Give It a Chance

Give It a Chance

Accommodation

She is like a turtle:

wherever she is is home.

These are notes

to a passage in

Stephen Mitchell’s translation

of the Tao Te Ching.

Turtles are slow,

but they’re sojourners, too.

They get there,

and they may not stay there,

yet they’re there

wherever they are.

There’s a poem by

Mary Oliver:

She’s in her car,

sees a turtle roadside.

Being a naturalist,

she knows where

the turtle is going.

She stops, picks her up,

takes her there.

The turtle didn’t say no.

To Ponder

            1.   I take accommodation to mean service or acceptance

                  offered with a small sense of obligation.

            2.   It’s not negative, but not altogether positive either. It’s

                  conditional. Time will tell.

            3.   The mature person accommodates frequently and

                  without fuss. Something good may come of this uneasy

                  coexistence.

            4.   And if nothing does, so what? Nothing ventured, nothing

                  gained.

            5.   The Tao’s message is that the Master is like a turtle. She

                  always makes do with what is.

            6.   That’s a flexibility lacking in most of us, at least in the

                  always part.

            7.   Bottom line, at the least, accommodation is a first-rate

                  first move.

© 2013 Allan Cox, Allan Cox & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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