Daniel Skach-Mills is an award-winning poet whose poems have appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies including The Christian Science Monitor, The Christian Century, Sojourners, and Open Spaces. In the introduction to this work, which like the Tao Te Ching consists of 81 verses, he says that it is not a translation, a version, an adaptation, or an interpretation of Lao Tzu's classic work. Going further, he states: "The verses are aimed, not at your thinking mind, but at re-awakening that part of you that already knows everything the text is saying. In this sense, it is more a remembering than a figuring out, more a realization of what one has always known than a fresh piece of mind-candy."
Here's an example of the wisdom to be found on these pages:
Eight
The Now is easy.
People make it hard.
The Now is here.
People put it "there."
The ego is always wanting
this or that to complete itself.
The Now is always
wanting this.
The mind is forever seeing itself
at the center of everything.
The Now is forever,
seeing.
In the poems that follow, Skach-Mills writes about being still, letting go of good versus evil, relinquishing being something, embodying openness, freeing the mind of clutter, labeling nothing, giving equal attention to every action, being unshakable like a mountain, and much more. It is mind games, the machinations of the ego, and the constant need to choose one thing over another that contributes to our present-day dis-ease in a wonderful world of possibilities. That is what is hinted at in these poems which are suffused with the fragrance of the Tao Te Ching.
