Yan grass shimmers like silken jade.
Qin mulberry trees' green leaves droop.
Your homecoming is now at hand
As heartbreak has me thin and stooped.
Spring Winds and I are strangers --
Why, past my curtains, the inward swoop?
Chinese Title: 春思; Original poem in Simplified Chinese:
燕草如碧丝， 秦桑低绿枝；
当君怀归日， 是妾断肠时。
春风不相识， 何事入罗帏？
Note: this is poem #7 in “300 Tang Poems” [唐诗三百首]
I say no to all sorts of things regularly, for good or bad. I have a [sometimes] unfortunate proclivity to default to no. I move through life like an aircraft carrier, not prone to quick turns or rapid adjustment to unexpected circumstance. I need prepping for course changes and plenty of time. But it does tend to keep me on my objective.
I’d say my first full-time martial arts teacher, because I was young enough to have considerable open domain in which said teacher could be influential and because the lessons were so diverse — from kinesthetics to ethics to culture to psychology.
By “most influential” I think one means having had either the broadest or most profound influence. (I favor the importance of the latter, the lessons that stick with one and which inform one’s philosophy of life.) This definition favors earlier teachers, but as I don’t remember any specific lesson taught by a specific elementary school teacher, they’re out (though I learned useful things from them and they ranged from competent to quite skilled as teachers go.) The earliest profound lesson I received through scholastic education, one that became a core tenet in my philosophy of life rather than just a skill, was in high school — and in my junior or senior year at that.
As with books, if I can take away one profound lesson from a teacher, I consider my experience well worth the time and energy. And most influential isn’t necessarily the prime criterion for a teacher — and certainly doesn’t necessarily mean best or most skilled or most in command of a diverse array of knowledge.
Slender grass waves in a light breeze;
Tall-masted boat rocks in the night.
Stars hang low, over the vast plain;
The river moon struggles for height.
I'll never gain fame by the brush --
Too old for civil service posts...
Wading, wading, what am I like?
A sandpiper on the mud coast!
The original in Chinese (Title: 旅夜書懷):
細草微風岸，
危檣獨夜舟。
星垂平野闊，
月湧大江流。
名豈文章著，
官應老病休。
飄飄何所似，
天地一沙鷗。
This is Poem 113 of “Three Hundred Tang Poems,” i.e. 唐诗三百首
I have no use for any tattoo, anywhere, thank you very much.
I’ll leave it to the teens and twenty-somethings to believe there is some image or phrase that will always and forever capture their essence. I’ve been through too many versions of myself and came out accepting the Buddhist / Taoist notion that everything, everywhere [even the self — if there even is such a thing] is in constant flux.
ALIVE!
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewst,
Now is the time that face should form another,
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb'rd not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
“You have good posture.”
I don’t think that’s a question I can meaningfully answer. I think each person has more confidence and courage in some dimensions of life than in others. A given observer tends to see the person who is the most confident in the areas in which that observer is least confident and think of that person as the most confident — when that person might be quite lacking in confidence in areas to which the observer isn’t being attentive.
It was eye opening to read about Audie Murphy, a man who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for single-handedly taking on a unit of Nazis, a man who had a successful career in film, but also a man who was said to have been tremendously shy and awkward around strangers. It would be all in the context in which one saw Murphy that might make one think he was the most or least confident person around.
Quite frankly, the person who appears the most confident in all aspects of life is probably also the most full of shit.
Lately, swimming… and, of course, rap battles.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 