“The Hard and the Soft”

Hello friends, with springtime here I’m reminded that new growth and wild green everywhere means renewed life and a hopeful season. What looks fragile and tentative in April will be hardy and strong in May storms and summer heat. As my poem suggests, the same rules can apply to the aging process — that it’s more beneficial to bend and yield than to be inflexible in times of storm and age. The poem is included in my new book, Interbeing, and you can find more about the collection here on my website, as well as on Amazon and from the publisher Wipf & Stock. Thanks, Gene.

 

 

The Hard and the Soft

“The hard and stiff will be broken,
the soft and supple will prevail.”
Tao Te Ching

My first birthday card to myself at 87,
a backward, maybe forward glance,
aiming an agnostic flashlight inward,

starting along the dim corridors
of my evolving brain shaped by ancestors
down my mother’s line, her rival brother,
and nonno who cultivated
vegetables not adversaries: the soft folk.

We like to think ourselves self-made,
a Horatio Alger of will and grit,
Harvard business grads racing
to pinnacles of wealth,
suppressing primordial fears.

Uncle John and I would never make it
as SEALs or commandos.
We’d flee to Canada, go to jail,
or risk death from true believers
driven by warrior brains and God-talk.

In Taoist parlance, we are the soft ones,
good enough as poets and academics,
but no good as Grant or Sherman
herding troops to victorious slaughter.
Is this why I quit the Boy Scouts at 12,
and didn’t volunteer for Jesuit Missions
to convert the Asian world like Xavier?

Expect a very long evolution
of our complex limbic systems
to create a softer world of justice and love.