[Note: I italicize phrases I borrow from the chapter, and link to phrases I borrow from other chapters to help tie chapters together. While making it more tedious to read, the Tao Te Ching is best pondered in the context of the whole.

After I read 'Great perfection seems chipped,' I looked out the window. There was a cobweb in the corner, the glass was spotted here and there. Beyond were trees and a gloomy overcast sky. The whole scene certainly seemed chipped. To make it perfect, in the normal sense of this word, I would have to go and clean out the web, polish the glass, prune the shrubs, and finally clear the sky to let the bright morning sun shine through - or, I can do my utmost to attain emptiness until I see the great perfect present here, now,... always.

Isn't that what this boils down to in the end? Our ideals of perfection are our expectation of how something 'should be'. These ideals of perfection are symptomatic of our disconnection from Nature. Nature is the great perfection I saw out my window: the spider webs, leaves 'messing up the ground', raw and simple, life and death. Nature's great perfection can't be categorized; after all, if it resembled anything, it would, long before now, have become small.

We feel disconnected from Nature, and so have great difficulty feeling the the shape that has no shape. To be real, it must have a word, a name, so that we can catagorize it, meddle with it, desire it, and assign it a value in a hierarchy of perfection. Nothing is what it seems, and thus we say, The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad. Well, with a world view like that, no wonder my mind is that of a fool - how blank! And, if you have read this far, I guess that puts you in the same boat. Welcome aboard!

Oh, but don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting we go walking around in some blissful daze... even if that were possible. After all, as the correlations suggest, that is what death is for - and we won't even have to walk around. Just knowing that great perfection is chipped helps lower expectations, and thus smooth some of life's bumpy ride.

I love nature as she is. I do not expect anything one way or the other from her. She is my teacher!!! I just wish I paid better ATTENTION to her! Some people think that nature is brutal and cruel. I do not, she is reality! I think reality and experiencing life is what it is all about. I love taking motorcycling trips into the mountains, seeing the cows as I leave my house, taking the country back roads etc. Yes, I am sort of a country boy now that I am retired and live in Tennessee. You could not get me near a piece of large concrete building for a million dollars (ha ha). Cheers