S2. Chapter 15: Let the Mud Settle

Chapter 15: Let the Mud Settle 

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Lloyd aims the Tao Te Ching at Trumplandia like a spiritual weather report for a country vibrating itself into madness. Using Chapter 15, he explores three versions of where he comes from: Seattle, the Big Bang, and a VHS copy of Say Anything that slipped into the multiverse.

This is a guided meditation for people who metabolize news like caffeine, a political satire for listeners with mud in their water, and a Taoist riff on clarity in collapsing times.

Can you stop long enough for the mud to settle?

Transcript

Welcome back for chapter fifteen.
I’m Lloyd Dobler, and this is The Tao of Lloyd, where I take the Tao Te Ching one chapter at a time and aim it at Trumplandia like a weather report for a spiritual climate crisis morphing into a Category Five Third Reich shitstorm, complete with a gold-plated toilet and a Truth Social account.”

“Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.”
That line from Chapter 14 keeps ringing in my ears. I’ll get to where I come from in a minute. 

Because if Chapter 14 was about the fog,
Chapter 15 is about what happens when you finally stop fighting the fog long enough for the ground beneath it to appear.

So here’s where my head has been:

It feels like, living in the United Sates right now is like living in a giant snow globe
that someone shook in 2016 and just… never stopped shaking.

We are a nation vibrating like, well like a vibrator at a Motel 6 where the walls are thin and the life choices are loud.

Meanwhile the Tao shows up with a cup of tea and whispers:
“Do you… maybe… want to sit down for a minute?”

And with that, lets settle right into some stillness for the meditation and the reading.

(Bell chime.)

If you’re somewhere you can safely do it,
I invite you to close your eyes.
Or don’t.
I’m not your spiritual advisor.
…Or am I?

Go ahead and close your eyes…
I mean what have you got to lose?
Unless you're explaining, to a confused child, why the adults keep breaking the world on purpose. 

Just go ahead and close your eyes.
Start the journey within.

Good.
Get comfortable.

Breathe in through your nose.
Breathe out through your nose like you’re accepting that you will absolutely die with an unfinished to-do list. Cuz chances are, you know… 
Breathe in
and out….

Good.

This is Chapter 15 of the Tao Te Ching:

The ancient masters were profound and subtle.
Their wisdom was unfathomable.
There is no way to describe it;
All we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful
as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
Courteous as a guest.
Fluid as melting ice.
Shapeable as a block of wood.
Receptive as a valley.
Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

The master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present and can welcome all things.

(Bell chime.)

And that’s Chapter 15.

Chapter 15 keeps asking this question that feels so gentle on the surface
and so impossible underneath:

“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?”

Most days?
No.
Not even a little.

My mud is loud.
My mud has opinions.
My mud files amicus briefs.
My mud thinks it can fix the country if I just stay awake long enough.

And right before that, in the last chapter, the Tao slips in another one:

“Just realize where you come from.”

And if we wait for the mud to settle, we should see clearly the place where we are; the place from which we come. So where are we from? If you’re anything like me, the answer is complicated.

On one level, I come from Seattle
but not the Amazon/Bezos/“would you like that latte with a microloan?” Seattle.

I come from 1980s Seattle,
the soft-focus, pre-grunge, pre-Nirvana tadpole version of the city
where it rained like the sky was apologizing,
and where every kid with a pawnshop guitar
was somewhere between a garage band and a prophecy.

A place where I biked downhill and the whole world smelled like salt and evergreen and possibility.

But to talk about Seattle honestly,
you have to talk about the land:
unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples:
the people indigenous to the Pacific North West of Turtle Island.

And if I’m going to say where I come from,
I can’t separate it from where this country comes from:

The Second Amendment
that sacred cow we keep offering thoughts and prayers to
wasn’t written so colonists could protect their sourdough starter from the British.
It was written
so white settlers could arm slave patrols
and enforce a racial hierarchy by law.

And Manifest Destiny
that white Christian nationalist fever dream—
didn’t stop at the Mississippi.
It marched west,
carved up Native land,
and installed itself as the unspoken operating system
of American identity.

Trump’s immigration policy?
It’s just Manifest Destiny with better lighting and a social media team.
A theology of entitlement, disguised as border control.

And if you trace that same logic outward,
you hit a century of U.S. foreign policy:
installing dictators, toppling governments,
treating the planet like a RISK game board

So when I say I come from Seattle,
what I really mean is:

I come from a beautiful place
built on painful truths,
inside a country that keeps trying to bury those truths
under fireworks and free-market optimism.

That’s my mud.
That’s my water.
It deserves to settle too.

Where else do I come from? Same place as you: The Big Bang.

Because if we’re doing the Taoist/Buddhist/“we are all stardust with student loan debt” thing—
then I come from the same place you come from:

A hydrogen atom flung from the Big Bang,
sloshing around the universe for 14 billion years
until it somehow decided to incarnate as a middle-aged guy
with a podcast and unresolved Diane Court issues.

I am star debris with anxiety.
Cosmic leftovers with opinions.
One ripple in the universe’s long inhale
momentarily convinced I’m separate
because I have thumbs
and a gym membership I don’t use enough to justify the cost but I keep it because Gym’s make it so easy to sign up, but have you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? It’s like Hotel California: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. 

Where do I come from?
Everywhere.
Nowhere.
Whatever existed before “existing” became a thing.

Also, and I may regret insisting on reminding you all this:
I mean, let's be honest
I come from a movie.
A script.
A boombox held overhead in the cultural memory of America.
I am a character who wandered off the set
and somehow didn’t get caught by security.

I come from Cameron Crowe’s brain
and the romantic ecosystem of 1989,
and then I slipped through a crack in the multiverse—
and landed here,
in your headphones,
during Trump 2.0,
hosting a Taoist podcast
because the simulation forgot to patch something in the timeline.

I am fiction leaking into reality
like a VHS tape melting in the microwave of the collective unconscious.
Talking to you.
Trying to make sense of a world
that wasn’t supposed to have a role for me past the end credits

So where am I from? 
Seattle.
Stardust.
Storyline.

All true.
All false.
All mud swirling in the glass.

But when the Tao asks,
“Can you wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?”
it isn’t testing your patience.
It’s reminding you that the clarity you’re desperate for
doesn’t come from more effort—
it comes from less interference.

When I stop forcing the water,
when I stop rehearsing an identity
and let myself simply be
the origins don’t compete anymore.
They harmonize.

I am the land I grew up on.
I am the universe that breathed me out.
I am the story I escaped from and continue to write.

The Tao isn’t asking,
“Where are you from?”
It’s asking:

“Can you stop long enough
to feel the part of you
that comes from everything?”

So can you?

From the edge of empire
and the center of the self—
this is The Tao of Lloyd.