A Wu Wei Kind of Day

This morning I had an early appointment out of the house, which meant that I enjoyed the immense gift of being in the car driving past east-facing vistas as the sun was rising. When I left home there were pink clouds strewn across the sky; that was beauty enough all by itself.

My first view of the water showed intense gold gathering along the horizon where some small clouds were clustered, right where the sun would soon appear. I'm sure you've noticed how clouds  a sunrise or sunset all the more interesting and often more beautiful. I turned off the radio and CD player so that there's be fewer distractions from the primary event of the sun's rising (and the small matter of keeping the car in the appropriate lane going about the right speed).

And then came the sunrise itself--since I was alone I greeted the sun aloud without apology or inclination to feel foolish. I thanked the sun for its energy and warmth and for making life on earth possible. The moment of sunrise wasn't particularly dramatic, nor was it any more glorious that what had come before (it was all plenty glorious). But sometimes it's good to speak to the sun directly. At least I happen to think so.

My appointment was an energizing conversation with Susan Doughty of the New England WomenCenter. Susan is a visionary women's health care practitioner whose center bridges western and alternative approaches to healing. She told me about documented (even videotaped!) evidence of the principles of quantum physics at work healing disease, even at the level of cellular repair.

What she was telling me echoes what I've been hearing and reading from a variety of sources about the power of imagination and vision to create and to change our realities (providing we loosen our energetic grip on limiting beliefs and paradigms). Even Einstein almost a century ago could see the power of the imagination to move and shift energy (and everything in the universe is composed of energy, all vibrating at differing frequencies) and to get us places that logic just can't manage.

As I was leaving, Susan shared with me some of her own experience that so often we get where we want to get not through struggle, blood, sweat, and tears (I know, I know--it's not what we grew up hearing) but rather by holding a clear, full vision of where we want to be, what we want to have accomplished, how we want to be in the world, trusting that in some corner of the universe it is already a reality, and by doing our best to stay "in the vortex" (her words for it), in the flow of energy, of the river of life, not resisting but "going with the flow". It doesn't mean that we remain passive and take no action at all, but that we take actions that are in some sense "effortless". What she was saying is closely related to the Taoist principle of "Wu Wei"--literally, without doing, without effort, sometimes expanded to "doing without doing."

So there I was, driving home again, minding my own business on the highway, when I noticed the license plate of a car that passed me. It said: WU WEI. Who am I to argue with that?