The Qixi Festival (Chinese 七夕)
The Quxi Festival, celebrated for over 2600 years, on the seventh day of the seventh lunisolar month on the Chinese calendar (about now) celebrates the yearly meeting of Altair and Vega.The Chinese story is about two lovers, the weaver girl Zhinü (Vega) and the cowherd, Niulang (Altair). Niulang was very poor and homeless, deserted by his family, met the beautiful Fairy Zhinü, on her visit to earth they fell in love, and against the wishes of Heaven she stayed, they married against the rules, their punishment was to be separated forever by a Silver River (the Milky Way). Altair built a bridge of magpies over the Silver River.and the Emperor of Heaven was so moved by their love they were allowed to meet once a year.
.Brush drawing by Janney for Quxi festival. Could be lovers in Albuquerque ballooning along the Sandia Mountains
The time of meeting is now, watch for the Summer Triangle
San Francisco
Sometimes words are too abstract. Its not that people do not understand the meanings of words, rather at The Beginning, there was never A Dictionary, people made sounds into words into languages while they were busy surviving.
Words have a structural social nature, they work with each other, they fit together in sentences to enable communication between people. Words represent the things in the human experience. They are used as symbols for those things but they are not those things.
Knowing how to say, or write the word does not mean one understands the meaning of the word.
Human beings lived in different places around the earth and developed different languages with different words.
If words represent things in the human experience and humans experience the universe similarly, then do different languages have different words which represent the same things.—after all if there is a set of things, we should have words for those things .Can we take different languages, list them side by side and find words which have a meaning-match, where translating is just a mater of knowing what word from your language matches—or represents— the same thing,
For many words this works but for many other words, for different reasons, it is not a simple process of matching words until its all done, Translation of poetry may be a choice between the “literal meaning” or the “feeling meaning.”
The corners of California and Powell are a favorite place, Both streets are steep inclines, there are blinking red lights and both streeta have cable cars not just running on them but also making a turn. People at all levels, pedestrians and drivers, are confused, lack confidence and are hesitant to go through the intersection. Imagine an out of town car driver stopped on a steep hill looking at the four blinking red lights on each corner, hesitant to move while behind is a SF regular in a large delivery truck honking the horn and the pedestrians are standing around waiting for a “walk” sign that never appears.—The intersection of America.
Do these differences represent different experiences ? Is there a “Real standard set of things” out there for people—for scientists—to discover, differentiate and define?
Produce store along Stockton Street
Alameda Creek
Covid restricted my travel and the Alameda Creek Trail, with levee, runs right by my (baby’s) door, As I like to walk everyday I often find myself on the trail. My photographs always have more questions than answers but they would never be evidence in a court of law.
Is there an actual standard set of “things” in the universe and oneday well people be able to differentiate each thing one from another and give them all a name.
There are many problems in knowing but what makes this work for human beings is that we all have a standard set of senses—sight, sound, taste, touch and smell and once we have words, we can compare our experiences and test if this experience is really deserving of the title “thing.”
Factors that makes it difficult is that societies —I use the word society here to mean a group of people theoretically defined as culture bound—have different historical experiences resulting in things which maybe completely or partially different.
For example different societies just by living in different geographical locations on the Earth may different different tools created to work in different places.
Levels of knowledge can play a part. Cultivated plants which for thousand of years appeared physically different from one society to another when, much later, investigated by science find them be like biological siblings.
The big “nothing, ” —air—which humans for millenniums used to separate one “thing from another thing” turns out also to be a bunch of things, small particles we cannot see.s
Consider all the new words in our society just since my life time of 76 years. Ae these all new things, created by people, words which never before existed?
When the term “Super Bowl” came out , I thought is was satirical joke, When young I played sports, enjoyed it— and have exercised most of my life— I do 3-4 miles miles every day along the creek—but I do not desire to sit around watching other people play, and other people become a bunch of partying fans— so for about 10 years I thought when people used the term Super Bowl that they were making a satirical joke about the irrational obsession many Americans had for football.—Shows you how removed I can be from pop culture.
Technically in the universe the amount of matter is constant— The law of conservation of mass states that mass in an isolated system is neither created nor destroyed by chemical reactions or physical transformations. Maybe the universe is an isolated system but then isolated from what?
So technically concerning the universe if we could agree on—discover?— the “smallest of all fundamental particles” and that the number of these particles would be a constant then there would be a finite number of different ways the finite number of smallest particles could join together. This is, for me anyway, no matter how small we look, we always find something smaller and no matter how big we look the universe is always the biggest, yet it keeps getting expanding —is the number of smallest particles particles in the Universe a constant that keeps getting bigger.
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This was along Alameda Creek trail but it does not fit the previous section, call it a “feet picture”, just a big concrete block concrete left there by some construction crew doing a government project—First Amendment rights? freedom of expression in a public place ?.Think of it as a pre-historic wall in a cave.
Maybe 15 years ago, a hot summer night in Reno —ever feel lucky? I did this morning.
Windows to the worlds, a corner is a turning point
but it only leads to another corner, and another corner, always going around and around rectangle. You can see through me but I don”t go anywhere.
If you look for me I am like Buddha holding the flower for Kasyapa. when you smile at me, I am the one that smiles back.
Which is why when I wake up in the morning I see The Heat Sutra.on my wall, it keeps my mind from getting too uncluttered from all this useful information.
Gate Gate Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhisvaha.
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