Zhenevere Sophia Dao

                                                

 

On Living
                                                       

                                                                                                                        words for my child              
  

 

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 magnitude. 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. Difficulties may shiver and release, like bars of sediment in a running stream. Grace may flow down from everywhere, like 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 accrues the warmth of the sun. 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 wellness. 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. 

​

​

*

 

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 and our function disassemble; 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 can sever you from yourself. 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. 

​

Stay human, tactile, woundable, transformable, and devoutly sentient. If you live and animate primarily on technological media platforms, 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. Just so, a species changes. The essence of human being is dependent on its way. If you communicate by robotic means of sound bites and ill-considered opinions, the birthright breadth of you will shrink to the formulaic proportions of a device or a screen. Your own mystery, even to yourself, will become improbable. If you depend on Artificial Intelligence to replace the stirring rigor of your thought, you may lose reverence for thought itself, and you may doubt the veracity of wisdom. If you employ Artificial Intelligence for your companionship and your coping, you may lose faith in yourself—in the bedrock of your character—because you have lost faith in other people and the work of human relationship. We cannot forgo human intimacy and remain faithful to ourselves. Human being is a cooperative expansion or a cooperative degradation. We make a friend by believing in friendship; the work discovers us to ourselves. Enslaved to the drug of scrolling and the instant gratification of social media, you may become more excited by slander and cruelty and less moved by quiet things; by harmony and dignity; and by powerful, reserved people. You may imagine that intelligence is manipulative, because it is serious and careful; and that wounded blame and herd-like hatred are authentic, because they seem raw and immediate. You may lose the essence of love, which is to consider others so deeply you become indivisible from their fragility, and naturally bound to their courage. We become the modes that soothe us: distraction, addiction, blame; or wonder, consecration and communion. In the final analysis, empathy is intelligence—not as a moral rule, but because we possess no world other than that which we make with understanding.

​​

​

 

*

 

 

Remain strange; locate yourself in your inimitability. Where you are indigenous to yourself is where you are calm, if you have the power to believe in your soul. Even so, unique lives incur pain. You may feel like a tree falling forever through the common shout of civilization. Probably, you will bleed. Difference invites abuse. 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. 

 

Do not curse your fate. 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 take care of yourself, unreasonably. In love, remember that passion, if it is passion, is always specific. You cannot desire innumerable people at the same time—not if your desire is the unique 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. 

​

​

*

 

 

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, on occasion like lightning; 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: primal, 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 microscopic 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 stitch in the cloth 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.

​

​

*

​

Do not court power, for true power cannot be courted. Power is as the ocean is; it moves according to eternal forces. Power is not leverage; rather, power is belonging to life. The confusion between these two is perhaps the severest blight on the legacy of human being. For the desire for power as leverage already spells the death of belonging to life. Power is consummation of being; union with irreducible forces. It is wisdom become instinct in body and soul, stripped of sophistication, expressed in thought and action. Power 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. Not possessing this mystery, people rely on leverage for a surrogate sensation: influencing; commanding; inflicting; exacting change upon things, land, and people, often against their nature or their will. But this is not power. This is agency in the absence of mystery—even if it describes nearly all the world.

If you would be powerful, transcend the shrillness of superficial ambition. Let every moment of life be a moment of inner life—even as your surface shimmers in vital arts and signs. Be an instrument played by the irreducible. Imagine, as a tuning fork feels the waning of sound, that the vital forces have become bereft among human beings, because we have all but abandoned them. That we were to be the host and viscera of these immensities, but that they are roving, searching, wounded by our distraction, our petty machination, and the exhausting strategies of leverage. Power is the spirit of immensity recognizing itself in you. The most perfect continuity is the marriage of modesty and passion. Each is renewed by the other; each calls to the other indefatigably; each is half of eternity. To be powerful is to be but a drop of water, but made of the colossal stuff of the ocean. There is no "will to power"; the phrase is essentially a contradiction. We are no more or less than our substance. We subsume into immensity, or, bereft of mystery, we scrounge on leverage. 

Some people may distrust you, even fear you, because consummation with life is too rare and too strange. They may feel groundless in your presence, and grow confused, angry, afraid, or dismayed, vacillating between adulation and disdain. They may even lie about you, because sullying you with slander momentarily anesthetizes their own pain. For you will speak another language: the language of belonging to being. To belong to being as a tree, or a lake, or a storm belongs; as wound, movement, thought and emotion belong; to overflow plainly with the faith of feeling—this skinless vibrancy often offends the jaded world. But every worthy thing on earth will feel you capable of consonance. This is universal sympathy; and generosity; and superabundance of being, all of which are power. Like all immensity, power lies underneath itself. It wells inside, like the sublime pressure in a seed. 

