What Is Your Dao?
Dao: Natural way
The first book I read about Daoism was ‘Being Taoist: Wisdom for Living a Balanced Life’ by Eva Wong. The Dao is talked about frequently in her book. How it flows like water, the source of nature, and balance. The yin & yang is an example of the Dao, the photo shown up top. Some things Yin represents is darkness, stillness, coolness, rest, receptivity, and the moon. Some things yang represents are light, movement, warmth, activity, creativity, and the sun. Yin and Yang encourage us to understand that life does not require everything to be the same to exist in harmony. Rest and action, softness and strength, silence and sound, and darkness and light all have their place. One cannot be fully understood without the other.
In mother nature, each animal has its own purpose. For example, the agouti, which is a medium sized rodent in Brazil, is the only animal in the world that can crack open a Brazil tree nut. The agouti has special front teeth that are able to gnaw through the shell and eat the nuts inside. But, the agouti can be forgetful. They bury the leftover nuts in the ground… and sometimes forget it. The uneaten nuts will eventually grow into a Brazil Tree sapling and continue the species of this tree. This is part of the agouti’s Dao, to continue the life of the Brazil Tree. The agouti also has many purposes, but that is just one.
Like the agouti, we have a Dao and many of them. Just like how the agouti’s life is not strictly revolved around continuing the Brazil tree species, people are not stuck to one way of life either. Women are not trapped in yin and men are not trapped in yang. Often, society tries to force women to be feminine, soft, quiet and men to be masculine, strong, and loud. I believe that forcing someone to be a certain way of an invisible standard corrupts a person’s own Dao. Some women’s Dao are being a stay at home mother with a husband and some other women’s Dao is being a lead singer with a wife. Some men’s Dao are finding a wife to have kids with and some other men’s Dao are owning a cafe with a husband. The Dao is nature, the Dao is species, the Dao is humans, the Dao is indivitality.
For some, the Dao can be difficult to understand. How can something with no shape be so many things at once? I like to use the example of thinking of the Dao as a large spider’s web. Each string of the Dao represents it. One string may be a species of tree part of it. Another string may be an individual you have never met before’s personality part of it. A string can be the fury of a hurricane. And somewhere in this giant web, is you. You are in the web and so is everything that makes you you. You are part of the web, the same web that has a flower, and the same web with a hurricane. The web has everything natural inside of it, even you.
In all my teenage years and early twenties, I felt like an alien trying to learn the human species. Like I was outside of the web and it would never accept me because I felt so different from those around me. I used to think that not having the same interests and personality as most girls my age was wrong, that it was not ‘normal.’ But now, at almost 26 years old, people have shown me that we as humans are anything but ‘normal.’ Many times. We as humans have our own quirks that I used to think I only had.
I noticed this the most when I began middle school, around the age where a child’s sense of self just begins to peek its stem through the dirt. Many of my classmates’ stems felt the sunshine and grew- mine had a shoe consistently stomping on it. The ‘shoe’ was the constant bewiddling I faced in my teenage years and some young adult life- a parent whose beliefs followed the patriarchy. The shoe saw my stem as some sort of embarrassment. Something that wasn’t growing the right way like the other saplings around.
The other saplings were not socially awkward, did not have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and were successful in school. My sapling on the other hand was the opposite and the shoe hated that. So the stomping continued. I always wondered why my sapling wasn’t like the others. How do I fix it? How did others grow so perfect and I did not? Why did I have to be stuck like this? I had spent twelve years trying to find answers. Why couldn’t I naturally be more feminine? Why couldn’t I stop these odd *OCD* rituals? Why couldn’t I have an easier time in school? Why couldn’t I be a male’s gaze? Why didn’t I want to get married to a man and have kids? Why couldn’t any of it be natural instead of feeling like I was ripping off my petals?
When I was twelve, I went to the same middle school as my cousin. Behind my back, one of my parents had asked my cousin why I wasn’t making friends. Which was odd. I had a good friend group, specifically seven of them, and they treated me well. I was making friends, so why was this parent so concerned about that? My cousin’s response was because of my friends, I wasn’t making new ones. I vividly remember my parent saying ‘*Cousin’s name* said “everyone loves Kay, it’s just the people she hangs out with.” So, maybe it’s time to make new friends’ which was after they told me they had asked my cousin their question.
Looking back at it as an adult, it makes sense. That parent knew I had friends but they didn’t like the friends I had chosen. They didn’t like that my friends were a bit quirky, that we liked games like ‘Minecraft’ and ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ and had favorite Youtubers we would watch at sleepovers. We weren’t like my cousins’ friends who seemed more interested in hair, boys, and a type of humor I can’t understand. My parent didn’t like that me and my friends weren’t like my cousin and their friends, despite the fact my friends treated me well. And I’m so glad I decided to not do anything with this new information and chose to stay with my friend group. The shoe demanded my stem to reshape itself to the kind of plants the shoe preferred. But no matter how hard I had tried, the sapling was never ‘fixed.’ So, the shoe stayed on the stem, not allowing it to grow until it decided to change.
