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?
My coworker said stressed. My mom said fire. One word my language has that English can't hold — and a two-thousand-year-old way of reading the body as weather.
A blonde woman on TikTok was scraping her jaw with a small white stone. The comments were all "adding to cart." I stared at that stone for a long time — it's a gua sha board. My mom keeps one in her bedside drawer, buffalo horn. In my home it treats heatstroke. Across the ocean, it's a $35 beauty tool. Same board, two destinies.
The cicadas went quiet, and the calendar said Chushu, the solar term where heat ''comes to rest.'' An old tai chi master by the river once told me: heaven and earth stop first; whether you follow is your own business. A soup that takes an hour to cook might be how an ordinary person catches up with the season.
When the temperature dropped, I felt cold to my bones. My mom pulled out moxa sticks and ginger, and gave me my first ginger moxibustion. The moment the heat penetrated through the ginger slice into my body, I understood what "penetration" means.
Hanshan asked Shide: when someone slanders me, cheats me, insults me — how should I deal with it? Shide replied: tolerate him, yield to him, let him be, avoid him, endure him, respect him, pay him no mind.