Welcome to The Botanarchy Times: Everything Is Dew On The Grass edition! On this verdigris precipice of exuberant emergence, we shelve our fearful peregrinations in the winter larder and celebrate the victory of survival by raising our green fists. Winterlong, we gestated in the primordial waters of the mycelial womb, suspended in a liquid matrix of placental stillness. If we were wise enough to secure the wisdom of the dark in our taproots like nourishing sap, we sequestered the potency to burst forth into the light. And so it goes, by the miracle of soil and spore, we are vegetating again.
Some of our springs are savage and pale, and others, an Edward Ruscha kind of spring… swimming pool wet, pastel, mere droplets on a pristine horizon. Some springs leap forward with empyrean expansiveness and some springs are hesitant and demure, full of underworld power with scant above-ground growth. Spring is the unseen becoming seen, which comes with the aliveness of untameable, unnamable forces making themselves known. Theirs is a mythic power marked by quick transformation and procreative thrusts, an agitated choreography of chaotic bursting. During spring, nature’s resilience is on display. The bauhaus architecture of barren trees is replaced by riotous bulbs and bushy brows. Brambles become blackberry bushes and lichen laugh into existence, tumbling hither and thither down the faces of rocks like the fingers of a lover tracing contours on a cheek. The weave of procreativity begets infinite miracles, things we thought long-dead grow arms and animals reemerge from the borderlands with a leap and a bound.
In Chinese medicine, spring belongs to the Wood Element, who represents the spirit of gigantic forces that reawaken after their winter rest. Wood pushes through the mossy detritus of winter from dormancy into action, bridging the potential energy of a buried seed with the manifest magic of emerging form. Its energy is one of bursting, birthing, sprouting, and hatching, tiny mysteries vegetating hither and thither. It’s flashy! It shows its hand! The Season Of Valiant Emergence is all about forward momentum, reaching upwards and outwards toward empyrean expansiveness like the branches of a tree.
We find the Wood Element’s somatic imprint in the support systems and connective tissues that keep us pliable and bending with the winds of change. We understand the stirring of wind between its branches through the movements of dispersion and dredging that regulate the circulation of qi, blood, and fluids throughout the internal ecosystem. We sense its clear direction and forward momentum through the faculty of vision that allows us to see the infinite horizon from atop a great branch. We behold its impulse to stretch and surge through sensations that rise strongly upwards, getting stuck in the head, neck, and shoulders. We feel its procreative capacity in the germinating thrust that initiates the growth and development of new cells.
The Wood Element says:
As a taoist physician, it is my work to reinforce our fundamental form of belonging to natural processes, recover the self that is non-differentiated from the whole. For the body is an ecosystem expressing the entirety of earth’s forms, and we can understand just as much from assessing bloodwork as we can from observing the unceasing flow of existence as it manifests in mountains and landscapes, rivers and rocks, tendons and ligaments and the fascial planes that connect them like mycelial webs. A taoist physician must cultivate a reverential relationship with seasonal cycles and maintain erotic entanglement with all of creation, which helps us keep a wild mind and a heart that beats with the pace of the rain. Our work is scanning the horizon for patterns and imprints that are emerging from the web of life, utilizing both our our clinical skills and our observation of natural phenomena to guide us in creating fertile, thriving ecosystems for our patients in which to cultivate health and embrace their essential nature. It is from this tangle of relationality that I share the following spring tale.
The Su Wen, one of the oldest source texts of Chinese Medicine, says that:
“When the Liver is deficient, one dreams of very fragrant mushrooms. If the dream takes place in spring, one dreams of lying under a tree without being able to get up”
So when I awoke with a start at 1:30 am the first Saturday of March to the scent of fragrant mushrooms and the feeling of soil sporulating around me, I thought I must be lost in the liminal hinterlands of a spring liver dream, taking part of that underworld magic with me into the light. But then I noticed my dog on my chest, wide-eyed and anxious, and I suddenly felt surrounded by elemental powers and the sense that something tremendous was in the process of happening. There was a huge rumble as if ancient forces awakened deep within the earth, and the hill behind my bedroom wall cracked open like a chasm to Hades and came crashing down into the side of my house. An unending tumble of bramble and roots and mud and rock beseeched us, shaking the walls like Persephone returning from the underworld to unleash the Furies upon us mortals with vengeful bolts. A rogue tree even found its way through my bathroom window.
