Pu

The largest living structures on Earth were assembled without a single act of anticipation by a process that never once considered the future.

The traditions related image is the uncarved block, pu, a piece of wood before anything has been made from it.

It is valued precisely for its unformedness, its retained potential, its freedom from a decided shape.

A person who has not yet fixed what they will be is in this framework, not lacking, but full, and this reframes the anxiety about an undetermined future almost entirely.

Water is supple.

The valley receives.

The uncarved block has not committed to a shape.

The empty hub can turn.

Well, according to Laozi and Zhuangzi and other early Taoist thinkers, the problem begins with language, with human language.

So the analogy of the uncarved block, which was from Tao Te Ching, the character Pu, essentially means simplicity.

So simplicity that is pure potential.

If you take the trunk of a tree, you are able to carve it in an infinite variety of ways.

So when we develop words and we start to use words and we start to give authority to said words, then a whole slew of problems results from that.

And modern society is overrun with... words and information tied to words, and it creates a lot of misunderstanding, miscommunication, ill intent, so on and so forth.

So part of the Taoist message is to be more Pu-like, to be more simplistic.

So to reduce our usage and our dependency on words and go back to a simpler time when we have a body-to-body communicative encounter with other things.