Another encounter my sapling had with the shoe was with one of my grandparents. They had taken me out to Applebee’s after shopping at clothing stores that never had my style. The conversation was simple at first: school, friends, and work. And then somehow my grandparent had brought up sexuality. My grandparent went on about how women should dress to please men in order to find a ‘good one.’ ‘Don’t wear all black, you’ll look depressed.’ ‘Don’t wear clothes too tight or you’ll look ‘slutty.’ But don’t wear clothes too loose or you’ll look like a bum.’ ‘Don’t lift anything more than 5lbs during workouts, or you’ll look muscular like a man.’ ‘Wear some makeup to look nice. But not too much, men don’t like that.’ Luckily I knew all this was just another stomp from the shoe. Trying to change my sapling into the ones my grandparent wanted.
Unfortunately, I am not the only sapling that has been stepped on by a shoe. Growing up, I never realized most women face what I had. I thought it was just me who was so imperfect, that I was the only one. In my early twenties, I read and hear many of the same comments that translates into the shoe trying to stomp on a sapling: ‘I wanna cut my hair short but my boyfriend would kill me!’ ‘I would like to go back to work, but my husband insists I focus on the house and the kids.’ ‘No man wants a woman who looks like shes from the streets’ ‘You don’t want kids? You’ll change your mind when you meet the right man”I dont get why these women get dreads/braids, they look like thugs.’
The issue is the shoe telling the saplings that if they follow its rules they will grow healthy and have full control of their own lives. Yet in the same breath say ‘let your husband lead so you can turn your brain off’ ‘The man makes all the money so maybe you’ll get an allowance.’ While these may sound nice to a woman whose Dao is a stay at home wife and wants her husband to lead, this sounds terrifying to women like myself: whose Dao is to have more independence. The shoe wants all women to be dependent on a man, the shoe gets angry at feminism because it promotes women to express their individuality without shame. Feminism promotes women to build careers, if they want to, rather than ignore them for a man’s dream of the white picket fence dream. Feminism promotes women to follow their style outside of the typical male gaze, if they feel more comfortable that way. Personally, I believe if Daoism was more well known, the shoe would hate it too.
This is not saying being feminine and/or a housewife is bad. This is saying that this lifestyle is not for all women. This is saying this lifestyle is not all women’s Dao. Forcing a certain lifestyle on someone ruins the natural way. It is wrong to tell a woman who wants to work and not have kids that she needs to be a stay at home mom. It is wrong to tell a woman she needs to work if she wants to be a stay at home mom.
Women can be feminine (presenting more yin) and work. Women can be masculine (presenting more yang) and stay at home. Women can be masculine and work. Women should be whoever they are without feeling scared to be themselves. Women should feel as comfortable being themselves as males are comfortable with how easy they take a male rapist’s and abuser’s side by saying ‘boys will be boys’ ‘She led him on’ ‘What was she wearing?’ ‘We can’t ruin his future over one mistake!’
As I have written earlier, I grew up being told to fix myself. Instead of ‘fixing’ myself for the shoe, for the patriarchy, I found the cracks in society. The constant questions I kept having about myself when I was younger made me also question others words and actions around me. How the world works to benefit the males and women were just supposed to suck it up and deal with it. The shoe tells us that women need to be a certain way in order to succeed in life and be treated well. If you don’t follow every rule, it’s all your fault if something bad happens.
We live in a society that would give the death penalty to a woman and a man a slap on the wrist for the same crime. A society built for the benefit of only one type of person, is one that will crumble from the dysfunction eventually from the lack of natural balance. You can cage a wild thing, but do not mistake its silence for surrender. When the door opens, it will remember the sky. When you deny a soul its freedom long enough, you should not expect it to ask politely when freedom finally comes. Nature does not ask permission to be itself. It grows, bends, breaks through, and returns to its own way.
So what is your Dao? Your beliefs, your culture, and your individuality are all part of your Dao. Just as no two trees grow in exactly the same way, no two people experience the world identically. We all come from different roots, different histories, and different understandings of life. Yet, we are all part of the same world.
The Dao does not ask you to become someone else. It invites you to observe, to learn, to grow, and to find harmony in the life you are living. Be willing to question what you have been taught, but do not be ashamed of where you come from. Allow your beliefs to grow as you do. Respect the paths of others without feeling that you must follow them.
There is no shame in being different, and there is no single way to be human. Walk your own way with compassion, curiosity, and the courage to be yourself. May you find peace not in becoming what the world expects of you, but in learning to live in harmony with who you truly are.
‘A forest will not survive if every living thing were the same. It is the differences between its inhabitants that allow life to flourish’
