Same Longitude, Missing Spine

Being Bold in Egypt: Awakening 7 - How Osiris revealed the invisible axis of my becoming in Jiufen

Framed by the open wooden window of Yu Zai Fan Shu Tea House, ridges of emerald fold into a tranquil cobalt bay. A steaming cup of Alishan high-mountain tea warms your hands; its delicate sweetness drifts into the salty breeze, as if mist were rising at once on tongue and horizon.

Far-flung headlands and a lone island hover on the water, whispering that Jiufen is more than red lanterns and cobbled lanes—it is also a doorstep to silence and expanse.

• Jiufen
  Latitude: 25.11° N
  Longitude: 121.85° E

• Shanghai
  Latitude: 31.23° N
  Longitude: 121.47° E

Between Shanghi and Jiufen, their longitudes are nearly identical, separated by only a fraction of a degree. But their latitudes are dramatically different, over 6 degrees apart— nearly 700 kilometers.

This minor-looking gap became a quiet revelation.

Same longitude gives you the root.
Different latitude reveals what’s missing.

And that realization echoed all the way back to a myth I encountered in Egypt…

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In Shanghai, I once moved like a version of my former self — efficient, practiced, dry. The air was fast and the heat bounced off me like performance.

Here in Jiufen, the same sun hangs in the sky. But the heat sinks in, not as punishment but as invitation.

There is no rain, yet the air clings to me — thick, humid, honest. I’m not performing. I’m melting.

My shirt sticks. My thoughts slow.

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In Lost in Longitude, Found in Laughter, I joked about being disoriented in Shanghai Disneyland, thinking I was in California... That was a humorous kind of lost.

But today, sitting in Jiufen with tea and sweat, it’s something deeper:

A bold kind of found.

Same longitude. Same clock.
One was a dry run, the other a humid awakening.

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In Egypt, I encountered the myth of Osiris…

• Set, his jealous brother, murders and scatters his body across 42 provinces of Egypt.

• Isis, the goddess of healing, reassembles him piece by piece.

• But one part remained missing: his spine, eaten by a catfish in the Nile.

• Without it, Osiris could not return to mortal life. Instead, he became god of the afterlife.

• From that fracture, Horus is born, rising not to resurrect the past but to carry justice forward.

Osiris was almost whole — but not enough.

His spine was the axis. The pillar. The truth of his structure.

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It struck me: Shanghai and Jiufen might share a meridian — but they offer different postures.

Shanghai is upright, armored, lean with ambition… Jiufen is curved, open, soft at the edges.

What if the spine of my past self was rigid performance?

And what if here, among mist and salt and sweat, I’m relearning to stand — not with control, but with grounding?

Am I still whole?
Or am I like Osiris — searching for a spine I didn’t realize I had lost?

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Osiris teaches me:

You can be mostly reassembled and still not return to life.
Because without a spine, you don’t rise — you hover. You preside over memory.

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This is Awakening #7:

To feel the tension between coordinates and completion, between place and personification, and to ask:

What’s missing in me that latitude has revealed?

Sometimes, like Osiris, we gather ourselves back together.

Sometimes, like Horus, we rise from the gap.

And sometimes, like this moment in Jiufen, we sit with tea and let the spine of our becoming slowly reform…

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Until Awakening #8,

With gratitude and grounded breath,
Kefei in Taipei