A week before this happened, I was alone in a bath a lover had drawn me on his land at the foot of the sierras, solitary in a huge bowl of night sky lit by a full moon and warmed underneath by a fire he built us. In a rare moment of absolute aloneness with natural forces, I was overtaken by a sense of sameness with the foreboding sky and the winter earth about to burst and busk. And then I was struck by the memory of a favorite Rilke quote, one that has always felt like a zen koan or a stanza of Chuang Tzu steeped in taoist lore:
The poem from which this stanza springs eternal unfolds as follows:
Something about the humble grace of this man and the land he so honorably stewards awakened a dormant part of my spirit, tearing down the thin wall between me and the starry dimensions and bringing with it a certain clamor. I began to weep at the recollection of this poem and the feeling of spring arriving in my body, because to arrive in spring is to mourn the loss of the generative safety that comes with being buried under earth. Spring comes with a certain violence, for when we rouse the Great Initiator - what Jodorowsky calls the intangible teacher crouched beneath matter - we do not know what he will liberate and trample in his quest for forward movement. I have known my life is changing for a long while, and I know that I am outgrowing structures that have given me a profound since of purpose, comfort, and material stability. Yet I am not sure what lies beyond, or how to move from gestation into action without fear and trepidation.
So I did what I always do in the shadow of the Great Initiator at the feet of the unknown… I received the visions and spoke back to the earth in symbols and in gestures. When I returned home, I carved the classical Chinese character for Hexagram 51 of the I Ching on a lump of clay, and then began a nightly contemplation on how it would feel to move like this hexagram: an untameable, unnamable force full of unfettered movement. Hexagram 51 hearkens to the waking of the earth in early spring. From Hillary Barrett, a modern interpreter of the I Ching:
The name of Hexagram 51, zhen 震 , means Shock and Quake, and encompasses both thunder and earthquake. The old character has two components: rain, and chen, the name of the fifth Earthly Branch in the Chinese calendar – which also means a plough, something that breaks open the earth.
In the family of trigrams, thunder is the first son of heaven and earth, entrusted with the sacred vessel. As the old is overthrown and the new embraced, he stands at the gates and opens them to the new time. This brings both the emotional experience of shock, and also the awareness of a sacred connection that continues and is renewed through upheaval.
Thunder is the voice of heaven; the shock itself is sacred. When you posit yourself within the relentless transformation of natural processes and court the Great Initiator, mountains move, the earth breaks open, and the upward thrust of spring rouses you from dormancy in your sleep. I cannot know where The Great Initiator will walk me. All I can do is build a prayer like one might build a fire, and have faith not in gods but in processes. It is my wish for this season and the intention of this newsletter to awaken within you the nascent magic of spring, to make your body a vessel for its nectar to flow through. May you drink deep from this dossier of gnostic nature transmissions, for everything is dew on the grass, nothing stays the same.
In health and solidarity,
Carolyn
By Carolyn Barron
Wellness begins and ends with a connection to the body’s place in the dynamism of the natural world. When we pause to witness, sense, and revere the natural phenomena that we are forever ensconced within, we come to understand that we are Nature and an embodiment of her cycles and patterns. This cultivated awareness allows us to anticipate change and respond to it accordingly, awakening our primal flow and inner physician. The ideal condition of a “healthy” individual is ping, which lightly translates to harmony, a condition which is reached through “adjustments” tiao, among the forces in the body that mirror the adjustments that happen so effortlessly in the natural world. Spring’s energy is strong and forceful, establishing new growth and viability like trees that climb up from underground waters. Spring gives form to the swirling motions of the old gods swarming within us. Think of the wild dynamism flowing under your own static veneer, the strong endurance of the spindly tree full of flowing sap who somehow makes it through the winter undaunted.
