Zhenevere Sophia Dao

                                                

 

On Living
                                                       

                                                                                                                        words for my imaginary children              
  

 

Zhenevere Sophia Dao

 

2025

 

 

When hardships come your way, face them directly. Passivity breeds illness of body, heart, and mind. Hardship endured without denial always becomes some form of trust in yourself. Go into hardship, then, like a mountaineer with strong legs climbing an impossible slope. On the route of pain, name pain for what it is; neither diminish it nor distort its power. Expect nothing meaningful to be easy. But know also that human freedom consists of making choices that, if brave and true, mysteriously align your single life with the unseen forces of providence. What once seemed impossibly hard may fall effortlessly from everywhere, like grace or mountain water. 

 

Speak your mind, but only for the purpose of sincere intention, not in order to show off or to gain status or attention. Be silent when you have nothing to say, and listen, like a stone feels the sun, for signs of revelation. Let your comportment match your substance in all things. Don’t exaggerate, for exaggeration insults the natural humility of the soul. On the other hand, do not avoid exuberance, for exuberance is the natural joy of the soul. Be strong in your body, but don’t fetishize your physicality. Your body is an instrument, but only so much as you love the world beyond your body. Strive to be healthy, but not so obsessively that you live by rules and lose the taste for paradox. Know discipline regularly, but break your discipline regularly. Allow yourself to be moved suddenly by strange impulses and wild gods. Give yourself passionately to a vocation you believe in. And if circumstances are such that you cannot do the work you love, then comport yourself in whatever labor you have as if you alone had the power to elevate the atmosphere. 

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When you are injured in your body or your mind, feel the injury, as much as possible, as a crucible of destiny, rather than a form of punishment. See yourself not as a victim, but rather joined in the historical procession of profundity. Focus on the nature of the wound, and ask of it what it needs in order to shape you into yourself. Don’t complain; complaining consumes the life force and blinds you to every opportunity that is as near to hand as your own breath. On the other hand, allow yourself to grieve when life and faith are shattered. Cry out to the heavens, or to the bowels of the earth in your grief. Be inconsolable at times, because you are inconsolable at times. Grief is a valuation beyond human intention, and therefore touched by the divine. And grief is a force of nature, a form of earthly thunder, conferring great resolution and change. Grief cannot lie. When we grieve, our form disassembles; we soak speechless into ultimate matters. We cannot restore ourselves, and so the earth shapes us into testaments of why we live—of why anyone lives, for grief is as universal as ground and sky. But neither is grief a steady state. Grieve fully, then attune to the wisdom grief bestows, for grief is power, beyond hope and fear.

 

Avoid facile, acquisitive ambition. Grow more rather than less responsible. Never think you are free because you are indifferent or do not care. Freedom is always some pasture that is revealed after devotion, or sacrifice, or terrible responsibility. If you are insulted or demeaned by someone, do not respond in kind. Rather, rearrange your inmost disposition so that nothing in their slander could possibly be true. Avoid people who thrive on attacking other people. But if you are attacked, speak clearly in your knowledge of yourself, so that your own soul bears witness to the truth of your nature. And if you are attacked in your body, defend yourself as powerfully as you can. Walk away from foolishly violent people, but if you cannot avoid it, fight back fiercely, and let your fierceness speak for the precious gift of your life. 

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Stay human, tactile, woundable, transformable, unapologetically sentient. If you live and animate primarily on technological media platforms of communication you will diminish your subtlety, discernment, and your sensitivity. You’ll unconsciously imitate the personas of personas and lose the sacred connection to your instincts. Technological media and mean-spiritedness are tragic bedfellows. The detachment inherent to a means of communication is proportionate to its tendency to foster cruelty, numbness, and defamation, even in your own heart. The essence of human being is dependent on its way. If you communicate in robotic means of sound bites and ill-considered opinions, if you depend on Artificial Intelligence to scientifically engineer your thought, your companionship, and your coping, you will become less disposed to profound existence. You will become more excited by slander and cruelty and less moved by quiet things; by harmony and dignity; and by powerful, reserved people. You will imagine that intelligence is manipulative, because it is serious and careful; and that wounded blame and herd-like hatred are authentic, because they are immediate. You will lose the essence of love, which is to consider others so deeply you become indivisible from the sense of their fragility, and naturally bound to the constituents of their courage. We become the modes that soothe us: addiction, blame, or wonder. In the final analysis, empathy is intelligence—not as a moral rule, but because we have no world other than that which we make with understanding.

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Remain strange; nothing potent and true is common. Where you are different is where you are calm, if you have the power to believe in your soul. Even so, unique lives incur pain. You will feel like a tree falling forever through the common shout of civilization. Probably, you will bleed. Difference invites abuse; it always will. There will always be people who use hate to veil their own stagnation. But there will also be people who need your difference, like a secret seal, in order to become themselves. Stand your inmost ground. Observe courage wherever it can be found. See eccentricity, your own and others', as mystery, not as fodder for scorn. The soul is an explorer, or it is not a soul. Doubtlessly, you are most essential where you are most strange. 

 

Do not curse your fate, not in any thing. Fate is a pliable master. Fate reflects upon ourselves what we think of fate, and our own substance grows or corrodes accordingly. But do not imagine that “character” means a stoical lack of emotion. That misunderstanding is the ruin of the world. Feel everything that happens to you, and to others, as if your own nervous system is the map of an inalienable religion. Sacrifice for others, unreasonably, and then suddenly take care of yourself, unreasonably. In love, remember that passion, if it is passion, is always specific. You cannot desire many people at the same time—not if your desire is the code of your nature. Passion and sexuality are always realizations of focus, or else they are merely the itch of insecurity. Be reverent with yourself, and you cannot but be reverent with others. Reserve yourself in love for those who want to know why you live. Touch others because you want to know why they live. 

