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

Thanks. That's very impressive. Sounds like a lot of work but you must be having fun with it or you wouldn't do it, right? The fish pond with plastic sheeting to home edible fish... I'm no fish expert by any stretch of imagination but what immediately occurred to me was that microplastics might have a ball leeching into that water. Microplastics are the scourge of modern life (we have an average of a spoonful accumulated in the brain! doing our brain functions no favors... and a lot in all other organs, harmful all of them -- hormone disruptors, carcinogens, mutagens, teratogens... They are hard to avoid in everyday modern life -- but I think the ones that have the best chance to degrade under sunlight and heat and leech into water are perhaps the most dangerous ones. So I would look into some more traditional options if I were a fish in that pond building something like this. I know they exist, but of course I've no idea about the $$ and labor involved. Just a thought though.)

So where I thought of something clean, you thought of something dirty. Someone has a dirty mind commendable sustainability on their mind.

Since SC the author of that tantalizing mystery is responding with I'm tempted to take a wild guess: it's The Once and Future Swimming Pool

Yesterday I made these two lamps They were very old mismatched ones, both different colors and both colors ugly. I spray painted the base of each the same dark bronze color and used two Ikea stainless steel kitchen utensils holders to make lampshades, by flipping them upside down and installing hardware. One of my hobbies, finding a new (often unexpected) purpose for an old and tired object. I like simple projects that I can finish on a whim in a short time.

https://x.com/catshealdeprsn/status/1957676400267169931

It's not part of real bazi though when someone is "defined" as a "Rat" or a "Dragon" etc. based on one of their Four Pillars, as is currently common due to quickie mart popularizations of that system. People used to think of themselves in Western astrological terms -- I'm a Virgo, I'm a Gemini, etc. -- and now they also have those cute Chinese animals to play with. I don't dispute that it's cute, but in reality, no one "is" a Rat unless they have Rat in all four pillars -- year, month, day, hour -- and ideally also in their Conception and Life pillars (which are usually omitted, even traditionally, except by the most perfectionist of old masters -- and which throw another two animals into one's personal zoo.) So unless that's the case -- '"when you're a Rat you're a Rat all the way," as that song almost went -- someone with Rat in their Year Pillar always has a layout of their Eight Characters (that's what bazi means) where the Self and their dominant phase and their lucky phase and their deficient phase are all in the kind of interplay that is the only thing allowing to make forecasts in a particular year. The main thing is the Wuxing or Five Phases playing with each other within those Eight Characters, forming families with alliances and animosities, with support and conflict... with a loving and nurturing Mother or a missing or abusive one... When cosmic and earthly energies change for a particular year, that's a times-two influence on each of these alliances or wars. Example 1: You have a chart with plenty of Water and no Fire. Fire happens to be your lucky phase. Rat or no rat, your Water will get warmed up in a Fire year. Is it a bad thing? With your cold chart that lacks a spark of excitement, warmth, light? This time around, enjoy a nice warm bath or a Turkish steam one your circumstances may become! You don't need to fear Fire -- your Water controls it. (That's only a rough sketch -- it's impossible to really draw conclusions without seeing the whole 8 character enchilada -- example given for illustration purposes only.) Example 2: You have a chart with Earth Self and no Fire. Ouch... Mother phase missing. In many respects it means you have to be your own parent, you can really count only on yourself. Then a year comes ablaze with Fire so the Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch both start "parenting" you, your environment becomes more conductive toward your goals, you can grow in that year, in whatever direction. Things have a chance to go your way without your exerting yourself. (Another rough sketch for example only, no one should take those quickie mart readings to heart, whether from me or from anyone who hasn't seen and analyzed the whole chart. Unless of course you've spent a couple decades studying these things from traditional masters and can DIY a chart. )

I will give it a thorough read later (gotta run), for now just a quick note -- Tiger is just my Hour Pillar, so, no worries. My Day Master is Snake -- just like yours, except mine is a green Snake and yours is a white one. A real taoist thread, like in the good old days. Cool. Thanks.

Hiya! Long time no see. I'm still here, amazingly enough, been telling myself that enough is enough every single day but cats are creatures of habit. TDB somehow managed to hook onto my morning coffee/computer time and that's sacred (I mean, coffee is, computer not so much) so there you have it. And late in the evening -- my tiny cognac (a consolation prize since I can't have coffee before bed) -- and voila, there's this forum floating in the crystal snifter so I get a tiny portion of that too. Not every single day of course. But it explains how it happened that I'm still here. By itself the habit wouldn't hold up. It's all dopamine dynamics -- coffee is dope, a tiny cognac, ditto, and TDB is like a slice of lemon on the rim. Which explains why sometimes it tastes sour, and sometimes sweet. Hope life's been treating you kindly.

