search for it: watch for
Dragons in the sky; for the Laugher, the Golden Person, in the
Sun: watch for Tao, ineffably sparkling and joyous--and quiet--
in the trees; listen for it in the winds and in the sea-roar;
and have nothing in your own heart but its presence and
omnipresence and wonder-working joy. How can you flow out to the
moments, and capture the treasure in them; how can you flow out
to Tao, and inherit the stars, and have the sea itself flowing in
your veins;--if you are blocked with a desire, or a passion for
things mortal, or a grudge against someone, or a dislike? Beauty
is Tao: it is Tao that shines in the flowers: the rose, the
bluebell, the daffodil--the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the
peony--they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways
into the Kingdom of God. How can you know them, how can you go
in through them, how can you participate in the laughter of the
planets and the angelic clans, through their ministration, if you
are preoccupied with the interests or the wants of contemptible
you, the personality? Laotse went lighting little stars for the
Black-haired People: went pricking the opacity of heaven, that
the Light of lights might filter through. If you call him a
philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really
he did not bother to possess. Rather he stood by the Wells of
Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets.
There is no way to Poetry but Laotse's Way. You think you must go
abroad and see the world; you must not; that is only a
hindrance: a giving the eyes too many new externals, to hinder
them from looking for that which you may see, as he says,
'through your own window.' If you traverse the whole world
seeking, you will never come nearer to the only thing that
counts, which is Here, and Now. Seek to feed your imagination on
outward things, on doings and events, and you will perhaps
excite, but surely soon starve it. But at the other pole, the
inner "How deep and mysterious is Tao, as if it were the author
of all things!" And then I hear someone ask him whence it
originated--someone fishing for a little metaphysics, some dose
of philosophy. What! catch Laotse? "I know," said Confucius,
"how birds fly, beasts run, fishes swim. But the runner may be
snared, the swimmer hooked, the flyer shot with an arrow. But
there is the Dragon; I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind
through the clouds and rises into heaven." No; you can