of grace from the tornado sirens of eternal damnation, the simple earthen path of heart from the superhighways of power. The heart does not exist at the bottom of us but rather at our center. This center, this heart from which the lifeblood originates is neither within the individual nor within the State, it is within the Family. If we are to wrap ourselves in a flag may it be that of the family, and may its color be brilliant white.

I do not need another God nor a stairway to heaven – I am convinced that He awaits me and that the steps will arise as though of their own accord if only I can decipher vices from virtues, tiny acts of goodness from tiny acts of barbarism within my daily affairs - that moment by moment tiptoeing which occurs too often within a darkened cluttered room; the pilgrimage my children observe before embarking on their own. I am convinced as well that out there, the race belongs to the cunning and the fleet and that I am not made of such material. In comparison, my ways are homely and plodding and more inclined to haul wood to the fire and buckets from the well; one of the teeming masses; a speck in the bewildered herd. I am a family man - that nondescript fellow in greens and browns who is barely distinguishable in mannerism from the water and wind that surrounds him; I make a wicked BBQ, take my turn when the kid has a nightmare and rise from dead sleep to dead alert when the alarm goes off. I am usually an embarrassment to my children and a disappointment to my wife but I find comfort when my back is against the cold; it suits me well it does, and I’ve learned the language – ‘solutions as the cause of all problems’; ‘doors that swing both ways’; ‘enough is plenty’; ‘the motion’; ‘balance’; ‘Family’ – it’s all come home to roost.

I know nothing of wisdom other than where He awaits in exile, on a bearing of true north. I have a map given to me by an eternal elder; it displays deep rivers and misty valleys and great mountains and parched deserts and vast savannas under the azure glaze of a seamless sky. I offer it up because the sands are shifting beneath my feet and because I cannot take it with me; it does not belong to me – as an inheritance, it is an heirloom rightly destined for my children and theirs, our grandchildren and theirs.

At last, I am not in a position to place demands, but if I may advise on a single point – be prudent with your beliefs, even in that which follows. It is a true footpath but merely a byway and the attachment to a belief may strand you where you stand, for better or worse. Scatter your beliefs lightly if you must as a scent trail for others, perhaps to emphasize or forewarn. But preserve the bulk as nourishment for you and yours; they will need the strength that comes from you alone and they will suckle from it as do fawns from a doe. Invariably, they will want to know. And from sacred fidelity, we are beneath the wheel of a tender obligation to entwine with their vision:

-      What is the object of being?

-      The object of being is love.

-      What is the method of love?

-      The method of love is grace.

-      And what of the substance of grace?

-      The substance of grace is beauty.

-      Where is such a substance?

-      Such a substance is within.

-      How does one know the substance?

-      The substance is beautiful.

-      And if I become beautiful?

-      You will be carried upon grace.

-      And if I am thus carried?

-      You will love and be loved.

-      And if…?

-      Yes!

The Method of the Reading

The Tao of Family is overly simplified as a ‘book’ and I am silent on the use of the I Ching or these readings as an oracle. Prophesy is a meandering of the imagination, but a revelation of the moment is not prophesy, it is illumination – the emergence of light within the shadow of our lives. Our waking and sleeping moments are biorhythms that do not impress time itself; time runs as a great river with or without our presence or permission. It has been said that life can only be understood backwards but has to be lived forward. It is accurate that the energy of life is concentrated in the moment, but the moment is dynamic; a conglomerate of memory, current experience and forward momentum. Our momentary experience resonates in the present, echoes within the past and transmits to the future – when asked what we will do tomorrow, we reach into the past for an answer and foresee that the children are at the kitchen table and the car is where we left it; in this regard, time is kind to us. Yesterday bleeds into today and today will bleed into tomorrow, each with their own distinction and quality, both of which can be illuminated, although the illumination fades when time is stretched thin - our own childhoods are preserved only in snapshots and our souls; we seldom recognize the photos of our great grandparents and only children are sure of who they will be when they grow up. If you want to hear God laugh, tell Her your plan.

Orthodox consultation of the I Ching involves the reading of yarrow sticks but few of us have these lying about so this is not practical. But there are alternatives.

