You Call This a Taoist Blog?

Trey Smith

Casual visitors and regular readers may have noticed that a lot of the writing on TRT is not explicitly Taoist, in nature. While most of the posts written by Scott and Ta-Wan indeed are Taoist or Taoist-like, the majority of mine appear not to be. While some of my posts concern personal issues I encounter in life, the vast majority are of a socio-political nature. Only about 25% or less deal explicitly with philosophical Taoism.

Though I don't pretend to enjoy the same status as Zhuangzi, I do believe I am following in his footsteps. He was writing about the contemporary topics of his day. A lot of the people and events he references seem archaic to us simply because he lived thousands of years ago! If we had been alive back then and read some of his stories, we might easily have known that he was referring to this or that warlord, king, civil servant or traveling sage.

In my mind's eye, talking and writing about philosophy in a theoretical or clinical sense has merit. It is by cutting away all the hubris of life that we can get down to brass tacks (i.e., foundational principles). But theoretical discussions can only take us so far. Life is about living and so I think it's important to discuss life from one's theoretical framework. That's why I focus a lot of my writing on what is taking place in the world today.

It has been noted before that I tend to address issues from an eco-socialist perspective. You'll get no arguments from me because I consider myself an eco-socialist! I think many of the central concepts and themes of philosophical Taoism and eco-socialism go hand-in-hand: simplicity, interconnectedness, justice, peace, thrift and humility.

While a good deal of my posts are not explicitly Taoist, I do think that almost every one of them is implicitly so.