the kongdan foundation

If you follow my writing on my website or face book, you know the value that I place on understanding our role as living history. That being a student of history enables us to be a teacher for tomorrow.

Confucius once is said to have said that we are not here to create, we are here to relate. I’ve pondered this thought a lot since first writing it more than twenty-five years ago for a book I wrote about Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.

Not here to create… but to relate. Just what are we to relate to, and does it matter?  

When we see ourselves as exponents and transmitters of virtue, then we can expand on the nature of things. After all we know has passed through us over time, what else can there be when all there is left to ask is who and/or what is to be made of our audience.

What did we leave behind, and how did we relate with them.  

Many times, when I read a book, I find essential to both my own and others understanding, I will re-write the passages in my own hand in my own words, while referencing and giving credit to the author. Having the words run through me as though an electric current or conscious stream of thought.

Finding grace and rewriting truisms from long ago conveying what we write as consistent with who we are to yet become.

Our paths interwoven with threads of history as though we are storytellers awakening to what we have always known but forgotten. To what may not have appeared important or understood at the time, but now finding ourselves reliving and updating history essential to the telling of today’s events and tomorrows to come.  

Things written years ago appearing like a time capsule just waiting to be acknowledged now with an understanding and wisdom that was then unknown.

Often asking ourselves in the interim just who is the audience and why do we write our story with little or no fanfare or attention from others? Words falling unnoticed like gold in a stream bed rushed over by water too much in a hurry. With others paying little or no attention to what comes before them, nuggets of true learning passing them by.  

When some things appear difficult, our journey is made easier with a little help and story becoming better told. With weaknesses within ourselves becoming strengths that could better serve our cause.

Why sometimes walking into a crowded room and feeling as if we are on a wisp of a cloud above our surroundings.

Not from ego, but something or somewhere beyond or more than where we find ourselves just then. As if we are in a room full of strangers when we may know a few that are in the room. While remaining home never with a sense of being alone when we are always with thoughts and words yet to be written.  

Growing up as a boy, until now retired and over seventy years old… with feelings of being in your world but not of your world. With nothing changing over the years. 

Regardless of where I am, even more so in China where I could not speak or write the language but feeling at home just the same.

Simply a narrator, taking notes for reference to be referred to later by myself, or someone unknown, with a far greater purpose than we could then understand. As we not only tell the story but become the story as well.