The western mind is accustomed to reading from left to right, from the first page to the last. The Tao of Family can be read in that order and in so doing, capture the full cycle of possibilities available. While doing so however, the reader (each unto their own) will experience an intensity that will first wax then wane, like the sun’s brilliance when walking an entire day from dawn until dusk. That waxing and waning of intensity identifies the moment and the conditions governing that moment within the life of that individual at that point in time. A particular passage will seem filled with meaning and gravity while those preceding or succeeding it may not. And this changes day to day as does your position within time and space. There is another way, neither better nor worse but rather a focus upon the reigning conditions of circumstance within a given time – your time; a way to coalesce the moment to a single ray of light. So now to a most serious game.

The illumination cannot be summed forth with wishing or thinking regardless of the purity of the faith or the weight of the thought, but it is available through the feather-light process of devotion and the temporary surrender of belief – you will build a hexagram. A hexagram is a symbolic representation of one of the sixty-four life permutations contained in the I Ching. It is composed of a series of six lines, broken and unbroken that serve to guide the journey. Hold three coins of identical denomination within a tightly closed fist. Close your eyes to blind you to external distraction and flow the moment to the coins; the condition of the day, the circumstance that surrounds you, the muddle desperately in need of clarity. Do not ask ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions but rather seek guidance regarding the nature of the circumstance and the path to walk upon. Infuse the coins with this substance and weight, and at the height of this weight (you will feel this) drop the coins upon a flat surface. Read the coins and begin building the hexagram from the bottom up (draw them on paper). Three heads = a solid line, three tails = a broken line (mark these with an asterisk – more on this momentarily); two heads and one tail = an unbroken line and two tails and one head = a broken line. Maintaining concentration do this six times until your hexagram is complete, then find your hexagram on the ‘Indicia’ page, which provides a chapter number that will lead you to the consult; the essence of the moment. Absorb this consult fully before approaching the visual depiction and the tandem story that follows, which intends merely to add dimension and color to the essence for a more vibrant life experience. Allow that the clarity of experience is best revealed under two conditions; high noon and an eclipse of the moon – the former brilliant and obvious, the latter obscure and vacant; apparent only within its conspicuous absence.

The reason for the asterisk is to define a condition that is in transition. In this case, retain your current hexagram as the current dominating force but change the lines so marked into their opposites; a broken line to a solid and vise-versa. As such, you will have two hexagrams, the first and strongest guiding you to current circumstance, and the second offering a glimpse of waxing conditions. Consult the first hexagram indicated and fully embed it before moving to the next (if there is a second). Understand also that, while the broken lines represent current internal balance, each solid line represents the zenith of that particular influence, which is soon to phase into its opposite. Foresight is available by converting those solid lines to their broken line corollaries, thereby creating a new hexagram and offering a prologue of the condition that will dominate the morrow from horizon to horizon, at least for that portion of time and space. But understand, the day will phase as days do, and need to be eventually refreshed with another round of coin falls. Preserving and reserving the original coins for each use is advised as they retain a residue.

Or, on impulse, you can simply dig into the readings, anywhere.

It is all right to dismiss this. We are taught that if it cannot be touched, heard, smelled, seen or measured that it does not exist, but we know better and frequently stand on the brink, confused. But confusion, though uncomfortable is a portal; we are never more available to growth than when we are confused. And sometimes the experiences within will result in happiness but just as often the sensation will be that of sadness or fear, contempt or disgust and so forth throughout the amazing gamut of our humanly way. Some things will be lost along the way and other things gained, much as it has been throughout the travails of life thus far. But the net gain will be positive assuredly through an elevation of your understanding and contribution to higher purpose and conduct. This is the alignment being sought; the light principle; eyes wide open, receptive. Nothing is the way it should be; everything is the way it is and the way it is, is the way it should be.

Indicia

Tao of Family

Table of Contents

Prologue

Forward

Introduction

The Method of the Reading

Indicia

    Illuminations

 The Creative (He)

 The Receptive (She)

 Difficulty at the Beginning (Joey)

 Youthful Folly (Old Tommy)

 Waiting (The Tyranny of Time)

 Conflict (The Game)

 The Army (Toby)

 Holding Together (Edgewalker)

 The Taming Power of the Small (Bequest)

 Treading [Conduct] (The Adiaphorite)

 Peace (Harvest)

 Standstill [Stagnation] (Belief)

 Fellowship with Men (Black Moon)

 Possession in Great Measure (Contrition)

 Modesty (The Reclamation)

 Enthusiasm (Sheila)

 Following (Rembrence)

 Work on What has been Spoiled (Never)

 Approach (Freedom)

 Contemplation (The Crack)

 Biting Through (Remnant)

 Grace (Friend)

