Whatever comes to mind. Sometimes a story I read, sometimes something that came to me while holding my mala beads.
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.
Someone asked the Buddha: How can a single drop of water never dry up? Put it in the ocean, he said. Just one sentence. But that afternoon, watching the water stain vanish from my table, I felt there was more to it than that.
The Buddha told a story about a blind turtle at the bottom of a vast ocean, surfacing once every hundred years, trying to put its head through a hole in a randomly drifting piece of wood. That probability, he said, is how rare it is to obtain a human life. This story has stayed with me — about cherishing, about possibility, about still surfacing when you can't see the way.