Taomeow

Pet raccoons though... if you do something illegal, they'll rat you out to the cops. https://x.com/TaraBull808/status/1920186904835678319

Quotes aside, all kinds of "the tao of..." thingies constitute yet another cultural appropriation (much as I dislike the glaring overuse of the concept in vogue of late, it does occasionally hit the right target), westernization, and oversimplification of the deepest insight of another civilization. Tons of books with this cute title -- The Tao of Pooh, the Tao of Meow, etc. -- created an illusion that such a thing as the tao of something not only exists but is approachable by the same cute methods as those outlined in self-help books or "get rich fast" investment plans. A fascination with sand you describe -- you can call it contemplation, introspection, study, observation... all fascinating to be sure, but none amount to "the tao of sand." Tao is not a property of sand. Rather, sand is one of the manifestations of tao, out of many. As for the sword, a sword practice is one inroad into "attaining" tao -- out of many -- and it can't be attained via contemplation, only through practice itself, but even at the highest level you would call what you attain "the gong of sword" first, mastery through dedicated practice -- and you might attain tao through that, some 50+ years down the road... or not. Also sprach Taomeow.

Cool cat song. A relative of mine is a veterinarian surgeon in Canada. He doesn't just see animals in his office but if necessary he travels to help them wherever the mishap had found them. He also had a local TV show at one point titled "My Pet Ate What?.." (Some owners, especially dog owners, get mind-boggling surprises removed from their pets, like five pairs of underwear and the like. Number one cat hazard is hair ties...) I remember this guy as a kid growing up in a perfectionist, sparkling-clean-obsessed family, whose only pet was a turtle. (Because no fur and no demands beyond a cabbage leaf.) I didn't understand how a human can have an emotional connection with a turtle, but he did -- to the extent it shaped his career choice!

Very true. Interactions with animals, for people who are not too far gone into that "spiritual solitude," albeit different from interactions with fellow humans, have always, till very recently in history, been part of the human experience, of what it's like to be human. Many find vestiges of that in pets, although it's still different from, e.g., what you experienced with that eagle. (My grandmother's cat was not exactly a pet although she did have some advantages and disadvantages of that status in her life, but she was also a free cat among other free cats, roaming a countryside-like environment, hunting, exploring, living a complex and rich adult cat life. Super healthy, never saw a vet in her life... She was well over 20 when car traffic, nonexistent throughout her life, increased in that area, and one of those monsters got her. She just wasn't used to minding cars, a late addition to her habitat.)

Great lessons. I've learned from cats all my life, and consider my grandmother's cat, who was 5 years older than me, my first taoist teacher. Alas, I didn't absorb all of her lessons, only some. Here's what they were: 1. A balance of freedom and loyalty is the foundation of all meaningful relationships. If either component is missing, the relationship is shallow and strained and ultimately means nothing to you. 2. Morning beauty routine should be brief but consistent. 3. Don't beg, don't steal, don't go without -- let your eyes tell them what you need. 4. Tomcats come when you call. 5. Kittens are to be taken care of with utmost dedication. 6. Enemies are forever. If you hate someone's guts, they did something to deserve it. Neither seek nor avoid a confrontation -- if they cross your path, fight, if they don't, forget they exist. 7. Love is forever. If you love someone, they don't have to do anything to "deserve" it and can't do anything to lose it. (If they could you would know better than to love them to begin with.) 8. If it's careless enough to be within reach of your pounce, it's food.

Actually yes, it is a simplified form based on the classical Chen forms (Laojia Yilu and Erlu), but it's a recent addition to the Chen arsenal, developed by members of the Chen family in 1983. Unlike the Yang style 24 form, which was commissioned by the Chinese Sports Committee in 1956 for mass exercise, the Chen 24 form was designed to introduce the basic "alphabet" of Chen taiji while maintaining its martial and health benefits. You can think of it as "CliffsNotes" of sorts to the real deal.

It wasn't a head butt, the front paws pushed against the barn wall, acting as shock absorbers. And nothing is stupid that is efficient. In martial arts styles, the counterpart of what cats are masters of would be Zui Quan (Drunken Boxing). They do exaggerate their emotionally motivated moves and create drama over things that don't seem worth it... like cucumbers... but the job gets done -- they are worshipped without having to serve.

I don't think grocery store mushrooms are capable of producing dire results except for gastronomic dissatisfaction. I hardly ever buy them because they do nothing for me after the real thing. Well, some Asian grocery store mushrooms sometimes, chiefly for their modest health benefits... but taste-wise, they still don't come close. I buy dried wild ones from somewhere in Europe on occasion, and then go to town. They are easy to rehydrate and use about the same way as you would the fresh ones.