Spring belongs to the Wood element which is presided over by the liver and gallbladder organs. It represents the movement and vitality surging through a great tree, our seed potential being made manifest and carried out with natural vigor. The liver as an emissary of wood medicine needn’t be abstract. Think of the role it plays in our inner ecosystem and how that mirrors the role of a tree in the collective called Planet Earth: Growth, regeneration, and detoxification are their sacred tasks, and as the liver carries these out it courses the flow of qi, blood, and emotions as they move through the body. Five Element Acupuncturist Lonny Jarrett elucidates this relationship further, writing “the liver must tap the potential of jing and implement its internal organization in the world the same way a tree must send down roots to tap reserves of water, manifesting them on the surface as new growth.”
It is our natural drive to seek harmony in spring by mirroring the qi of nature. If we do not take the time to thaw out and slough off winters leaden grievances, we can become encumbered by their downward pull and stagnant restraint, which can thwart the emergent motion of Spring and keep us tethered to the underworld whilst everything else is leaping forward in Nature’s Grand Debutante Ball. As such, this is the time of year that primal desires for freedom, lightness, and unfettered movement beseech the body, and all of my patients become besotted with the idea of “spring cleansing.” I get asked constantly about a myriad of detoxes, from juice cleanses to prepackaged detox kits, bone broth diets to extended fasts. Everyone want to be on “detox herbs”, shed weight, GLOW. I understand the drive and while it is often necessary to support the body’s natural detoxification pathways, it is utterly superfluous and often harmful to “detox” the body in the absence of disease.
There’s a core concept in taoism that I discuss with my patients each and every day: don’t push the river, it flows by itself. We have a built in reverence in Chinese medicine for the elegant perfection of an ecosystem left to its own devices. The capacity for growth, regulation, regeneration, and self-governance is intrinsic. As a taoist physician, we succeed where allopathic medicine fails because we aim to be in flow with the invisible rivers of life, gently coursing the movement of vital substances throughout the body instead of forcing them to move against their will. Using excessive strength to force an organ to work overtime depletes the body’s resources and courts ecological catastrophe, threatening biodiversity and disrupting the harmonious inter-functioning of the organ systems. When we study healthy ecosystems, whether they are within the body or throughout the cosmos, two key concepts arise:
In the parlance of Chinese medicine, we say that forcing an organ to overwork ‘insults’ its intelligence and capaciousness within a self-regulating system. In the theoretical framework of our medicine, the liver is likened to a general that is responsible for governing the free flow of qi throughout the entire body, and its ability to function properly impacts every system within the microcosm. It is in charge of dispersion and dredging, and is responsible for the regulation of emotion, the promotion of digestion and absorption, and the maintenance of the circulation of qi, blood, and bodily fluids. An emissary of viriditas, the liver has an incredible capacity for regeneration and a healthy individual can regenerate a brand new liver every month, even sans a Sakara Life Cleanse™. The nerve! At any given time, your liver contains 10% of your total blood and pumps 1.4 liters of blood every minute to filter toxins and infections. Malfunction of the liver can contribute to allergies, skin problems, digestive issues, hormonal imbalances, mood disorders, vision pathologies, and fat metabolism, as well as a slew of other complaints that get kicked around our clinics on the regular. Instead of forcing the liver to overwork in the face of these symptomologies, we will elegantly sleuth around to find the root dysfunction of the liver, and use needles and herbs to harmonize, disperse, soften, smooth, clear, resolve, regulate, descend, tonify, nourish, or dredge in order to re-direct patterns of movement within the body. It’s complicated! While there are bodies whose liver and lymphatics generally require a good swift kick in the keester - patients with mold exposure, patients whose fields expose them to chemicals and particulate matter (woodworking, art, construction, agriculture, firefighting, etc), patients on medications that are very taxing to the liver (NSAID’s, Dilantin, Tylenol, Methotrexate, etc), functional alcoholics, and patients with fatty liver disease to name a few - detoxing for the sake of ‘cleansing’ is superfluous at best, harmful at worst. Detoxing in the throes of a concurrent viral infection can be too depleting and impair the body’s ability to fight the pathogen (here’s looking at you Lyme, EBV, Long Covid, Herpes), and detoxing in a body with concurrent qi, blood, or yin deficiencies can lead to chronic fatigue, depression, nutrient deficiencies, diarrhea, hair loss, weak muscles, vision loss, menstrual cycle irregularities, skipped periods, poor concentration, insomnia, hot flashes, cramping, night sweats, dry mouth and throat, headaches, and anemia. Why do we do this to ourselves?
