Taomeow

All things change, it seems, but Haiku Chain has old rules. I observed them. Why?

Good thing I like tea. Turkey, England, Kazakhstan, Ceylon, here I come!

Great idea. When asked what he was going to do with the rattler, the ranger told us he would take it to Snake Canyon and release it there, among its peers. Apparently there's a local canyon that serves this purpose. Our "Poisonous and Spazzy Snake Canyon" could be situated below The Pit...

I posted this on FB, so whoever is hanging out there and saw it has my apologies for a repeat. Last week I was practicing Cannon Fist with a regular practice partner in a regular spot in the park, and we were jumping around for an hour before we noticed that there was a snake curled up in a cozy roll sleeping soundly right under our feet. It's a miracle we never jumped on top of it, it was pretty invisible. Called the park ranger, he captured the snake and put it in a bucket. Turned out to be a young rattlesnake. The ranger explained that they are more dangerous than adults, because they can't control their poison -- an adult will bite just once, but a rookie will spaz out and keep biting and biting. (Somehow this reminded me of what I like to talk about when discussing the martial power of taiji -- skill is acquired sooner than control is perfected... a technique can be mastered but its practical use might be off limits for a prudent person who doesn't have total control of it yet. Total spontaneous control is the ultimate skill.)

Is not what you thought a butterfly's dream, Zhuangzi's worst nightmare?.. Wake up!

In San Dieguito Park in Solana Beach. First Saturday of every month, 1pm-4 pm (but might go past 5 pm too if the vibe is good).

I haven't been in a couple of years too, but you brought up drums this morning and I remembered that the regular monthly gathering is today, and I see synchronicities of this nature as prompts from the universe, so I went. Just came back. It's so much fun. More serious drum people than you and me drag in those dream drums that sound like the Big Bang, veritable monsters. And you get to play other people's drums because it all moves and rotates. And there's two dozen percussion toys available too, I just discovered my new favorite -- a thunder tube spring drum. One guy there has apparently studied voodoo music in Haiti and Cuba, so he sang invocations of various loa... We had a banjo and a flute too, and it's amazing how things work out spontaneously -- some of the improvisations were positively sublime.

Thanks for the reminder, there's a drum circle happening here today, I think I'll join. Don't have a hang drum though, only a djembe.

Repairing the chain... With drunken boxing, with spears, guns, nukes, tooth and claw -- fight on, Arjuna!

Here's another song of the end of the world, in three languages, by this amazing songwriter/musician/singer:

The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older, shorter... * *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWTLUmUjo8A

For purposes of taoist dual cultivation, gender roles are reversed -- the woman expresses yang (knows the male), the man expresses yin (keeps the female). Educating a woman how to express her male aspect and educating a man how to express his female aspect respectively reach much farther than the bedchamber, however (though there it would be a good start.) Since Laozi was talking to the man -- all of TTC can be seen as an attempt to educate the active/ruling/outwardly-expressed aspect of the society which was represented exclusively by the male gender in his time, what he meant was, don't lose sight of the unexpressed/ruled or you'll get us all in trouble. Society didn't listen, and we're in trouble. Women express maleness by assuming roles of skewed males, not of balanced males who "keep the female." E.g. female warmonger politicians are not expressing maleness, they are expressing maleness that "does not keep the female," extreme/skewed yang, and their gender is therefore inconsequential. (Wish all female/feminist Hillary supporters saw and understood that, but alas, they don't.)

I do keep my mind open, and on occasion my wallet too, but not so wide as to let all the contents of both fall out.

Obviously you haven't seen the first episode of the new season yet. I nearly gave up on the whole thing when his training by the Maesters was being depicted. Braced myself, but had to put my Haagen Dazs back in the freezer. Back on track: for a gastroenterologist, to be this full of shit is simply unprofessional.

I think he lifted it from Game of Thrones... Samwell Tarly's training at the Citadel...

Yup.

Zhu Tiancai is great. Here's a (somewhat blurry) video of him visiting our school (with my teacher in red):

Thanks for noticing. Yes, get out more -- Damien Escobar is playing in our neck-of-woods next week. Come have a live listen!

