Whatever comes to mind. Sometimes a story I read, sometimes something that came to me while holding my mala beads.
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.
On TikTok, a woman wrote: 'Three weeks in, my shoulders finally let go.' She was doing Baduanjin — the slow routine I watched my grandfather do in the park and found unbearably boring as a kid. Nine hundred years old, it has traveled from a Song dynasty official's midnight to a New York balcony.
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 bottle of melatonin gummies from a business trip, a wooden foot-soak basin from my mother — two civilizations answering the same sleepless night. Melatonin shouts "it's dark!" on behalf of the body. Foot soaking invites a mind that has been sprinting all day to finally stop. Insomnia is often not a sleep problem; it's the day's unpaid bill, collected at night. Settle the heart first, then the eyes.
My American colleague asked why I drink hot water. My mom isn't a doctor — but behind her stands something a few thousand years old. Chinese medicine calls the stomach a stove, and ice water a block of ice dropped into the pot.
A blonde girl on TikTok lit her first moxa stick, and the comments ran into the tens of thousands. I stared at the screen — not surprised that foreigners found moxibustion, but because the smell seemed to drift right out of the screen. My mom has been doing it for thirty years. "A seven-year illness needs mugwort aged three years."
A cool gust on a late-summer night told me summer was truly over. White Dew — the most beautifully named of China's twenty-four solar terms. TCM says autumn is for the lungs. I ignored that for years. This year I finally cooked the soup.
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.
On a lost path behind Mount Qingcheng, I met a Daoist who had not eaten lunch in seven years. Bigu is not dieting, nor fasting — it is another kind of relationship between a person and food.
An 80-year-old TCM doctor taught me zhan zhuang — Chinese standing meditation. I didn't believe it at first. How can standing still heal anything? After 100 days, my insomnia is gone, my hands are warm, my temper softened. This is my honest record of those hundred days.
A blonde girl on TikTok doing Ba Duan Jin with imperfect form. After three years of practice, I realize — it doesn't matter if your form is perfect. What matters is whether you're willing to give your body eight minutes a day.