Chapter 25

In origin
all is complete, combined, one.
There is no distinction
between earth and sky:
just tranquility, formlesseness, solitude,
circulating freely, inexhaustible.
This is the world’s mother.
It precedes and overwhelms 
our attempts to know or name it.
Constrained to pick it out,
we’d call it Tao.
It flows without stint,
giving everything to everything.
It has made itself scarce and it is returning.
Tao is spacious.
The sky is spacious.
Earth is spacious.
Even the center of man is spacious,
when it finds its connection to these.
What we are is fused to earth,
earth to sky,
sky to Tao,
Tao to what we are.

© 2003