Before came the '51-'52 winter

本矛

Indian with Spear, 1905, Charles M. Russell

“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.”

― Red Hawk ― Seeker of Visions

No Mud No Lotus, Thich Nhat Hanh

No Mud, No Lotus

Before a fierce winter came, Nature had its course

At midsummer, a first harvest

Followed by a Many-Splendoured Fall

But as the frost iced all of the Mother's 

The white father stirred the mud up

Age of débâcle

That sent a Wanderer Dervish Tintin

Spinning around the world and round and round

From Seven till Seventy-Seven, a reporter

That, at present, does not dwell well in the Past,

Anymore, anyhow, anywhere

The tide, the time, have changed

Gray Gravity and Gray Matter to a Gay Lux reversed

As Joy and Love returned in an open heart

And that blossoms a Lotus

戈

The three most common types of Chinese polearms are:

1. the Ge (戈), the dagger-axe,
2. the Qiang (槍), the spear,
3. the Ji (戟) the halberd

Dagger-axes were originally a short slashing weapon with a 0.9 to 1.8 m long shaft, but around the 4th century BC a spearhead was added to the blade, and it became a halberd. The spear is also sometimes called a mao (矛), which is sometimes used to designate polearms with a wavy snake-like spearhead.