Taomeow

The hurricane/tropical storm is a couple hours away from us per latest predictions, but some fire hydrants in downtown decided to help it along ahead of schedule. Video: https://packaged-media.redd.it/k703vjwl1bjb1/pb/m2-res_1280p.mp4?m=DASHPlaylist.mpd&v=1&e=1692572400&s=6d053c7ae8deeab4e038fffffacb9f5afa090978#t=0

It comes from wuji (tao-in-stillness) transforming into taiji (tao-in-motion) also going by Xiantian and Houtian. Yang floats upward, yin sinks downward. That's the beginning of heaven and earth. "In the heaven images arise, on earth they take shape," as the Ta Chuan explains it. (Unlike in all hierarchical systems, it's not "heaven first, earth later," it's a mutually dependent and simultaneous process.) And then every step of the way the pattern gets refined/complicated -- up to 64 steps times five times eight and their ten thousand combinations... and that's the outer border of a meaningful pattern. Beyond it lies Hundun, where there's no pattern. Chaos. Plenty of information, no meaning.

I would say information is part of what qi is/does, but my understanding is that "pattern" runs deeper. When someone yells "fire!" in a theater -- that's information. But if there's no pattern consistent with that information (heat, flames, smoke, etc.) it may mean we have a prankster on our hands, or misinformation, or a mistake, or malicious intent, and so on. In other words, information is open to interpretation, while pattern is independent of interpretation. It just is what it is and does what it does. A practitioner of taoist arts and sciences observes the pattern and discerns its meaning -- and then interprets the resulting information. That's one reason we're not as hung up on names as some other practitioners are. My teacher, e.g., used to call the taiji move known as "White Crane Opens Wings" simply "Big Bird" -- but because the students were able to observe the pattern of that move, they didn't interpret it as an invitation to imitate the muppet character known as Big Bird. Likewise, I didn't know anything about the MCO when I had to buzz off my hair (normally long) because I had a distinct feeling that "that thing" running up my spine gets tangled in my hair and tickles most annoyingly. (I still have an old expired driver's license with a picture of me with that uncharacterisic hairstyle. Every time I see it, I'm, like, "what was I thinking?" -- and then I remember. And now I have the words for that... "oh... that's what it was, "'it'" was trying to go through the yuzhen 玉枕, and since that gate is perhaps the biggest obstacle in the orbit to overcome, '"it'" was sort of chipping away at the passage... and hair being in the way was, of course, a subjective interpretation of the sensations.)

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Cats are also telepathic, capable of forming strong bonds with (the right) humans, dogs, each other, and sentimental objects -- a domestic cat's emotionality is not unlike ours, and they are strong empaths at that. And judging by some behaviors I've observed in some cats, they are no strangers to abstract thinking. I may have posted this before -- apologies if it's a repeat. This is the monument to Semyon the Traveling Cat installed in the city of Murmansk, Russia, and based on a true story. In 1987, the Sinishin family, returning from a vacation in Moscow, accidentally lost their cat named Semyon who was traveling with them and, as cats do, ran out to explore at some point and got lost in the huge city. Not knowing where to look, the family had to return home without him. Semyon showed up at the doorstep of their home in Murmansk six years later, skinny and tired but successful in his incredible quest. Murmansk is located two thousand kilometers away from Moscow (and a bit over a hundred kilometers away from the Arctic circle.) The story got published in the local newspaper and received a resonance comparable to the story of the Japanese dog Hachiko, who became a symbol of fidelity and also merited a monument. (The dog did the opposite of the traveling cat though -- he sat in one spot for years... but you probably saw the movie with Richard Gere.)

At the very least its curcurmin is a strong pigment, and many pigments of plant origin tend to reduce inflammation due to their antioxidant properties and ability to interact with inflammatory pathways. Anthocyanins in berries and grapes, carotenoids like lycopene in tomatoes and beta-carotene in carrots, etc.. I don't think it's a magic bullet but apparently it can contribute to the good causes. I usually have a Vietnamese turmeric ointment on hand for mishaps like cuts and scrapes and use it instead of neosporin et al (which prevent infections but also impede and slow down the healing of wounds.) Internally it's supposed to be combined with piperine which potentiates its effectiveness.

Cobra and chicken. A bazi reader at work smiles: Six Harmonies.

@steve Here's a hug. If you think sharing might help, drop a line.

Easy peasy. I even know the mantra for this: Black hole sun, won't you come, won't you come...

None of them are reliable. I trust your British version but I don't hear it in the US. Neither does Grok, apparently. This summer I was flying somewhere with a stopover in London, where random strangers called me "love" on three separate occasions when all I did was ask a question about getting from point A to point B or procuring a cup of espresso. Here I have never heard "love" used as a vocative toward a stranger. We might say "dear" or "honey" or some such.

