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I've mentioned Scott Meredith' s 5g Tai Chi elsewhere...the chapter about "the secret of sink" made a huge impact on my practice. There's a sense of lowering from the bottom surfaces; think about the bottom of your shoulders, your armpits and the inner surfaces of your upper arms, and the side surface of your upper rib cage. With an awareness of this area, gently, continuously generate a slight feeling of sinking or dropping it. He uses the image of a flying squirrel which somehow helped. If I'm even approaching the right question here... I'm more enthusiastic than expert in my practices.

Kongar ol Ondar. When the film "Genghis Blues" was in the theaters, I busked in front of the local cinema for my ticket. (Didn't take long. Kind town)

I have a history of being a "bad influence " on people asking these kind of questions

Verse Forty Cyclical return is the path things take: Weakness is a thing that can move. Everything under the sky is part of the world. Whether it serves a purpose you can perceive or not.

Verse Thirty Nine In the past, people saw everything as one thing. The sky has to be one thing, clear blue sky, in order to be seen as clear. You have to see the land as one thing in order to see the life in the land. You have to see the sacred as one thing in order to find tranquility. The valley has to operate as a single system in order to provide for everything. All of the ten thousand things share one life. So - a big important official has to act like he represents the sky itself if he’s going to seem like he has any idea what’s going on. When the sky is not clear, the sky has many elements, and the weather will change. When the land is not at peace, There is fear that the land itself can become unviable. Magic spirits and religious ideas are not the same As the life of the land. But people lose faith and fear that the land will become unproductive. When things start to die, there is fear that everything Will die. It costs a lot to get appointed to a big political office. Just to live in fear. Expensive, and couldn’t really pay enough For all that fear. Big important office holders all say “It’s lonely at the top”, Few of them live peaceful happy family lives, or could be entrusted with the care of a mulberry tree. So let them go by in their big fancy limousines; drive your beater, ride your bicycle, That carved jade symbol of office is just a stone weighing them down.

Verse Thirty Eight Better than doing is not having to do anything. Things that get done of their own accord; Doing just what is required To accomplish the task at hand Is not the same thing as following the domination of a moral code; Better not to deal with it as morality at all. If the rules are there for a sensible reason, then that’s the reason to follow the rule. Doing things that are considered “good” Can involve doing things with a merely ceremonial purpose; even doing things that have wrongful effects under prevailing conditions. Once we’re involved with figuring out what to do, we’ve lost the thread. We’re not following the trail. Lose the thread, forget what to do, and you could still get lucky. Forget getting lucky, and you can still do the right thing. Lose doing the right thing and you can still have good habits. A grownup can have good habits even when the reasons are dumb. Sometimes, a dumb person can follow the trail more easily than a smart one can. The great Trail Marker leads where dumb things go too. You’ll meet dumb people on your journey; A grownup - a really big grownup, like ten feet tall - Gets under the thin surface , into the thick substance of things. Some things are real enough to deal with; Some things don’t go along, so discard them.

Verse Thirty Seven The force we’ve been talking about, The tendency to observe that things move in certain ways That I’m calling the Trail Marker, Translated from the word Dao, Is the interrelation of so many processes that there is no way to name all the parts and movements. It’s the pulsing, the suction, the peristalsis of things happening. Big hats, people of importance Protect and defend and shout about What’s happening anyway ,whether they desire it or not; Change. All the myriad things - all those scorpions - change And become something different. I would live in a town With no name. Not so mysterious as it sounds, just a place With no reputation, No reputation keeps things simple, What else could one desire? If you don’t want peace and quiet, I’m certain that the sky will rain on you soon enough.

Verse Thirty Six When you really want something, that’s when You have to learn to wait. When you want to weaken something, Make it stronger. When you want to abolish something First promote it. When you want to steal something - Give it to someone. It has to belong to someone to steal it! All while you count the time in fragments of seconds. The soft victory The easy victory Is just winning without using your strength. Fish cannot escape the deep. The best things about your homeland Aren’t in the brochures.

Verse Thirty Five Putting on the big show . Heaven’s movement is already Laid out And it flows along safe , level, peaceful. It’s only the big show When you see it as a distraction; As a passenger only. Following the Trail Marker goes out the window; Look and it can’t be seen, Listen, it can’t be heard. No need to try to do something, it’s already been done.

