As I have worked on this journal over the last year, it has amazed me how often the Tao has suggested a different course than the one I had planned. Sometimes I have taken the way it offered. Sometimes I have not. When I have ignored what the Tao had to say, the results have generally been adverse. And the more I ignored, the more severe the consequences. It is almost as if the Tao was trying to teach me — first gently, and then, when that did not work, through more rigorous lessons. Always those lessons have to do with surrender, with yielding. With gentleness, and with putting harmony ahead of desire and ambition. With faith in the Taoist way, the watercourse way.
The Tao Te Ching itself emerged twenty-five hundred years ago, out of one of the most violent and unsettled periods in Chinese history. Cities burned. Armies grew into the hundreds of thousands. Peasants were taxed into desperation to fund military campaigns. It was not written in a peaceful time. It was written by people who had seen what striving and cleverness produce, and who turned instead toward the quieter intelligence of water and the wisdom of silence.
This journal pairs prose poems interpreted from the Tao Te Ching with my reflections on each, a single journaling question, and original paintings throughout. The paintings and the words have always belonged together in my work, and they belong together here. The journaling question at the heart of each chapter is not a prompt for cleverness. It is an invitation to listen — to the quiet voice, to the song within, to whatever current the pen wants to follow.
Journaling has been a friend and guide to me at the significant turning points of my life. The hidden undercurrents that shape us — many of them taking form in childhood — affect the quality of our lives and our relationships, both with ourselves and with others. In this journal those currents weave together.
And so I offer you this work, which has grown out of a creative life lived on the edges of our culture. Some of those lessons were learned the hard way. Some I seem to be still struggling against, still resisting. Sometimes the easiest way forward — surrender — appears the least attractive.
The journal will be hardcover, double wire-o bound so that it lays flat for writing. It will be printed on Mohawk Superfine — a premium uncoated paper that reproduces color beautifully and takes a pen well.
The journal ships in about a month. After publication it will sell for $67. Pre-publication orders are $57. Shipping is $11.45, and free for Supporting Members.
You can pre-order here.
More on the journal here.
Every journal pre-ordered will arrive with a signed bookplate inside the front cover, expressing my gratitude for your help in making this work possible.
If you are not a Supporting Member and would like to support this work (the art, the Substack, this journal and the others planned for later this year) you can read about the benefits Members here.
Love the notion, quiet book for noisy time ! We'll get quiet times away from noisy turmoil