According to Grok, it's a white cat thing. Q: Briefly: difference in meaning between American and British English for the word "modernism" A: In American and British English, "modernism" generally refers to a cultural, artistic, and literary movement from the late 19th to mid-20th century, emphasizing innovation, experimentation, and a break from traditional forms. The meaning is largely the same in both contexts, with no significant regional difference. Both associate it with movements in art, literature, and architecture (e.g., Joyce, Woolf, or Bauhaus). Any subtle distinctions might arise in academic or contextual usage, but these are minor and not systematically regional.

As for me, I'm not a hostage to modernism (did you mean modernity? 'cause modernism I don't have any use for, except maybe Cézanne but he was not quite that yet, just the transitional phase from art to all that nonsense). Rather, I'm trying to be an interpreter/translator when I resort to modern analogies. The reason for this is, I try to talk to real hostages-to-modernity in the parlance I hope/believe they know well. I know other languages too but those are not exactly widespread here, so I mostly keep them to myself, except for an occasional song of my people -- meow... meow... meowwwwwwwww....

When I asserted -- as I have for the past 25+ years -- that qi is the medium and message of meaningful change, I didn't say it lightly. A somewhat (but not quite) similar dual understanding which some phenomena merit causes physicists to refer to elementary particles as both particles and waves. It's not something an everyday mind steeped in "either/or" dualities of observable macro phenomena wraps itself around with ease. Could it be that your shiatsu teacher may have focused on the "message" part of what qi "is and does" but either overlooked or decided to ignore the "medium" part. Qi is both, and it is neither by itself. It's a medium/message of change, simultaneously. A bit like coffee from that old maxim: when you boil an egg in water it gets hard, when you boil a carrot in water it gets soft, but when you boil ground coffee in water it changes the water. Qi changes the medium it operates in while changing itself. Qi does travel though meridians not unlike that -- except it doesn't have to be a substance in order to both undergo and engender change... it's the pattern that travels -- and substances encountered on the way align (or resist aligning) with the pattern. Patterns underlie both matter and energy. Also sprach The Ta Chuan aka The Great Treatise on the Changes.

Does wifi exist? Is it a substance? Is your phone born with its Uber app? With its Instagram app? How about Amazon? Is your credit card stuffed with paper dollars and coins, which are substances? How do you fit them in there? Do your hundred dollar bills physically lose weight when there's inflation in the country? Does your bank account gain weight when you make a deposit? Does it lose weight when you make a payment? How about energy? What energy exactly does it gain or lose? And so on. The world does not just consist of substances and energies. The world is also choke full of changes. Changes can be meaningful or meaningless. Qi is the medium and message of meaningful change. The signifier of meaningful change is a pattern. MCO is not a substance and not "energy." (Oh the pop use of the term by folks who don't understand Newtonian mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics!) MCO is a pattern of movement of qi. A bit like an app. Sometimes it installs itself after you push the right button. Sometimes people push wrong buttons and it doesn't. But once it's there you know it's there. Just like Uber. You can get a ride if you have pushed the right button to install the Uber app. Does Uber exist? Do you carry a little inflatable car in your phone for it to exist? A hundred thousand little cars? ??? And yet you can get a ride if you have the app. Also sprach Taomeow.

Not sure about Roman concrete -- I seem to remember they used egg whites in it, but modern industrial processes have long been way too stingy for that. As for herbal birth control, I have this Chinese medical book, A Barefoot Doctor's Manual (too lazy to re-tell the story of its origins and contents but you can look it up), and it has a few plant based methods of birth control. It was developed as an entirely practical book, no tall tales, but a couple of birth control recipes there blew my socks off... There's a monthly method -- fertility is on hold while you take that herbal brew, and when you stop it gets restored within a short time. And a yearly method -- a remedy you take just once a year that switches your fertility off for that year. Also reversible. So those plant methods weren't lost everywhere... although I don't know the current fate of the plants that went into making them. Pre-civilized people always controlled their birth rates, and not via infanticide as our so-called "scholars" (indented slaves of the system, with perks) would have us believe. Women of our species, let alone matriarchs, were neither ignorant about things nature nor numb as doorknobs back then.

@old3bob So maybe you can recall the secret, lost for many centuries, of making that most desired trade item that was known as the Tyrian purple? It cost more than three times its weight in gold, and only the royalty, nobility and the Roman high clergy could afford it. I know it was obtained, via an incredibly laborious process of procurement and production, from certain species of Mediterranean snails. The snails might still be around... but the technology is lost. If you knew it in that past life and could retrieve it, you could make a fortune. The mega-wealthy still hunt for things no one else can afford, and pay incredible money for the items that come with a guarantee of no mass access to them. Of course countless modern purple pigments exist, but none can replicate that royal color. (In fact, I know the color purple has the potential of being striking, but in modern clothes, in most cases, I find it ugly. I do own one exception but that's it.)

