“When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don't belong.” 
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

There is no truth for everything. Every thing has it's own unique truth that fits it into the whole. We spend so much time looking outward for answers, only to find that the answers may be inside of us. That our answers are hidden away in our existence, and that what we seek is connected to some truth within us. I've been spending time with the Tao of Pooh and Te of Piglet. Two books that make the Tao the Ching wonderfully simple by explaining it in stories. 

The Tao is the universal law in action. A coexistence with everything else. Where every thing has it's place within the whole. Society, western society in particular, has created systems based on fear, power, greed, and control dating all the way back to the Confuscianist period. The animals and trees became inanimate, and we no longer lived with a mutual respect for the things that sustained us. 

When you begin to look inside for answers, you find things that are yours and things that are not. Your combination of experiences, and thoughts, and learnings, and physical self is exactly what the universe has crafted. When we look outside for answers, following laws and rules that do not coincide with our truth, we grow away from our truth. When we look inside, and honor ourselves exactly as we are, we understand what we can offer into the world. If every person seeks their own individual truths and then how they can fit their gifts into the society at large, we find a whole community. 

There is peace in this connection. In this knowing how much a part of everything we are. And as we learn that we are everything, we understand that everything is also us. We grow with the world around us. Gently giving and taking and living in balance. There is no need for more, and the meaning of our lives is derived from exactly what we have. As the balance shifts back and forth, we learn that everything has an equal and opposite. We trust the systems to balance themselves and we place ourselves within them. 

Eventually, the hope, is that as each person learns to love and accept themselves. To seek the light and truth and belonging in the scheme of things. People will know how much they are as they are and will not need to prove themselves bigger. Material possessions will lose importance, and the quality of life will be defined as the ability to coexist with the universe. When we balance ourselves, we reflect the balance in others, and as we find balance in our communities, we learn how we can be a part of the balance of the world we live in. 

We have lived out of balance for a while now. In the western world where we are taught that the answers are outside of us. Where competition and rivalry and greed are at the forefront of how we move through the world. I trust that we will swing back towards the feminine soon. Where art, and music, and laughter, and conversation are valued over paychecks. Where we know where our food comes from, and we waste as little as we can. Where we trust our gifts and share them proudly. Where we love for the sake of loving, without expectation in return. Where we follow the way of the universe instead of trying to control, manipulate or understand it. 

It might all be simple. Really simple. We just have to trust that it is to get there.