[PREVIOUS] Responsive to Skillful Attention

Following the river where it bends—
not because rivers know
but because bending is what rivers do
when they meet the unmovable.

After months of decluttering awareness through Nagarjuna’s emptiness and learning to show up with skillful attention, I find myself at another threshold. The Buddhist path cleared the underbrush—all that grasping, all those fabricated necessities that kept me circling in familiar loops. But now what? Standing in this spaciousness, responsive and alert, where does the path lead?

Zhuangzi whispers: nowhere special. Everywhere present.

Xiaoyao (逍遥)—the Chinese characters suggest wandering freely, moving with ease, carefree roaming. Not the carelessness of avoidance, but the carefreeness of someone who has learned to move with rather than against the grain of things. Someone who has discovered that the most profound freedom comes not from forcing our way but from finding the natural gaps, the spaces where movement becomes effortless.

Drifting beyond destinations

The Current Empire operates on summits—measurable peaks, achieved goals, possessed objects. It cannot conceive of value that cannot be captured, accumulated, stored. This is why xiaoyao appears to the Empire as waste, as aimlessness, as philosophical luxury for those who have the privilege of non-productivity.

But Zhuangzi knew better. In a world increasingly mechanized by systems that reduce humans to resources and nature to raw material, carefree wandering becomes essential practice. Not escape from engagement, but a different quality of engagement altogether.

I am learning the difference between drifting away and drifting with. The first is reactivity—pushing against what we don’t want until we tumble into its opposite. The second is responsiveness—feeling the currents, sensing the openings, moving like water finding its way.

Last week, walking the familiar path to the coffee shop, I noticed my feet choosing a different route without consulting the map in my head. Not rebellion against routine, but something more subtle: attention to what wanted to emerge. The slight inclination toward the tree-lined street instead of the busy avenue. The body’s wisdom, prior to the mind’s planning.

This is how transistance deepens into xiaoyao. Where Buddhist emptiness taught me to notice the fabricated nature of my mental constructions, Daoist wandering teaches me to trust what remains when those constructions relax their grip. Not the void—that’s still thinking in terms of presence and absence—but the natural responsiveness that doesn’t need to choose sides.

Beyond the wisdom of grasping

Nagarjuna’s emptiness was surgery—precise, necessary, sometimes painful. All those thoughts and patterns I mistook for reality, exposed as interdependent arisings without fixed essence. Essential medicine for a mind addicted to certainty.

But xiaoyao is what happens after the surgery heals. Not the careful reconstruction of a better belief system, but learning to live in the space where beliefs become workable rather than true, provisional rather than permanent. Where wisdom expresses itself not through accumulated knowledge but through what Zhuangzi calls “fasting of the mind”—a quality of attention so receptive it doesn’t leave tracks.

I notice this while writing. When I try to construct the perfect sentence, the words become wooden, forced. But when I let the writing wander, following its own intelligence, something flows that I couldn’t have planned. Not automatic writing—there’s still craft, still care—but craft held lightly, care without clinging.

The Empire cannot understand this. It needs to know: what’s the goal? What’s the outcome? How do we measure the value? But xiaoyao moves like weather, like the way deer emerge at twilight—not according to schedule but according to readiness, according to the confluence of conditions that makes appearing natural.

The politics of uselessness

Zhuangzi tells the story of a massive tree, so gnarled and twisted that carpenters pass it by as useless. The tree lives for thousands of years because no one tries to turn it into lumber. “Everyone knows the usefulness of the useful,” Zhuangzi observes, “but no one knows the usefulness of the useless.”

In our moment of climate crisis and social collapse, I wonder if carefree wandering offers something essential: the possibility of relating to the world in ways that don’t immediately convert everything into resource. Not withdrawal from political engagement, but a different quality of engagement—one that doesn’t begin with conquest, doesn’t end with possession.

This touches something the Buddhist emptiness practice prepared but couldn’t complete. Seeing through the solid-seeming nature of things is liberating, but it can drift toward detachment, toward a subtle spiritual superiority. Xiaoyao maintains engagement while releasing the compulsive quality of engagement. It wanders into the world rather than above it.

Practically, this means learning to participate in necessary work—teaching, caring for elders, tending gardens, resisting injustice—without the internal pressure that turns all action into achievement. Finding the places where my particular responsiveness serves not my ego’s agenda but something larger and more mysterious.

Sometimes this looks like showing up to community meetings and listening past the surface arguments to what’s trying to emerge. Sometimes it’s writing letters to representatives while holding lightly any attachment to specific outcomes. Sometimes it’s simply walking slowly enough to notice what the neighborhood trees have to teach about patience, about growing toward light while staying rooted.

Responsive spontaneity

What I’m learning through xiaoyao differs subtly but significantly from the mindful attention cultivated through Buddhist practice. Mindfulness still carries a sense of watcher and watched, the meditator observing the flow of experience. Useful, necessary, but not quite free.

Xiaoyao invites something more like becoming the flow itself. Not watching the response but being the response. Not observing spontaneity but expressing it. Like the skilled cook whose knife moves without resistance because it finds the natural joints in the meat, or the master swimmer who moves with rather than against the water’s turbulence.

This isn’t skill as accumulation but skill as emptying. The more I practice, the less there is of “me” doing the practicing. Not dissociation or spacing out, but a quality of presence so complete it doesn’t create a sense of someone being present.

Yesterday, in conversation with a friend struggling with depression, I felt this quality emerging. Not the therapy-trained part of me analyzing and intervening, not the spiritual-seeker part offering dharma teachings, but something more immediate: just meeting her where she was without needing to move her somewhere else. The words that came were simple, probably forgettable. But something passed between us that felt like medicine—not because I administered it but because I got out of the way of what wanted to happen.

The art of aimless direction

Zhuangzi’s xiaoyao doesn’t reject purpose but holds it differently. Like archery after years of practice—the arrow knows its way to the target not through force but through alignment, through the archer’s whole being expressing itself through bow and arrow and flight.

I am learning to live with aimless direction. Moving toward what serves without grasping at outcomes. Teaching classes where the curriculum becomes conversation, conversation becomes discovery, discovery becomes transformation no one could have planned. Writing that begins with a question and follows where questioning leads, trusting the intelligence of not-knowing.

This requires what I can only call faith—not belief in specific doctrines but trust in the natural intelligence that moves water downhill, turns seedlings toward light, brings migrating birds home across impossible distances. The same intelligence that moves through human consciousness when we don’t interfere with conceptual management.

The Current Empire cannot tolerate this kind of faith. It insists on control, prediction, guaranteed return on investment. But xiaoyao suggests another possibility: learning to participate in the intelligence that governs ten thousand things without needing to understand how it works.

Not passive waiting but active receptivity. Not lazy drifting but alert wandering. The difference between floating downstream and swimming with the current—both move with the water’s energy, but one responds skillfully to what emerges.

Afternoon light slants through kitchen windows
across unwashed dishes
and I practice the art
of not-needing-to-fix-everything
right now.

This too is wandering.
This too is free.

TENTATIVE SERIES OUTLINE

• Whispering New Directions
• A Fourfold for the Current Empire
• Decluttering Awareness: Nagarjuna and Emptiness
• Showing-Up for Emptiness: Excellence Between Obsession and Apathy [PREVIOUS]
• Responsive to Skillful Attention [PREVIOUS]
• Care-Free Wandering (Zhuangzi) [CURRENT]
• Traversing not Avoiding Nihilism (Nishitani) [NEXT]