Chapter 10
“Can you coax your mind from its wandering
and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
supple as a newborn child’s?”
~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.
Meditation and politics would seem to have nothing to do with each other. But as I noted a couple of days ago, the Daodejing is not just ancient self-help, and does not think we can seriously separate the personal from the political, character from the collective, de—a key term we will come back to—from the doing of the people’s business. If the last four years have taught us anything, it is how powerfully—how viscerally—the character of a leader and the climate of our politics can affect our consciousness—even our nervous systems.
In his inauguration speech yesterday, President Biden called us away from the toxic culture of negative partisanship that has consumed us these last four years. We have wandered so long and so far from the good, the true, and the beautiful—hell, even the decent and the factual—that many have begun to wonder whether our country is hopelessly lost, whether Biden’s call for unity is just an old man shouting into a hurricane.
For those wondering whether it is possible for us to “keep to the original oneness”—whether we can, in Franklin’s words, “keep” our Republic—the recitation of Amanda Gorman, poet laureate of the United States, was a definitive answer. Her movements were graceful as her words were wise, coaxing the attention of a nation toward the unity—the feeling of home, belonging, and “original oneness”—that even those who deny our new President’s legitimacy deep down so desperately desire. If our body politic can become just a little more supple—if each of us can find just a bit more space between stimulus and response—we can climb whatever hills we face. Without a little wuwei, there will be no exit from the vicious cycle of polarization.
What the Daodejing calls us to, above all, is trust: to trust in our own minds, in others, and in the nature of things. What do we do each day but try to form a more perfect union in our psyches, in our relationships, in our world?