Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective

Rather, a life spent ‘not minding what happens’ is one lived without the inner demand to know that the future will conform to your desires for it – and thus without having to be constantly on edge as you wait to discover whether or not things will unfold as expected.

Indeed, your world can break down precisely because you live on after the death of everything you love. This “death” can be much more painful and fearful than the prospect of your own death, not least because it is a death that you have to survive. Hence, as long as you are attached to someone or something that you can lose, you are susceptible to

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes descri

but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.

I came to Daoist philosophy through Ursula Le Guin’s rendition of the Daodejing . In the second poem of that small volume, I read:

The things of this world

exist, they are;

you can’t refuse them.

-like a moment of vertigo. I still can’t explain why this truism has the effect on me it does, but I find myself, in moments of pain or grief, reminding

It’s not unlike how we feel about death: We know we’re going to die, but does it have to be now? Can it not be now, please? Can it just be, always be, a little later? Until exhausted, stalemated, and without reconciling anything, we finally surrender. And like the wise frog, we jump out of the pot into the unknown.