The key for me in doing a commentary on Lieh Tzu is trying to take a down-to-earth approach to his writing to help make Taoism and Eastern philosophy more approachable. To let him speak to us in his words in our times.
While I have tried to emulate, or model, my activities from what I have studied and learned from both Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu over the years, Lieh Tzu seems to follow a more laisse fare approach to living a more unstructured life that seemed to grant a great deal of freedom to a more undisciplined lifestyle than Chuang Tzu that seems to suit me. Although of course, gaining more discipline is the paradox I am here to remedy.
Chuang Tzu’s depiction of his “Perfected Man”, has a much great structured emphasis on how we live. Although, he seems to spend a lot of his time making fun of and laughing at those who appear only to live a structured and disciplined life solely for the benefit of seeming to do so… when their efforts to live a life of virtue leave a lot to be desired. I love them both dearly. For me strolling in the clouds through eternity with the two of them has the most ultimate ring immortality could offer.
The line below that rings most clearly is when we are “Always growing as we fall away”. From what are we falling away from, and to what are we falling into? And then in the next entry “Everything remaining Perfect”, how could you write something like that and not be impacted or affected after everything I had written to date over the previous year. I recall vividly after I wrote it, that as I set my pen down and thought what had now transpired over the past year or so… The question of who I am was becoming very real. Events of the day could not compare with these three immortals from ancient China who had been asking me to join them was very real.
As I write this now thirty years later, rather I was to join them was really never in question.
My travels with Lieh Tzu / Interpolations along the Way
Chapter One – Heaven’s Gift
18. Falling away or giving way
Imperceptible shifting of time within the elements. Things forever shrinking and 
swelling, maturing, decaying, being born, and forever dying all the same.
Always present in the end. Never aware of changes at the onset or the results sure to come. Our essence is taking shape as we live always changing. From birth to death our features, knowledge and bearing differing as we are but a mirror moving through time.
Always growing as we fall away. Never knowing the intervals. Only waiting for the results sure to come. How else can we ever know? 1/11/95
19. Everything remaining Perfect
Have no fear of the end of heaven and earth. Thereby lacking a place to rest or that 
you forget to eat or sleep. Heaven is nothing more than the air around us. Where is there that there is no air? Your own weight in it allows you to walk and stand tall breathing in through lungs filled only with it. Always breathing in and out as your inner chi or essence makes itself known to dragons.
The earth is nothing more than the soil and water that sustains us. Filling and giving shape to the place we only temporarily call home. As we walk and stand tall with feet forever attached to it. Always letting the earth be the ultimate messenger of nature’s way.
What can the air be but the rainbow, clouds and mist, wind and rain and the four 
seasons? Simply heaven at its purest. What can soil be but mountains and hills, rivers and seas, metal and stone, fire and wood? The essence of earth at its fullest. How can there ever be an end to it? As all things have beginnings and endings, what will happen must happen. Endings always end, bringing new beginnings that simply begin again.
Fearing the worst will happen is not as it should be. What can eternity be but the innate sense that heaven and earth are simply the same only in different forms for different reasons? Things just taking shape in the end. Have no concern for final outcomes and know peace. Simply rest easy and eat and drink from the cup that living brings you. With everything remaining perfect to the end. 1/13/95
Numbers eighteen and nineteen of one hundred fifty-eight entries.
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