 Splitting Apart (April Fool)

 Return [The Turning Point] (Angeline)

 Innocence [The Unexpected] (Wood)

 The Taming Power of the Great (Antigone)

 The Corners of the Mouth [Nourishment] (Spaghetti)

 Preponderance of the Great (A Famine of Faith)

 The Abysmal [Water] (Widowchamber)

 The Clinging [Fire] (Circle Drive)

 Influence [Wooing] (14,235)

 Duration (Stalker)

 Retreat (Home)

 The Power of the Great (Sovereign)

 Progress (Humphrey)

 Darkening of the Light (Genesis [annotated])

 The Family [The Clan] (Lost and Found)

 Opposition (Rev22.22)

 Obstruction (Lackafathom)

 Deliverance (Rita)

 Decrease (The Good Son)

 Increase (Sunday)

 Break-through [Resoluteness] (Planeing)

 Coming to Meet (Orpheus)

 Gathering Together [Massing] (International Flag of the Family)

 Pushing Upward (Crain Hill Epiphany)

 Oppression (Daddy’s Girl)

 The Well (Holy Water)

 Revolution [Molting] (Wolves)

 The Caldron (The First Supper)

 The Arousing [Shock] (Cool Melvin)

 Keeping Still [Mountain] (Respite)

 Development [Gradual Progress] (The Hollows)

 The Marrying Maiden (Mae)

 Abundance [Fullness] (Matilda)

 The Wanderer (Bobby)

 The Gentle [The Penetrating, Wind] (Thwing)

 The Joyous [Lake] (Provenance)

 Dispersion [Dissolution] (Dusk)

 Limitation (Poppie)

 Inner Truth (Clarence)

 Preponderance of the Small (Frank)

 After Completion (Silhouette)

 Before Completion (Mary)

Epilogue

Plates of Depiction

Illuminations

1.  Ch’ien

The Creative

One of the two primal powers: male, light-giving, strong and of the spirit; without weakness its essence is power and energy, its image is heaven. Unrestricted by any fixed condition in space, it is thus conceived of as motion and the embodiment of time.

Creation expresses the supreme power of the Deity. In relation to the human world, it denotes the grand capacity to awaken and develop the higher nature of all men. It provides that all success and happiness in one’s self and that of others depends upon seeing in one way only, by perseverance in what is correct. Great indeed is the generating power of the Creative; all beings owe their beginning to it. This power permeates all heaven.

The beginning of all things lies still in the beyond; in the form of ideas that have yet to become real. The clouds pass and the rain does its work, and all individual beings flow into their forms. The way to success lies in apprehending and giving actuality to the way of the universe. Each step attained forthwith becomes a preparation for the next. Having found expression in the two attributes of sublimity and success, conservation is shown to be continued actualization of the differentiation of form, thus does it show itself to further through perseveration. Greatness resides in the bringing of peace and security in conformity with the Great Harmony. Obedience to the higher nature is the province of the superior man; the conduct of others to be governed by law.

One complete revolution of heaven makes a day, the repetition of which is followed by another constituting the existence of time. But it is the same heaven, a duration that never stops nor slackens. Thus, attain the tirelessness which depends upon consciously limiting the fields of activity. Do not allow the influence of outward success or failure nor prematurely attempt to attain by force something for which the time is not yet ripe; rather abide by the dictates of time, remaining within the calm strength of patience.

Things that accord in tone vibrate together. Things that have affinity in their inmost natures seek one another. Each follows it kind. Mildness in action joined by strength of decision comprise good fortune.

Wisdom.

1.)  He

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves,

the tides and gravity, we will harness

for God the energies of love. And then,

for the second time in the history of the world,

man will have discovered fire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

…the only time I was truly a great father was before I had children. I had visions of romping in meadows with a little boy on my shoulders; he was about two, with large brown eyes and a dutchboy haircut, and he laughed so much his chubby cheeks were contoured by joy dimples. I was the greatest of fathers, always happy and patient and the epitome of warmth and humility. If he ever skinned his knee, I’d envelop him in my arms and speak softly and stroke his hair until his sobbing subsided. If he were ill, I’d hold him as he slept and a mysterious healing energy would pass from my body to his and he would awaken with those angelic dimples, fully cured. My fantasies were often preoccupied with ailments and magical cures and it was some time before I made the connection.

How come Dad’s in the woods all the time and doesn’t come to church?, I asked Mom once as a young boy. She told me about a sister I’d never known who died of pneumonia at two years of age. Later he was at his workbench in the basement when I asked him, Is that true?