Snip-quoting me masterfully and relentlessly toward distorting the meaning and context of my words and slapping together, out of those poor disenfranchised snippets, a straw man to prevail over is a brilliant strategy toward that goal.

Thank you. This is such interesting work. Q: is there a way to read it on a white background with black letters? White letters on a black background give me more phosphenes than a disco ball. (Not that I've seen a disco ball anytime in this century but I remember...)

I don't oppose either shying away from interpersonal conflict or letting it unfold -- it's situational, it depends on a bunch of things, one of them being one's values... e.g. what do people value more -- to be on good germs with everybody or to be on good terms with themselves. The first one is more of an Asian value -- old China, Japan, places where people lived together in closely knit communities and it was important to have good relationships with the neighbors. The periodic outbursts of incredible communal violence and cruelty toward anyone not towing the line illustrate the limitations of this approach... The second one is more Western, more individualistic -- "my truth" must be expressed, key word "my," and I take no prisoners. Obviously there's limitations to that approach too. I think it's wise to suppress sometimes, express at other times provided both are chosen consciously rather than driven by unconscious imperatives. One chronic line of behavior applied to all (or most) circumstances is not as healthy IMO as occasionally giving the finger or occasionally giving a reassuring pat on the back. You do have a bazi sense. Tiger (or rather tigress, she's yin) is just one of my Four Animals, and not the leader of the pack -- not my Year animal and not even my Month animal. Like all cats, she takes the longest naps... but she can't be sleeping all the time. And like all cats, she doesn't like it when someone steps on her tail, especially on purpose. Meow.

What's unhealthy about giving the finger to someone who needs one? Sometimes that finger points to the moon... the sun... the stars... as in, "pull your head outta your ass and see the light!"

South from Central Park, my cousin lives among friends -- wealthy liberals.* ___________ * true story

Soft but not hollow. Steel needle in silk cocoon. Diligent practice.

Unfortunately, there's Yang Fire in the Heavenly Stem AND Yang Fire in the Earthly Branch next year. (Unlike the European zodiac that places the 12 astrological animals up in the sky, the 12 animals of the Chinese one are all in the Earthly Branch and are just helpful to remember particular "personalities" of the main players -- the wuxing or Five Phases of qi. Analogies, metaphors... stuff like that. They are popular in mass culture though, but older feng shui schools don't use them -- and newer ones that are serious and traditional view them in the similar vein, more like "pointers," psychological traits, etc.. For analyzing the energies resulting from the Heavenly Stems interacting with the Earthly Branches in a particular year -- or month, day, hour -- they are like mnemonic devices, but wuxing analysis in and of itself usually suffices. Well, that and the Flying Stars and... but don't let me get carried away "going there.") So anyway, 2026 is Yang Fire in the Stem and Yang Fire in the Branch... Ugh... That's a year when anything can happen. I might do a more comprehensive forecast later... I shudder in advance at the possibilities. Although some of the currently prominent feng shui masters, from what I gleaned reading their versions over the years, simply love Fire, the more the merrier... Might be their personal bazi chart influencing their perceptions, who knows. (People are typically attracted to either phases that are deficient or the ones that are overrepresented in their chart -- in the first case because replenishing the deficient ones is beneficial for them personally, and in the second, because the excessive ones are the easiest to access for them personally.)

_/\_ That video gave me anxiety -- I was waiting for her to swallow her bubble gum.

There's over 500 active geothermal phenomena there -- hot geysers, hot springs, mud volcanoes... but Yellowstone has more geysers, and a far bigger volcano. If that mother wakes up... And who's to say it won't -- the July 30th one in Kamchatka slept for 600 years. Fire Horse years are challenging (and also transformative -- the last one, 1966-1967, was quite noteworthy), but they happen every 60 years and that Kamchatka volcano ignored them for 600 years --and Yellowstone, for 640,000 years. Besides, the way I was taught Xuan Kong feng shui, the coming next year does get foreshadowed a couple of weeks in advance, a month tops... that's when its ruling qi is getting close. But six months ahead, no. It's still the antics of this-here year. Still the Wood Snake. It does carry Fire inside (concentrated in its venom and also firing up its sudden outbursts of the lightning fast strike -- but that's not a whole lot of Fire, it is actually cold-blooded after all). If you don't step on its tail, it is, generally, a rather peaceful animal (which may be one reason there were no casualties in that eruption, nor in the 8.8 earthquake that preceded it.)

