Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work.
— Lao-tzu from ‘Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past 2,000 Years’, tr. from Chinese by Red Pine
Sent to school for this purpose: that
we learn
the lessons that will allow us to
quickly
flourish and succeed in our lives.
There is
a curriculum, which if followed, has
no chance
of failure. The path is drawn clearly
for us.
"Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps
behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference?
Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the
rest is hypothesis and dream."
@handmade_ghost@poetry@fsgbooks Mine, too! I'm glad this was a nice surprise on your timeline today. Some days, I like going a little further back in the poetry archives for my #TodaysPoem choices.
@joel@poetry haha, welp. Rattle snakes are not really so bad, I like the poem but bites are actually pretty rare and human-rattlednake interactions more frequently end in a dead rattlesnake. They are beautiful creatures and in fact will normally let you watch them pretty peacefully, well, the desert species will. I have shooed many of them off our roads in the spring when they are treating the blacktop like a heat rock. Splat-Pop is how most of them go out. (Popping a skin tube of blood...)