Finding our way starts with where we are here, now, and with what we perceive our options to be. What are our assets? Our liabilities? Our choices? We might drop into the emptiness/stillness/silence with these questions and wait to see what occurs to us out of the silence. I am retired with no pressing responsibilities so I can wait indefinitely for something to come along that requires my attention. Finding my way can wait until my circumstances make demands, then I will choose from among my choices, and take it from there. My tomorrow will be much like my yesterday for as long as I can envision. If something needs to be changed, I can wait until that becomes apparent. My circumstances will call for some action, which will lead to other circumstances, which will carry me on to the end of my days. Finding my way will be one thing at a time until I run out of time. Where I am is pretty much where I will be, and I am fine with that. I am stable and able to dance with my options as they reveal themselves to me, and in a better place than anywhere in my past in terms of flexibility and opportunity.
T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a part of The Four Quartets, presents us with two metaphors worthy of us. He says “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” And he also says, “Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
I take these images and merge them, blend them, so that the dance becomes our exploration, and the still point becomes the center around which everything revolves, making sense and falling into place when we “arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time.” And what do we know when “we know the place for the first time”? Can we put it into words? Will we be able to say what we know? And what it means that we know it?
According to Joseph Campbell, Heinrich Zimmer said, “The best things cannot be said (The Taoists would say, “The Tao that can be said, explained, defined, is not the eternal Tao), and the second-best things create confusion because people cannot agree when they attempt to say what cannot be said, which leaves us with only the third-best things to talk about, news, weather, sports and gossip.”
What we know cannot be talked about, discussed, debated, only known. And that, then, becomes the still point around which we live our life. What we know–not what we believe or how we at told to think–is the heart of the matter, and we cannot talk about it. We can only know it and live our life centered on what we know and doing what our knowing calls for us to do here, now in each situation as it arises. And let that be that.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 