​

​

*

​

​Of politics—know that politics is not a subject of social science; rather, the political is ultimately the spiritual; there is no separation. We disgrace this truth every moment—we have not told this truth for a comprehensive second on the earth. Nevertheless, the human race is an aspen grove, an infinite sensorium of mycelium. We, ourselves, release fumes and screams whenever we, elsewhere, abuse or are abused. We, ourselves, cry and tremble, and bow our heads in sanctification, whenever we, elsewhere, are kind, tender, and generous. There is distance, but no walls; not in time or space. You move your elbow, like a leaf in shadow, and a slave, two hundred and fifty years ago, asks in your heart, “Is that a whip or a tear of bread?” A child cries next door, and a bomb drops—right now—on a school or a hospital; somewhere; everywhere. For the world is a ruin of flames, from bloodiest barbarism, hatred, and violent stupidity. You have a glass of passion; you have an intelligent heart. You know that every moment of freedom, sanity, health, and peace—that everything in your life you might call viable—has been paid for by someone suffering needlessly and unspeakably, often at the hands of the lords; the masters; the henchmen of history. Therefore, your glass of passion would be for others; not entirely, but substantially. Live seriously and devoutly toward this end, as one of the purposes of your life: that whatever margin of health, sanity, and peace you have, others would have it too. To be well is to be capable of carefully being unwell, because others are not well; because the earth is not well. 

But be careful of identifying absolutely with causes. Be careful of becoming no more than a sign. For whatever work you do for justice, you must work twice as hard—thrice as hard—on your own soul. You must continually become a living answer to the question, “What was the human for?” If your own sensibility does not rise above the summit of your anger, you will become part of the world’s impotent rage. Simple harmonies; myriad studies in close love and care; privacy and passions and gratitudes of being; tremulous brushes with nature—these small mirrors of immensity will forgo you, if you are only rage. For the question of how to live—this, too is your life; this, too, is your cause. Remember that the news is not politics. Rather, politics is your indivisibility from history. To be political, then, is to feel. Feeling is not isolate and trifling; feeling is instinct amassing into action. And feeling is learned in the truth of your heart. It is maddening to say it, but there is a war between society and the soul. Money is the reason for this war. This very instant, in Silicon Valley, there are empires of Artificial Intelligence examining the shapes and shades of your soul in order to harvest your behavior: inundating your addictive social media feeds; bludgeoning you with unending horrors; gross arguments, combative and abusive dialogues; directing you to products and industries; infinite channels and chats and podcasts and media streams; algorithmic coups designed precisely to exploit your inmost passions, and to keep you from the health, sanity, and peace you believe you are fighting for. If you lack union with life, if you do not belong to being, you will be titillated by your own exploitation. You will even seek your own exploitation. Exploiting yourself, divesting yourself of sacrality—this will feel like a sudden rush of suicidal freedom, because you have forgone the work of intimacy with being. This is now the steady-state of our civilization.

 

Character is time, how you spend your minutes. The political has never been more personal. It is maddening to say it, but to be yourself in our time, you have to be a warrior of unprecedented courage. It is unfair; but spirit is a mountain; incalculable; and often unfair. Not Achilles, who was infinitely manipulable. But be a woman, or a man, or a non-gendered being like a great tree that grew where no one was looking; corrugated with consideration; strong of pith; wrought of patience and time; delicate of foliate; as ancient as you are modern. Do not fall down before this age as if you are nothing but this age. Rather, be an undoubtful human accumulation. Harvest inestimable being through time until the pith of time becomes you. Study everything you love until you are like its very self, and lose the will to chatter.  Failing great work always feels like freedom—until we have bad dreams. 

​

*

​

 

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. To be sincere is to be aware of death; to be aware of death is to be sincere. Sincerity wastes nothing; it wants only itself and for everything to be itself. 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, especially if it gives someone pain. Pain, like joy, and like love, is a spiritual entity, a holy ghost. Pain is as universal as air. Others' pain is ultimately our own pain in the mysterious interlocutions of being. What is glorious is not the infliction of pain, however necessary, but the more necessary honesty; the courageous self-preservation. Not the victory, but the attempt at healing; the empathy; the fierce resolve to sound out truth, to lay oneself bare in the need for communion and truth—endlessly.

 

Don’t live tamely. Take risks—or rather, make risk when life is rote; when habit or prowess becomes composure; even more, when Providence dries up and the soul's callings vanish. But risk not like a daredevil, which is easy. Anyone can be reckless if they revere a thrill more than themselves. Rather, risk as one who hears in the slapping of the rain the footsteps of mourners at her own funeral, and who breaks the coffin in order to begin everything again—how to talk, how to move, how to eat a piece of bread—because she was dead. Risk by listening to every third beat of your heart; the minor chord; the sound that makes strange clay of regret because you cannot sleep—for it is good not to sleep if you have not lived your life. Risk as one who bends down to his childhood and asks, “How have I failed you?” and says, “I will amend.” And again: “I swear, I will amend.” To risk for yourself is beautiful; it is a refund to birth itself. But to risk for someone else, to risk for someone else's becoming—this is indescribably beautiful. 

​

​

*

 

 

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.

​