Husband

In the mystery before time
Before earth, before the stars
In silence and nothingness
Eternal and infinite
Transcending all description, moving all things,
Perhaps this created us.
Presumptuous to give it a name,
call it tao
as a way to point at it.

Immense, it flows
Far away
then returns.

Tao
Space
Earth
Humanity
All important,
All faces of tao.

We grow out of the earth,
The earth is born of the universe,
The universe arose from tao,
Tao speaks through our understanding.


This one was challenging, and I'm not really satisfied with the words available in English. It clunks, I think.

Husband. The word is from O.E. hus, house, and Old Norse bondi, a freeholder or yeoman, from bua, to dwell; hence, the word is literally, a house-owner in his capacity as head of the household, and so came to be applied to a man joined to a woman in marriage, who was, naturally, the head of his household. When Sir John Paston, writing to his mother in 1475, said -
I purpose to leeffe alle heer, and come home to you and be your hisbonde and balyff,
he was proposing to come and manage her household for her. We use the word in the same sense in such phrases as To husband one's resources.

Similarly a ship's husband is an official responsible for seeing that all the equipment, etc., necessary for going to sea is placed on board a ship before sailing, that all the regulations relating to the voyage are fulfilled, and that the captain is sufficiently furnished with money, etc., for carrying on business when in foreign or other ports.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1963, p 475.