It is only by imagining the best can happen through our endeavors that dreams can actually come true. In the process we learn that it’s never too late to change the future. There is a process of how to organize a community I learned a year after graduating from SMSU (now SMU) back in 1977 of doing Town Meetings that helped me to see city planning as a career. Years later, when I became a city planner organizing neighborhoods and doing master plans, I saw the benefits of developing a common vision that people could do themselves when they worked together. The town meeting process taught me how to look for underlying contradictions that were obvious but appeared to be beyond the reach of all those involved. The key being to see past just who they thought they were, to who they were to become.
Many years later after retiring as a city planner/neighborhood specialist, while I was teaching in China I had the same experience. I had many friends who were professional planners in Jining and Qufu (cities over two thousand years old) and we often talked about how to preserve the old that was important and trying to modernize their cities. Many streets in the old cities that were thousands of years old weren’t made for so many people and especially cars. It was often left to the city planners to decide how to mesh the old with the new.
They often said that it was following the ancient ideas of Confucius whose presence permeated their communities. Conversations would often turn to the I Ching and looking to complimentary opposites that would focus on trying to capture the flow of both human history and endeavors that complimented the past being the key. Not just tearing down old structures to build new, but to show the best of the old with the new. We often forget or overlook that it is old structures that hold our memories that give us definition as well. It is the key to urban planning that gives an identity complimenting the past giving definition to the future to who we are. This was always an opportunity for seeing the best of the past and keeping true the who they would be going forward.
Looking back more than thirty years after I wrote the entry below… it remains as though we are all forever meandering downstream. That we all have places to go and things to do before journeys end.
Voices of the Dragon Part 2 Number 12
We are Forever Meandering Downstream
Remain as a log adrift down a slowly meandering stream. At peace and harmony with all. Knowing that as the river finds its end you will find your own place as well.
The log itself a beehive of activity with small creatures and bugs in and outside its core with birds forever flitting about. A blue jay landing to rest for a moment just to watch the scenery go by.
Forever finding ourselves. Finding our own place in the universe wholly within nature’s way for each to find and come to know. With no one’s place on the log or the log itself more important than the next.
Coming to know the seasons and the cycles they forever represent and finding comfort in the expectations that the elements constantly bring to the forefront. Always reminded that the final call as to who gets their own way is natures alone. Always siding with the strongest as it must be in the end.
Come to know boundaries and find the structure that is needed for everything to begin to make sense. Stay within those boundaries and be relieved of choices. As what comes forward will be only natural to your own desires. Simply by showing strength and by letting go.
There can be no river to travel or log to steady the way downstream without an awareness that we affect everything we touch and are affected by everything that touches us. As we remain forever on the journey, forever meandering downstream. 4/16/94
(In 2012 I was a part of a Chinese delegation of about forty people to promote my two books that I had published in China in 2004 and 2006 that went to London, England. I stayed at a bed and breakfast where the British Museum was about a block away, they had several Chinese porcelains three are depicted here.)
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