As someone who has the privilege of tending to bodies and secrets, I know how deep and vast our wounds with nourishment and cleanliness run, expressing themselves through disordered and dysregulated eating. Let’s get something straight - if we are eating outside the boundaries of Monsanto-fied foods that feed corporate egregores whilst robbing bodies and Earth of their legacies, there are no inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods. Where food falls on the spectrum between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is completely relative, and is one of the myriad ways we fall victim to internalized prejudices informed by a slew of various cultural conditionings that impose false hierarchies on things. Most of this has more to do with socio-economic biases (and sophisticated advertising both overt and covert) and less to do with nutrition. Your body is detoxing ALL THE TIME no matter what you eat. That said, food CAN support or negate our thriving, but this is different for everybody and informed by the climate of each person’s unique ecosystem, personal history, and stew of inflammatory predispositions that can take a lifetime to understand. This is where the Taoist approach to nourishment and cleansing diverges from most modern nutritional practices… we think seasonally and contextually, focusing on the relative truths of each person, and not a supreme truth, acknowledging that reality is in a state of process. Everything changes, nothing is constant, and sometimes things flourish best when left alone. We don’t need to obsess too much about these things (but I still do from time to time, it’s a hard knot to undo). The idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean is a puritanical pyramid scheme. We need to support them seasonally and gently through our everyday lifestyle choices, and we need to strengthen their natural function of elimination when the spirit calls for it.
Ritual purification when done right can be fierce and witchy like a torrid hermit receiving visions after fasting on foraged bark in a crag, but when we veer from using it as a tool for embodied grace into an obsession with inner cleanliness it becomes less elucidating and more pathological. An obsession with emptiness and purity can be thought of within the lens of the Elemental Medicine tradition as the ‘Metal Element insulting the Wood Element’. In a thriving inner ecosystem, Metal controls Wood, pruning and refining so that its growth is bushy, verdant, and upright. A sense of order and a vector of growth preserves the qi and prevents the wood element from toppling hither and thither in all directions. But if the Metal Element excessively cuts the Wood Element down, Wood can never carry out its sacred task as the grand architect for our vision of the future. In the body, our tendons, ligaments, and support systems become weak and devitalized, and the flexibility and strength of our connective tissues becomes compromised. When undernourished, Wood can wither into aimlessness, anxiety, timidity, and ambiguity of self and purpose.
By Carolyn Barron
The poet sages that transmitted the Old Medicine knew that to be in good health, one must be intimately embroiled with the comings and goings of the seasons and starlings, to move as the rivers, mountains, and cosmos itself whose miraculous maneuverings are both predictable and astonishing. This was true of the Old Medicine in all of its guises, whether the Old Medicine was wearing a birch hat and bark clogs in a hermit hut on Wudang Mountain, or carrying a Rowan staff and chanting the runes in the Westfjords of Iceland. Mountains, streams, moons, and minerals don’t fight the will of their inner nature, they have something to teach us about following the spontaneous warp and weft of natural flow. When we come to understand that we are nature and an embodiment of its cycles, we reclaim the right to periodicity: we get to wax and wane, ebb and flow, leaf and bud like the best of them. Natural impulses awaken like a California poppy unfurling its tangerine-tinted hair on an April morning. For in the Mystery School of the Old Medicine, natural impulses are never arbitrary - they are connected to a divine inner authority, one that must be protected and cultivated at all costs. This is the work of acupuncture and the Chinese medical arts.
