The Tao te Ching – Verse 5

I haven’t reviewed in a while… so here I am starting again with Verse 5 of the Tao:

Tien ti pu jen
Heaven and Earth are not kind:
The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.

Sages are not kind:
People are straw dogs to them.

Yet Heaven and Earth
And all the space between
Are like a bellows:
Empty but inexhaustible,
Always producing more.

Longwinded speech is exhausting.
    Better to stay centered.

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Hmm… I have to admit this is a tricky one. It’s a verse that i will probably need to really meditate on to really grasp it’s meaning.
First of all I find the image of a "straw dog" is nothing I really understand…. yet let me try to explain what I am getting from this verse
so far…

Neither heaven nor earth are kind, neither is the sage. As everything, kindness and meanness, come from the same source. So how could a God
realised being be either? And how could they be neither? The sage is one with the heaven and the earth. God realised and part of the one source.
The source of all that is kind, all that is mean, all that is empty and all that is inexhaustible. At the same time the source has the power to
be all… and nothing… all at the same time.

Heaven, earth, you and me and them…. we are all the same. We are nothing and we are it all. We have potential to be great, and the potential
to be terrible. We have the choice to reach inexhaustible peace within ourselves. In the most productive place we can go… into silence. Into
meditation and into the now where we feel our oneness with source clearly… no chanting, no talking and a silent mind. In the centre of the source.