Yes, it’s true, he replied and kept tinkering with something without pausing to look at me.

How’d that happen? I followed, and he kept fiddling as he factually recited four days in hell when the nurses couldn’t find the oxygen tent and everybody was really, really busy. I think he wanted me to go away but I was still curious.

Ever miss her? I asked. It seemed like a simple question. He stopped tinkering, raised his head, leaned on his arms and stared at the wall in front of him. Things got spooky.

He could be scary sometimes, but that was not his usual way. The schoolteacher son of an English coal miner, he was rather stiff-necked and wore bow ties that fanned out beneath a sharp adams-apple that bobbed when he spoke. There was a propriety about him that made him seem much taller than his five ten frame and he walked with a slight limp, from what I do not know. The propriety did not manifest in showings of class but rather that of learning and discipline and an insistence upon logic as the proper course. His severity on matters of money may have come from his lower-class background or having endured the Depression. Family rumor also had it that Poppie, his father, stole his college fund to provide for the family.

He was conservative in his expression and when he spoke he seldom wasted a word. His responses to questions that I might ask resembled pontifications. Having gone from the third to the fourth grade and from pluses and minuses to a letter grading system, I once asked him if B’s were good. For twenty minutes, I endured a monologue on the central position in the food chain and cycle of life occupied by the common bee. My father was not to be interrupted. I merely said, Thank you. and went to ask Mom, who said, Yes.

Usually his quiet vigilance simply meant that all was fine and us kids would just tussle around him like kittens around a tomcat. But he also had a way of filling a room with a dark silence; he was dangerous then, and whatever we were doing, we’d stop doing it. It was like this now. And here I was trapped in the basement with him. Mom, who could be counted on to temper the moment, - Jacob, that’s enough now, she would say to him - might as well as have been in Chicago. He turned full to me.

I thought I saw the glisten of tears in his eyes but just as quickly they were gone. In all that I can recall, I never saw my father’s tears pour out upon his cheeks. They seemed to be quickly reabsorbed – maybe because he could only cry so much and then he’d die or maybe he saved them for the woods or maybe he stored them within him like a wartime letter from the President kept in a musty trunk that begins, ‘It is with the deepest regret that I must inform you…’ Not that you couldn’t tell. Sometimes we’d sit at the kitchen table and something would be said, and he’d stop eating and stare off into space as the kitchen would fill with a dark, resinous sense of despair. Mom knew. She’d reach out to him, but there was no bandage that wouldn’t bleed through.

I arrived long after the initial mourning. It was a godsend I suspect as I have no memory of wringing anguish or anniversaries of agony between my parents. But I was frequently confused by the momentary warps that would occur in the home, as though on any given subject and at any given moment Mom and Dad would just stop, time would hang dry and motionless and all would fade to black. I think now that within these moments they’d find themselves like naked people in a hailstorm and in sheer desperation they’d join hands and kneel before death. I’d look again, and Mom would be sewing and Dad would be reading. I thought it was me.

I did come to understand why her name was never spoken and I did discover the tiny, framed picture of her on my mother’s dresser. I suppose all parents believe their babies to be beautiful, but that’s a stretch. My latter two, the twins, were mousy and shriveled and balder than peeled eggs. I rib them to this day that Mom and I were sneaking out of the back door of the hospital when the doctor busted us saying, Aren’t you forgetting something? But she was truly adorable – she was worthy of adoration. She had a crown of silky, auburn hair and long dark eyelashes that accentuated her huge brown eyes. The photo suggested that her smile could quickly erupt into the shrieks and squeals that only babies can do. In the morning, being greeted by such a baby would insure, no matter what else befell one that life was good and God was great. If Mom and Dad were forced to make a list of reasons for drawing another breath, this baby would appear first on the list. And she floated through their life like a feather on fire.

Finally, he just looked at me and exhaled. He talked some about the natural order of things – about cycles of time and the unfolding of life – he used words like ‘vibrant’ and ‘shimmering’ and ‘bountiful’, and he said that it was God’s greatest mercy that things are arranged so that parents die before their children. He said that when this didn’t happen, there was no mercy. He said that he hoped that I understood. I, of course, did not. I was fixed upon his eyes as they were upon me. And in the shard of time before my father turned from me, how dark and engulfing his eyes became – black they were and endless, like the ocean at night.

I came to understand