The Tug Between Baggage Claim and Letting Go
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“Wherever you go,
The rigid lie low
While the weightless in the sky,
And all that is gentle
Fly boundlessly high.”
—Tao Te Ching
(A New Translation and Commentary
by Ralph Alan Dale)
I shan’t preen like a feral mermaid over her shiny shipwreck hoard, but I will confess that I’ve amassed an excessive impressive assortment of stuff over the course of many years. Secondhand knicknackeries, dust bunny trinkets, crates of Christmas ornaments my father gathered for decades, and three prized bookshelves, two of which are filled mostly with my mother’s carefully curated collection.
I was in my early twenties when she passed away suddenly, and my later thirties when my already ailing father died a month after catching COVID-19. It’s a privilege to be able to pass on anything to others, but at the time, I didn’t know how to handle sorting out my parents’ entire lives into neat little boxes. My younger sisters and I found ourselves drowning in way too many belongings for us to possibly keep them all.
I won’t pretend that I haven’t come to deeply regret some of the things I gave away, and I don’t think my little sister M will ever forgive me for accidentally donating my mother’s entire Dick Francis (mostly hardback) collection of horse mysteries! But the older I get, the more I am wearied by carrying so much with me through life, and I feel the urge to sort through everything I kept in my haste to lose nothing important—
And let go of what I no longer wish to carry with me for the rest of my days.
So, I’ve decided to go through all my books to rediscover old favorites and make room for new! That’s how I stumbled upon this splendiferous translation of the Tao Te Ching by Ralph Alan Dale.
*Enjoy a rare glimpse of an investigatory Purrito
Last week, I was randomly flipping through it when I came across the final lines of Verse 76, and I couldn’t stop returning to them again and again as I rolled the words over in my mind:
*
“Wherever you go,
*
*
The rigid lie low
*
*
While the weightless in the sky,
*
*
And all that is gentle
*
*
Fly boundlessly high.”
*
Not all the baggage we carry in life is visible to others, but it weighs us down, nonetheless—crushing us from the inside out. Sometimes, we fill it ourselves and drag it behind us. Other times, it’s handed to us whether we wanted it or not. Life parcels out both pleasure and pain in unequal bursts.
Yet I still want to believe that even our heart’s most heavy wishing tears may eventually evaporate, finding their way to such a boundless and gentle sky as painted by the Tao Te Ching.
Archilochus colubris
by S.E. Page
The Ruby Hummingbird
has less than
a thousand feathers,
and a heart full of sky.
The secret is,
She knows it.
All her thoughts
are air-bent,
a bliss of wings
and wandering—
I would learn
her iridescence.
*Feather Dreams of Sky
Herkimer, New York. September 2025.
P.S. Wait! You didn’t think I forgot my March Artweaver Practice Pony, did you? Okay, I almost did. I whipped this mossy beauty up while stuck at the car dealership today. I shall call her Esmerelda.
Source:
Dale, Ralph Alan, Translator. Photographs by John Cleare. Tao Te Ching: A New Translation and Commentary by Ralph Alan Dale. Barnes and Noble Books, New York. Arranged by Watkins Publishing. 2002. P. 153.
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