Lots of things don't have names.

Verse Thirty Four The Great Trail Mark is everywhere, yes it is! It’s there to the left and to the right. Everything - all the ten thousand things, all the dancing scorpions, Rely on it to exist. It has merit But no name. Everything gets clothed warmly, taken care of, but not dominated. Nothing is left wanting. This is treated as a small thing, given a small name, But everything keeps cycling around, the ten thousand things keep coming back, And they get the big name. According to the the person you should emulate , the ending of things is a small matter; So, transformation, not endings, is the big deal.

Verse Thirty Three The person who is wise about people Knows who to select for each purpose. To win victories, you look to strong people. Since victors are strong, They will tend to be wealthy, and to expect pay Commensurate to their abilities and risks. People who conduct their lives in terms of this kind of strength Have their own way of thinking, and of doing things. While one conducts their own affairs, one will see that some of them live, some die.

Elderberry and ginseng, steeped with my regular herbal tea, which is various minty plants from my garden.

I've managed to confine my efforts to shorter stuff, lyrics and poems that fit on a page, short essays. I have notes for longer projects - short notes. The translation effort I've been posting here is the longest structured writing project I've begun. And my choice of Lao Tzu was entirely because of the relative brevity compared to Zhuangzi.

Philip K. Dick was known to use the I Ching as a writing tool. Adding strange attractors and random processes to creative work is part and parcel of the Cut Up method, explored in the works of William Burroughs. Especially for recording artists, Brian Eno created his "Oblique Strategies" cards, as a clear way to introdice a similar element within a particular technical frame. As a side note, I've been experimenting with using a twelve sided die, balanced to recreate "yarrow stalk" odds, to generate trigram lines. However, I don't consult the I Ching often, seasonally if that.

Verse Thirty Two The Trail Marker Isn’t a symbol, a label or a logo. That uncut block of wood Isn’t anything until we cut it up; nameless potential. It’s simple. A banner flying under the broad sky Shows off a daring minister, so that even the person in charge will be able to see what a great job they are doing. So they can stand out from the rest of the ten thousand things. Look out for falling scorpions! Otherwise, sky and earth would blend together. We couldn’t tell them apart without Mr. Important and his flag! The sweet nectar, though, is that people are not like this. They aren’t the things represented by symbols, badges, or names. Grown ups need to understand where to stop, When to stop seeing a plumber as a plumber, to see them as “Cheryl” or ‘Dave”, Or just as a person, a hungry body, possessing a mind. The Trail Marker is there to follow under the sky, over the plains, along the streams, into the rivers, through the valleys and out to sea.

Wonton Soup “This soup is so good!” This was our seventh visit to the restaurant over the years, at irregular intervals. “Chicken soup with pork dumplings but WOW! So good.” We were never seated at the same table twice, otherwise the meal, and most of the conversation, was the same. We’d only looked at menus briefly, the first time, our first “Real Date”. Warm, soft light in a pink and brown room, always the same calm dinner time. The other diners silhouettes and shadows, their conversation and clink lost like sounds in snow. “Do you always poke your wontons apart like that?” “You always poke your wontons apart like that.” A little flatter each of the five times she’d said it in between. “I just wanna see what’s inside” “You don’t need to do that with everything” The emperor of the Southern Sea was Lickety, the emperor of the Northern Sea was Split, and the emperor of the Center was Wonton. Lickety and Split often met each other in the land of Wonton, and Wonton treated them very well. Wanting to repay Wonton's kindness, Lickety and Split said, "All people have seven holes for seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing. Wonton alone lacks them. Let's try boring some holes for him." So every day they bored one hole, and on the seventh day Wonton died. Mair 7/7, last verse of the Inner Chapters of Zhuangzi.

