Whatever comes to mind. Sometimes a story I read, sometimes something that came to me while holding my mala beads.
Psychology took decades to describe flow. Zhuangzi finished it twenty-three centuries ago with one ox and one blade — a knife used for nineteen years, still fresh from the whetstone, because it looked for gaps instead of hacking bone.
Cold Dew is the first of China's 24 solar terms with the word "cold" in it. The old rule for this season is one word: gather in. Pack the summer clothes, sleep earlier, shift the table from "cooling" to "moistening" — and let the unfinished things become next year's fertilizer.
An American girl wore a mamian qun to prom. The comments asked what brand it was. She said: It's not a brand. It's 400 years old. This skirt has only been back on Chinese streets for twenty years. Where did it go? How did it come home?
On the way to the Moon in 1969, Houston really did ask the Apollo 11 crew to watch for Chang''e and her rabbit. It''s still in the NASA archives. Before Mid-Autumn Festival, the whole story of the woman who lives on the Moon: she got forever — and lost everything else.
I found an old red string in a drawer — the one my mother tied on my wrist years ago. Red strings have been on Chinese wrists for two thousand years: the long-life thread, the old man under the moon, the zodiac year. Chinese families don't say "I love you." Love turns into soup, a sweater, a string.
After three weeks of overtime, my back started protesting. My mom pulled out a bamboo cup inherited from my grandmother and gave me my first cupping session. Seven circular marks — purple, black, red, pink — like moons on my back, like a map of my body.
A man so poor he had nothing but moonlight, and a thief who found nothing worth stealing. The night Zen monk Ryōkan lost his last robe and saw the richest view in the world through his window.
Last night I couldn't sleep. Tossed and turned, then got up and flipped through the Shurangama Sutra. There's a passage that stopped me cold — the Buddha said when someone points at the moon, you should look at the moon, not stare at the finger. It felt like a mirror showing me a habit I repeat every single day.
A troop of monkeys sees the moon reflected in a well and frantically tries to fish it out. Only later do they realize — the moon was in the sky all along. How much of what we chase is merely a reflection?