{"id":1340,"date":"2012-01-22T17:12:17","date_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/?p=1340"},"modified":"2012-01-22T17:12:17","modified_gmt":"2012-01-22T17:12:17","slug":"of-dragons-and-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/weekly-diary\/of-dragons-and-new-year.html","title":{"rendered":"Of Dragons and New Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was watching a PBS special last night that morphed a profile of Hong Kong with an exploration of the Dragon as a symbol. As you may know, the Year of the Dragon starts Monday with the Aquarius New Moon (<a href=\"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/weekly-diary\/mars-retrograde-and-the-year-of-the-water-dragon.html\" target=\"_blank\">additional coverage here<\/a>). I have long been a fan of dragons and of being born in a Dragon year, though I didn&#8217;t look in detail at the symbolism. The program, which I&#8217;m not finding easily but I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s available, made the point I&#8217;ve always noticed &#8212; of the 12 Chinese animals he&#8217;s the one who &#8220;doesn&#8217;t really exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The segment described how the Dragon is composed of a morph of the whiskers of a catfish, the claws of a bear, the body of a serpent (though with scales), and a diversity of other best attributes that give him a fearsome strength. The Dragon is a blend of Yin and Yang energies &#8212; the scales are evenly distributed with these energies.<\/p>\n<p>In the East, he&#8217;s considered the benefactor, the one who stands guard over good fortune. In the Western world he&#8217;s been reduced to a shadow of fear, with our terms like &#8220;slaying dragons&#8221; meaning to get rid of deep issues. Even in <em>The Hobbit<\/em>, the dragon is presumed to be evil and is killed. The Dragon appears throughout Chinese culture in his role as proector and guardian. I was vaguely aware that people in Asia would plan to have their children during Dragon years, which says a lot about how much respect this supposedly imaginary critter has.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was watching a PBS special last night that morphed a profile of Hong Kong with an exploration of the Dragon as a symbol. As you may know, the Year of the Dragon starts Monday with the Aquarius New Moon &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/weekly-diary\/of-dragons-and-new-year.html\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/2012\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The path to wp-cache-phase1.php in wp-content/advanced-cache.php must be fixed! -->