Verse Thirty One When healthy, useful people Are turned into soldiers, armed with ominous, unlucky devices or other evil plans and machinations, The people in charge are not following the Trail Markers. A nice home, a good place to live, is expensive to maintain. Keeping people under command as soldiers Is expensive. Soldiers with ominous devices Cannot maintain that nice, comfortable home for themselves Or anyone else. Keep the victory fires cold. Victory is not beautiful. That so-called beauty is the music of People being murdered. The person who sings songs glorifying murder has poor standards, low aspirations. So there is still luck; the fierce thing is one part, the angry, military, violent portion, put it here on the right. Let’s stand over on the left side of the military and watch them march by. There they stand, at attention, Celebrating a funeral. Kill a lot of people, It’s depressing, you will attend A lot of funerals. Victory in War; as much fun as a funeral, As a memorial service.

Verse Thirty When the main person in a group of people follows the Trail Marker, They don’t put soldiers out under the sky. There are better things to attend to. Brambles grow in the places where soldiers have camped and trained. In the wake of an army, bad harvests follow. Do not use daring to take by strength. Live and grow and do not pity; Live and grow and do not kill; Live and grow and do not be proud; Live and grow and do not need credit for your deeds or For the accidents of your birth: Live and grow with no need to show your strength; This idea that strength defeats weakness has been around for a long time, but it’s not what we’re calling “Following The Trail Marker”. It’s not all there is to things .

Verse Twenty Nine Someone wants to own the world, I don’t see them succeeding. The universe is outside of our control, The person who tries to will be defeated. So put things in whatever order you choose, Suck it up, or blow it out, Strong or weak; Or load it up, or dump it out; The person you should emulate does away with extravagance. They don’t put on any kind of show.

Verse Twenty Eight Knowledge is something you build inside and push into the world to effect change. We’ll call this pushing “masculine”. We’ll call it “Yang” at some point, too. Seeing - taking things in through any of your senses - involves being in a receptive state. We’ll call this receptivity “Female”. Sometimes, we’ll call it“Yin”. Even the stars, the gods and the castles of gods, everything real and imaginary up in the sky, will follow the same rules when we look at them closely. Virtue and morality have nothing to do with how everything real and imaginary up in the sky operates. Let’s return to the infant, the newborn child; It starts out in darkness, and doesn’t know it. As soon as the child sees light, it soon understands that there is such a thing as “darkness”. Because the sky follows a pattern. Since the sky follows a pattern, Often the “Right Thing” is...not so much. No time of year, no part of any system, is The “Best” part. Forget that set of standards. When you see the “Heavenly Glory” You can see what’s wrong with that kind of thinking. Heaven follows the same rules as the river valley. Since Heaven follows the same rules as the river - as nature - then let your standard of behavior follow nature. Go back to simplicity. An uncut chunk of wood has no plan for itself. It could become anything in the moment. It can be cut up into anything; into containers,or tools. But then it is no longer an uncut piece of wood, still less a tree. The person you should emulate maintains their unprocessed quality; Remaining a tree Rather than becoming a tool. They do not destroy or disrupt The big system Nature has in place.

Verse Twenty Seven Skilful hikers practice “leave no trace” trail ethics. They say “Leave nothing but footprints Take nothing but memories” A skilful tracker and trail runner leaves no footprints. A person skilful with words leaves no room for disagreement. Some people can do complex math in their heads, without even a pencil and paper. A skilful carpenter can make a doorway with no metal parts, no pins, no nails screws or lock, and it’ll be secure and work smoothly. You tie a boat to a dock Without a knot, and the boat stays put. The person you should emulate looks after the interests of all people Appreciates their skills and learning ability And abandons no one. Everyone is taken into account. Let’s shine a light on it. The skilful teach the unskilled. The unskilled learn from the skilled. This is the mystery to solve - who can learn what from who, Building this chain of respect and skill sharing. If this isn’t in order, confusion arises.

Verse Twenty Six Weight is the root source of lightness; Stopping for a long lunch break can make all the difference in the work day of a so-called-grown-up; So a qualified leader Keeps going all day And then digs into the supplies. Although they can see the glory, a swallow just nests up there. Why carry more than you need In a world where distribution is essentially light? When you forget to go lightly You tire yourself out. You lose your temper.

I'm finding that how I use my hands to do things I already know how to do has been a source of physical problems. Retraining myself, just how I get through the day, tie a knot, prepare a meal, there's a lot of balance and engineering there.

Carpentry, music, gardening? Hands get hungry for expression, things that make them spread out and present their accomplishments. There'a as much emotional content in "opening up from the chest" as there is muscular.