We also have dark retreats in taoism. As for chasing cats, this reminded me of an episode from the The Game of Thrones (which I happened to have read before the TV series appeared). One of the advanced exercises Arya got from her taoist-ish master was to chase cats in dark alleys. The master required proof of her having caught the cat -- she had to bring every captured cat to him. Then the cat was out of the bag. As for me, I'd only had visions of a black jaguar in the Amazon, but far from chasing it, I evaded it... At the get-go ayahuasca makes one blind for something like an hour, by temporarily paralyzing the visual cortex -- which is one reason the shamanic ceremony takes place in complete darkness so that freaking out over it doesn't interfere. So at one point I stepped out of the dark premises into the dark jungle and promptly got lost. I was lost in vast space, funky nonlinear time, and actual physical whereabouts... plus that black jaguar, no telling whether actual or "of the mind." Luckily then I had a vision of AC/DC -- or rather an auditory prompt. I had no memory of which way I turned when stepping out the door, and they sang into my ear, "Our balls are always swinging to the left and to the right" -- and so I knew I had to turn left, then right, to get back.

I believe it's chasing, in a dark room, a black cat who isn't there. As some may (or more likely may not) remember, I came to taoism from dzogchen, many moons ago, and the way I was taught dzogchen meditation, you had your eyes open, looking past the tip of your nose at nothing in particular but placing your awareness in your eyes. I don't know if there's other ways (would have to ask Steve since I didn't take it far with that practice, it was still an experimental stage for me). But even with my eyes open I would occasionally just feel sleepy and, realizing it, proceed straight to bed. I asked my teacher then what I was doing wrong. His response: "Nothing. You must be chronically underslept." Which I was at the time. So he goes, "Then you're doing it right. A sign of meditation done right is, it gives you what you need. Not what you want. What you need." I made a note of it...

Heard this continuation of Zhuangzi's dream.* ...So then the Japanese patrol captured Zhuangzi and interrogated him. Why are you planting explosives all over our military trains routes and derailing our trains, they asked. And he's, like, I have no idea what you're talking about, I'm a butterfly, I don't interfere in your military affairs. -- And what did the interrogators do? -- What could they do, they put him in front of the firing squad and woke him up. -- And then what happened? -- What could happen? He's flying somewhere out there, visiting this flower, then that flower... *from an accomplished martial artist who thinks he's a taoist -- but far as I can tell, the only taoist thing about him is his zhuangzesque sense of the absurd. Which is good enough for me -- better than what many others who think of themselves as taoists have to show to justify the self-identification.

And for some of us, especially those of the feline persuasion, I propose adding an enhanced version:

I heard this when it first came out and somehow chanced on it again today, so I decided to share it with any lucky bastard who missed it back then. O Fortuna! This octopus... Let's give him boots... Send him to North Korea... Our perceptions co-create reality. Here's the real Latin lyrics for comparison... Of course the misheard ones are nothing like that -- they don't sound anything like that -- but if you're listening to the misheard version while looking at the English phonetic counterpart on the screen, you hear the English version quite distinctly... O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis semper crescis aut decrescis vita detestabilis nunc obdurat et tunc curat ludo mentis aciem, egestatem, potestatem dissolvit ut glaciem. Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis status malus vana salus semper dissolubilis Obumbrata et velata michi quoque niteris nunc per ludum dorsum nudum fero tui sceleris. Sors salutis et virtutis michi nunc contraria, est affectus et defectus semper in angaria. Hac in hora sine mora corde pulsum tangite quod per sortem sternit fortem mecum omnes plangite

Thanks, I didn't know that. Of course meditation is not the most dangerous thing a person can undertake, but it's not something as simple and straightforward as the West has come to believe. In formal taoist training it is an advanced stage for a student, usually requiring a bunch of prerequisites, physical and mental priming. Personally I believe that not leaving one's breath alone may sometimes be a bad idea for a beginner... and without proper guidance, for everybody. Breath is different from other brain stem-mediated functions in that it has a second set of controls in the cerebral cortex, so it can be both involuntary and voluntary. You can't "decide" in your mind on where to set your resting heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, etc. if you are not trained accordingly for a long time and in the proper modality. But with breath you can, the neocortex can interfere in that function because it "wants" or "believes" something... In some cases this access, bypassing the autopilot, may backfire. The brain stem stores the earliest, and hence the worst, of the developmental traumatic patterns -- one could have been traumatized so early, e.g. at birth or in early infancy, that the cerebral cortex wasn't even there yet, so it couldn't possibly record the memory -- but the brain stem was, and did. Triggering that pattern by taking voluntary control of breathing without conscious access to those patterns (aka systemically retrieving an unconscious memory and making it accessible to consciousness) may be potentially detrimental. And I believe it explains things like "meditation psychosis" and "qigong sickness" etc. in all cases.