theme of the week: cups

Had I posted this last week, it would have made a lot more sense. So. Humour me. Pleeease. And pretend you’re reading this during Melbourne Cup week…

This time last year, someone with wisdom beyond the urban bind baffled me with a Taoist parable about cups and the value of their contents. The moral being that a whiff of possibility is far more valuable than any precious stone, sweet intoxicant, nay, anything that can be held/measured by the cupful.

Upon recently re-reading this post, the story made a lot more sense. At the time I barely realised that my cup was empty. (I guess that’s the whole point though: fullness is relative.) I had no fixed address, no next calling. I'd spent more than a year being pulled along by a fluffy dream cloud on a string.

Now my cup overfloweth. With fizz and delight. (But also fair amounts of spillage, stained tablecloths, and working it out as we go etc. Ahem.)

After a long-ish stint of independent living, the house on the ‘Hill welcomed another member. K officially moved in after several months of unofficial cohabitation where we pretended to have separate abodes and he would duck home (to his beautiful motorhome bus) once or twice a week to water plants and pay rent.

So his arrival, with the rest of his worldly belongings not already at my/our place, was not the huge merge of stuff I’d expected (sort of stupidly, knowing his possessions are restricted by the confines of the bus). He came with computer, a few clothes, four indoor plants and an obligatory man-box of power tools. My long neglected spare room is morphing into The Creative Space (the one I have always dreamed of but somehow put up with a dining table instead... though it now more closely resembles a bank manager's office, with big wooden desk from The Salvos and a big-wig type reclining chair... we'll work on the ambience thing.) 


Anyway, back to cups. I came out a dollar ahead in the workplace sweeps. I’ve been scouring the local op shops for vessels of all sorts of late. Last week I picked up another old-school glass sugar dispenser.

A dollar, a sugar jar and a whole lotta love. Glass half full indeed.

empty is the tao

My enviro-mentors from the Strezleckis came for lunch today. (The enviro-mentors who I planted a walnut grove with, who henceforth have looked upon me beamingly as their little green disciple. They who shall now be known as 'Gifted With Asparagus & Artichokes' for their bestowal of two shopping bags heaving with the season's best from their garden. I will be weeing green before the week is out!)

Ahem.

So after emptying several glasses of champagne - ten days til I clink the desk shackles back on & damned if I'm going to let the opportunity for daytime carousing pass - I told Gifted about my plans re work. He replied with a parable from the Tao Te Ching. Something about a cup of water being valuable, a cup of wine being even more valuable, and a cup of diamonds being more valuable still. But what trumps them all, he said, is the empty cup, which can be filled with anything.

Me: ......................

Hopefully I looked very zen. And not at all like someone experiencing mild panic over a recent and fairly life-altering decision after being ambushed with the Tao. And DEFINITELY not like someone wondering if the empty cup could be filled with champagne and that was why it was the most valuable.

No. I think the little parable turned something in me. When I was a desk hound, no one would've recited the Tao in response to something I said. Never. Nor would they have brought champagne and home-grown asparagus for lunch. I think it’s an achievement that I’ve trotted on my idealistic high horse back to reality. But it's still a way from the saddle to the 40-hour grey-walled commute-consume pantomime which I've philosophically divorced. For a long time before I left work, I felt like I didn't make sense in that world anymore. It's not just a different drummer thing. I feel like I'm on tour with the whole freakin' band.

Hrrrmmmmppph. Empty cup. Empty cup. Empty cup.