Anemoia. From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig, comes a word the language badly needed but never had until 2021. It's the feeling of nostalgia for a time you've never known. A wistful longing for an idealized past that exists only in imagination or secondhand accounts. When I first came to the US, to New York specifically, it was a different city from what it is today, and far as I'm concerned, a better one. But back then my older female co-workers, native New Yorkers, would often tell me about New York they used to know in their childhood and youth, and it was nothing like the city I was witnessing... it sounded like a dream, an urban fairy land. On more than one occasion they actually shed a tear telling me about that lost city. And they gave me anemoia. That's just one example. I'm massively afflicted by that feeling for many purposes. Some of it overlaps with nostalgia for the worlds (sic) I knew in this life, some must be genetic memory, and some -- possibly -- memories of past lives. I wonder how widespread this anemoia thing is.

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which only proves the point of the headline: I remember the early explorers of the land that was to become the USA reporting on what was to become the Hudson river -- they asserted you could cross that river stepping on salmon's backs.

We were born to brachiate. I don't know how well-known this term is (when I first heard it in my teens someone explained it to me) so I'll define it in case it isn't -- to engage for extended periods of time in locomotion in the trees. Like all primates, we are built like brachiators, but we hardly ever climb trees anymore, let alone sleep in the trees or jump from branch to branch and from tree to tree as a means of getting from point A to point B. (I've seen forests where it would have been quite feasible and probably more efficient than any other way of moving through them, but those are almost nonexistent in most parts now -- whereas once upon a time the whole planet was forested.) Some folks in the Ancestral Movement community do this as part of their training and occasionally get very convincing and very impressive. Parkour fans do this in urban settings, but the ability harks back to the primeval forest...

I've read that book and liked it a lot -- the parts where McDougall sticks to observed facts that is, not so sure about his evolutionary theories. (We spent a good deal of our evolutionary history -- the vast majority of the past 400 000 years -- in the ice age conditions, so overheating from running may not have been as much of a consideration from the standpoint of evolution... freezing to death was a bigger concern...) There's another theory I like more -- the aquatic ape (Desmond Morris in his book by the same title goes into some of the details). But based on the evidence from genetics, fetal development, history (especially the history of the "discovery" of sedentary agriculture all over the planet at once, in places that could have no contact with each other) and so on, I tend to consider, strongly, the possibility that we are a designer species, genetically modified toward goals unknown to us and quite seriously damaged by the intervention (like all GM organisms are). However, that post of mine was not a serious foray into the subject. I just pity those cats who look like alien chickens... reminds me of Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped." (Featherless rather than furless because bipeds -- e.g. chickens -- tend to have feathers rather than fur.) And I miss my tail.

Of course I meant the queen of England when she was young and feisty (rumor has it she used to hit and punch the king -- but not with taiji -- back then), and Noam Chomsky when he was a linguist whose Transformational Grammar I studied at the university many moons ago, rather than a political sellout to ___________ (not filling in the blank to avoid the dreaded politicizing of the thread). The first one then did (rumor has it) something I wouldn't mind being able to do myself, and the second turned the English language upside down and inside out for me, which was quite beneficial for my then-budding ability. So don't dismiss them without consideration... although neither one did anything for my taiji... oh and all the taiji reading material, whether in English or not, didn't do that much either beyond giving me the ability to engage in taiji parlance... most folks in my lineage who practiced and developed it for the previous 400 years were illiterate to begin with.

As a reggae song goes, The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. Too bad you didn't have better luck with finding a group to your specs. Thank you. I credit my master, my grandmaster and the other three of the Four Tigers of Chenjiagou, as well as my practice partners and students with giving me a bit of a clue over the years.

There's as many ways to do tuishou as there are components to mastering it. Their way was quite expert -- they used ting jin to listen for any tension in the opponent's body which they could use, or the weakening of the root, or the opponent getting ready to attack, or a myriad other things. Everything matters in ting jin -- including subtleties of breathing pattern, heartbeat (sic), the irises of the eyes, but primarily of course the touch. I've pushed hands with each of these women (one was a taiji classmate, the other one a regular at our workshops and co-author of several taiji books) and I know that nothing like their encounter with each other ever happened in their encounters with me. Both are aggressive and ambitious -- something I am not, so I could use it against them -- and very, very dedicated to practice, which made pushing hands with them not as easy-peasy as it would be with someone aggressive, ambitious and slacking. But they did have the skill to discern the level of skill in the opponent -- instantly, like all experienced practitioners! -- inferior, superior, or about equal. When it's about equal, which was the case between those two, things can get... um... uninteresting to the clueless outside observer. You've never done tuishou, have you?