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Know some kind of trade. If you would belong to life, the animals, plants, and the elements must know you and trust you by the way you attend to material and sentient things. Touch carefully and deftly the more-than-human world. Strive to be natural, not colonized by money and digitalization and screens. But be wary of turning nature into a product or a screen. Gear and equipment may be accoutrements to action, but the essence of nature remains untouched by all things. All you have is the instrument of your organism; you feel and perceive only the measure of your sensibility. You cannot buy nature any more than you can buy love. Neither imagine that nature is something to be conquered. Rather, learn ways and styles of human being that blend with nature, as if you were hardly there. Speak like streams; be silent like snow; listen like a lake; ponder like a field; imagine like a wing; shiver like a pelt when you are moved.

 

Awe is wonder that has become personal. Become natural, and your passions—body and soul, word and deed—cannot help but align your will with the preservation of the wild—the wild that abides within you, and the wild that remains on the egregiously abused earth. Humility is soil in the biome of the human. We may yet disdain ourselves for the maltreatment of the earth. We may finish where we began: aghast; amazed at wonder; with an unspeakable reverence for solidity, darkness and fire; for air; for water; for wind and salt; for fur and blood; for the pounding of hooves; and for microscopical cosmoses of infinite complexity we surmise but cannot see. Live this reckoning now, for the sake of the ice and the bees, for the vegetation and the creatures. Not only because they sustain us, which they do, but because care is a supreme human purpose; care is the key to the wisdom of interdependency. Care cannot condescend, because care finds itself in that which it nourishes. You are most mysteriously yourself when you are filled with the exigency of others, all kinds of others. There is ultimately no "other" on the face of the earth.

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Do not court power, for power cannot be courted. Power is as the ocean is; it moves according to eternal forces. Power is belonging to life. Ambition for leverage is not power. The desire for power as leverage already spells the death of belonging to life. Power is consummation of being; it is union with irreducible forces. Power is wisdom that is instinct; stripped of sophistication; expressed in thought and action. It is sudden; strange; power cannot be calibrated to circumstance or society; for its strangeness is spiritual and incalculable. Power is plain profundity; wondrous ideation; undiminished sensation. In this way, power is almost too simple for the world. 

If you would be powerful, transcend the shrillness of superficial ambition. Let every moment of life be a moment of inner life. Be an instrument played by the irreducible. The vital forces of life are lonely, perhaps even abandoned by history. Power is the sensation of these forces recognizing themselves in you. Guileless, suggestible, passionate, and true, you will be their destination. 

Some people may fear you, even distrust you, because you are satiated with being. They may feel groundless in your presence, and grow confused, angry, afraid, or dismayed, vacillating between adulation and disdain. For you will speak another language: the language of belonging to being. But every worthy thing on earth will feel you capable of consonance. This is superabundance of being, which is power. Like all immensity, it lies underneath itself. It wells ceaselessly, like the sublime pressure inside a seed, pulled like the tide by the gravity of the moon.

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Be wary of snideness entering your heart. Some styles of irony spiritually refine and mediate pain, and may relieve despair. But crassness and bitter sarcasm are often the clever tantrums of sick and frustrated passions; they are sometimes the masks of strategies to avoid essential grief. Reduce nothing prodigious. Avoid rancor, greed, and vengeance. Trust your transformations, for they are the soul's resolve to not waste your life. Sincerity is not saccharine, naive, or effete; sincerity is power, because without fail it waters like heavy rain the inmost sanctums of the heart. Sincerity tells time in the soul; we live so shortly. Everyone is mortal, and therefore everyone would be sincere.

 

Strive to become as the animals in the way you move and perceive. But when you speak as a human being, use words that dignify things and people. If you must defend yourself with words, because of some injustice or offense to your soul, use words carefully and knowingly, like the sharpest, most precise sword. But do not glory in any victory, however necessary the battle, if it causes anyone pain. Others’ pain is ultimately your own pain in the mysterious interlocutions of being. 

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Worship the gift of life itself, while it lasts, as the utmost sacrament. Become pure in spirit, not anesthetized by convention or dogmatic morality, not dulled by culture and expectation, but pure because you are undisguised to yourself; pure because you are filled with birth and death unceasingly. Take your naked soul bravely out into the world, where you will be loved or hated, or both, by turns. Expect disapproval and sympathy equally, for there is no other way to be a true person. Ask life to be intense, not easy. But let laughter sometimes overtake you like a rushing stream; let a divine madness quake your very bones, not in derision, but when gravitas becomes comedy, through the mercy of the absurd. The world is filled impossibly with sham and cruelty. But the world is also filled impossibly with essential goodness, with sudden shoots of innocence that nod like beams of dew in the leaves of grass. Be rare in beauty and in your considerations, but be too consumed by world and love and care to even recognize that you are rare. Then you will be a human being on the earth, and of the earth. 

 

And when the earth shuffles us off, as it will, perhaps some tissue of your residency will remain, that you did less, rather than more harm on earth. Perhaps something of the way you thought and moved and touched will subsist in wild and true things, and in the dust of the inseparable stars.

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