One of the attachments I find it most difficult to set aside is my attachment to the safety of loved ones — of my wife and of my dog above all, for they are in my immediate daily physical world.  Meditation can bring me to a point at which those fears for their safety fall away — a degree of non-attachment, though perhaps not deep and certainly not lasting.  It is not not caring — so it is not detachment.  But it is a kind of release, of them from my careful hands, and of myself from a certain kind of caring that is over-determined, ignorant, even harmful. 

When I contemplate the motions of the Tao I know that my little efforts to protect them and keep them just so are a kind of delusion at best.  I know that I must trust the Tao* — but that is not the same as believing that the Tao will care for them and protect them as I would.  The Tao proliferates, it spills over, it inhales deeply, it calls us back to the root.  The Tao does not care as a human being cares for loved ones.  But its endless creation is a kind of cherishing nevertheless.  The Tao too is not not caring.

I have said before that most of the spiralling thoughts I hope to depart from in meditation are fears of one kind of another, leading to plans, strategies, scripts for conversation, efforts of control.  Many of these have to do, I see now, with keeping my loved ones safe.  Failure to do so feels like failure in the very idea of humaneness I grew up with — and certainly it would be a failure of manhood as that was taught to me, by my father and his father and all the fathers and brothers I have known and seen and read and watched on screen throughout my life.  Simply to let go of such a duty of care, to trust some other power in the universe to keep me and mine safe — to shrug off the kind of safety that might conceivably be in my hands — this is hard, this is one of the greatest challenges to my peace.

But the longer I spend in those moments of meditation that make me feel a little freer of myself, the more I understand what not not caring might mean in daily life.  One still has one’s tasks of husbandry.  One still feels one’s loves.  One is profoundly, however, even peacefully, not in charge.

18 January, 2025.

* Unposted entry from 15 December 2024: “Is there a reason for the way in which the Tao moves? No. Is there a logic to it? No. Does it care to protect me, comfort me, hear my prayers? No. Is there a harmony to it? Yes. Trust the Tao. It breathes, proliferates, creates, surrenders. Trust it.”