As a rule I don't take any mushrooms with gills except for chanterelle. The ones with the sponge under the cap are a lot safer, and the inedible ones among them tend to announce they're inedible with bitter taste rather than fool you with imperceptible toxins. The worst-ever mushroom scare I experienced was when we were on vacation with some relatives in the Adirondacks and gathered a good basket of mushrooms, which I was going to fry up for the whole party. My nephew, about 3 at the time, wanted to contribute and kept offering mushrooms he found, and got upset when they were being turned down. I cooked a great dinner of wild mushrooms with potatoes, and then at night I heard someone in the house visit the toilet. And then a horrible thought struck me: what if my nephew did manage to sneak a death cap or something into the dish when no one was looking?.. And of course I started feeling "symptoms." Worst night of paranoia ever. In the morning it turned out everybody was fine of course, but I added another rule to my mushroom hunting: never in the company of helpful little kids.

In Belarus we used to gather these... of course this guy found a champ, but Parasol mushrooms are indeed huge and surprisingly edible. Work best in soups, frying them (like any 'shrooms with gills) is a pretty uninteresting culinary endeavor, they have too much water and not enough flavor. A look-alike grows in a nearby park here in CA, but I'm afraid to give them a try because I can't be 100% sure it's not the poisonous cousin, which also exists. I've even taken spore prints and they looked good... but still I'm reluctant. American mushrooms even of the varieties I am very well familiar with look somewhat different from their European counterparts, and I was trained on European mushrooms -- on location, for which no spore print is an adequate substitute. So, here I only take either the ones that have very distinct features and no poisonous evil twins, or else local ones I only learned about here and never met in the European forests.

Mushroom poisoning is like swimming accidents -- most of them happen to experienced folks who get too cocky. I will never forget an episode from my childhood -- at my grandmother's, on the countryside-like outskirts of a town surrounded by mushroom-rich forests. Everybody was into foraging, me too of course, since I was 5. So anyway, my grandmother had a falling out with a neighbor over her cat, whom the neighbor accused of breaking her precious lily flowers in a flower bed she cultivated in the front yard. The cat purportedly made a bed for herself among those lilies. My grandmother pooh-poohed the accusation, words started flying and the two women wound up becoming sworn enemies. Then at one point the neighbor banged frantically on our door in the middle of the night, crying and begging my grandmother for help -- her husband ate some foraged mushrooms and was supposedly dying. Hardly anyone had phones then and there, no private cars, no means to get to the hospital till morning. My grandmother, a nurse, tended to the poisoned guy until the neighbor located a phone somewhere and called the ambulance. Took a while. I don't know exactly what my grandmother did to save the neighbor's husband, but the verdict at the hospital was, she did. So, the cat was allowed to take her daytime naps in her favorite spot among the lilies again from then on, and did. This was the ultimate prize when mushroom hunting in those parts -- the King Boletus. His royal majesty.

Haha. I don't think he could avoid domestication entirely -- if you're caught in the rain you can't avoid getting wet -- but he did a pretty good job.

Interesting. "Tao gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two give birth to three, three give birth to ten thousand things." This statement, physically and biologically absolutely accurate for our 3D world,* contains within itself "laws" that can't be broken by 3D beings, whether domesticated or wild, whether benign or malicious. Now of course beings from a realm that has more dimensions can overcome these limitations unless there's a law that stops them. But determining whether those interdimensional criminals are the ones responsible for our plight is above my pay grade. *Tao: from wuji with no dimensions, to one which is a single point, to two which is a 2D line, to the 3D structure that breaks out of the flat 2D plane into the next dimension, to ten thousand things you can build out of these building blocks by stacking them together this way and that way. A 4D being can manipulate objects and entities of a 3D world as easily as you can draw on a 2D surface of a sheet of paper or type on a 2D surface of your computer screen. If they choose to write malicious code, they can. Scary, huh? You can write outrageous laws on a flat sheet of paper and 2D beings will obey them. 4D beings can write outrageous laws into a 3D world and we will obey them. The only way to not break the laws of nature is to imitate it ("tao patterns itself on itself"), approach nature as complete and perfect, and write no additional code into that. I don't know who's that wise (or that lucky) but it's not us.

Cats do break the law they are under. Granted domesticated cats are under domesticated man's law -- but they do break it unless the owner bends them into submission with early detachment from mother, nutritional deficiencies and toxicities, veterinary iatrogenic damage, impoverished non-stimulating environments, obligatory boredom and loneliness and removal of parental and mating behaviors via surgical mutilations, outright cruelty, and other human laws a cat may be too overwhelmingly changed to break. We are in the same boat. No one knows what non-domesticated man is like. (Let alone non-domesticated woman.) But I have a hunch that domestication breaks all the laws of nature, whether in man or in cat or in cattle. Whatever we think up to take their place serves somebody I guess -- but hardly the species itself. Somebody else. The owner.