Fiddle?.. That's not only Juilliard educated violin, but this guy was the youngest student ever accepted to Juilliard (at the age of 10, graduating at 13). What style do you have in mind?

Fit for anything, my mighty sword, Dragon Well, watched "Game of Thrones" too.

And flowers for food made cow's butter taste like home far away, long gone.

This is a continuation of the universal shamanic tradition. There were several ways to become a shaman, but all of them were decided upon in the spirit realm -- ancestral spirits chose the human body to initiate, and the initiated shaman kept in touch with them to find out who, and how, to initiate next. Typically it was the student, the apprentice, or else a blood relative, who in some cases didn't even get the training in the material world but had the "receptive vehicle" of a body due to being related to the shaman. In such cases, the shaman, usually on deathbed, transferred his or her entire spirit and all the knowledge to the new shaman. The lay tribesmen were well aware of this method of transmission, so the new shaman wasn't even treated as new -- it was the same shaman, the same spirit, and many tribes believed throughout their existence that they always had one and the same shaman from the beginning of time, who just went through merging with different bodies as generations passed by. One such situation is described in a book titled "Entering the Circle," by a Soviet-era Siberian psychiatrist (now living in the US) who was faced with this weird case in her practice. A young man came to see her seeking professional help, he thought he was rapidly losing his mind, and it was somehow connected to his uncle, a shaman who kept his shamanic side secret until it was time for him to die. He visited his nephew in a dream and told him that it's his destiny to be the new shaman. The young man was freaking out, terrified and confused and depressed, up until the moment of the actual transfer (that took place the moment his uncle died), whereupon he acquired a completely new and totally confident demeanor, dismissed the psychiatrist on the spot telling her that her services were no longer needed, and proceeded to fulfill his destiny (and, eventually, hers too...)

Nah. Just internalized the technology. All those bulky telescopes... who needs them when you can develop bionanites and just use your enhanced senses to see into stuff. Or to do as you wish with stuff. Hundreds of millions of cats opted for utilizing hundreds of millions of human servants. Annually these human servants purchase $75 billion worth of cat food to serve to creatures who are not expected to give anything but trouble in return, and love it. Hundreds of millions of humans not currently owned by a cat because they can't afford to serve him or her work on improving their living situation so that they too can accommodate one some day. So... who knows what else they are manipulating. Giblets to galaxies, their only limitation is their own imeowgination. And why do you think a popular modern (of the past couple thousand years) god sends so many souls to a purrgatory? Purr+gato (cat in some Latin-derived languages) should give one a clue...

I hope you're right... although I see mostly indicators pointing in the opposite direction. But I know from taiji that to go anywhere, you start by making a move/gaining inner momentum in the opposite direction. (The "there and back jin" ) So I hope that might be what it is... I always appreciate it when a man "gets it," and I know it is a kind of strength and security, some sound, sane wholeness of spirit in the making. This. Being a man who gets it. It's a prerequisite for a whole lot of unconfusion. I remember only a few of my past lives or whatever they are (and don't quite trust it when someone else looks into that for me, I trust my every-which-way memory more -- genetic and subtle and macrocosmic or whatever it is, I think I might have less "junk DNA" than average, something is unblocked that is "normally" blocked...) In all of the lives I can remember I was a woman. But in this-here life, my parents did not quite approve of it -- they gave me a male name before I was born and called me by that name half the time, and my mom didn't teach me any "woman" things (even the stuff "all mothers" tell their daughters I had to learn from my peers) while my dad raised me as a tomboy, highly valuing (and demanding) strictly male virtues of me. This conditioned the first 13 years of my life -- I did quite the opposite of what you describe, i.e. I responded with a physical attack to any attempts at bullying or whatever I saw as disrespect, and in general spent much of that formative period fighting like a warrior -- no retreat, no surrender. And then almost overnight hormones (or destiny?) kicked in and I wanted nothing to do with that kind of me. I was a girl and I only wanted girl things. Took me a quite a long time to find an inner place where those two things, the yin of me and the yang of me, work together without excluding each other, but I did. I understand now... What we were sold as "man" and "woman" are both wrong. I know what each of us is really "naturally" like now. Not that I don't cringe every single day when exposed to what most men and women today think about it. But I don't have to argue with them. They'll find out, in due time...