The landscapes of the Old Medicine are not padded behind chainlink and patrolled by armored vehicles. They let us enter into them and wander trails, explore their canyons, streams, and mountain peaks. The Old Medicine survives in cycles, seasons, and the five elements of water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. The Old Medicine survives in you. The rushing of water, the rising of sap, the steady embrace of earth… each of these elemental forces lives inside of you, and their movements and interactions form the basis of disease and health in your inner ecosystem. This is not merely an abstract concept, it has corporal truth in the soils, rivers, tissues, and vessels of your own body. The rushing of water is felt in the surging brine of blood through the vessels, the rising of sap as the upward directional flow of the cerebrospinal fluid coursing its way from the sacrum to the brain through the spinal canal. Lao Tzu, the mythic mage of Chinese Medicine, is known to have said “I am the wilderness before the dawn.” For in the parlance of the ancient sages, our bodies are sensuous, cyclic, fertile, and feral, full of the generative capacity and pluripotent possibility of an old growth forest on the brink of Spring.
It is impossible to state the principals of nature, but in the budding of leaves and the circulation of blood we see a spectrum of motions arising without conscious will or attention, we sense a remarkable naturalness that is ordinary and unlearned. This is tao in its simplest expression. Tao is the central concept of Chinese medicine, and like love and all mysterious forces that beseech life, it can never be defined by language alone. It can, however, be witnessed in observing the course, flow, drift, or processes of nature. Lao Tzu and Chuang-tzu use the flow of water as its principal metaphor, which prompted Alan Watts to call tao the Watercourse Way. From Watts:
“The taoist term, which we translate as “nature” is tzu-jan, meaning the spontaneous, that which is so of itself. Nature as tzu-jan might be taken to mean that everything grows and operates independently, on its own, and to be the meaning of the verse:
(As I) sit quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes and grass grows of itself.”
Self-regulating interdependence is the mark of a healthy ecosystem, whose elegant feedback loops spiraling betwixt water, clouds, rocks, plants, and the ten thousand things inherently organize towards balance, connection, and regeneration. When I think about the health of an ecosystem in spring, I inevitably think of the acupuncture point Liver 8: 曲泉 "Spring at the Bend”.
Acupuncture point names are like poems that articulate the living mystery inside of us. These wilderness landscapes are a gateway into patterns and forms emerging within and throughout, and by making contact with our ecological imprints through acupuncture points we understand our embeddedness in greater cosmological processes. It is from this place of sensuous wholeness that we can come to approach our bodies with the same reverence and curiosity we might encounter while watching a condor on an alpine lake, or a redbud tree bewitch a grey roadtrip sky with an embarrassment of flushed flowers. Spring At The Bend holds the ecological imprint of a tree tapping the force of a bubbling spring and channeling it upwards for strong directional growth.
Spring At The Bend is located at the crook of the knee, where a surging rush of spring water percolates like a hidden current straight from the mystery school of the mycelial womb. To find it, bend your knee and glide your thumb across the surface of the patella over the knobby bone that juts out like a cliff, and let it fall like rainwater into the interior crease between the tendons. When you make contact with Spring At The Bend, you will feel the pulsation of primordial realms, cool rushing water brimming upwards through the vessels with the pluripotent potential of spring. It contains invisible landscapes of serene and terrifying beauty, the smell of wet wood engulfing you like a mycelial blanket, the guiding force of wu-wei that is always acting and growing in accord with the pattern of things as they exist in their unfettered form. It is the grace of a tree that appears motionless and fastened to earth, yet sequesters an occult pulsation of rushing life within its trunk. In its bowers are fragrant plants, jeweled cliffs that dive into placid lakewater, colored mists, the anointing beauty of frigid water bristling upwards from a perennial spring, the unstoppable motion of eternal source. It is your body’s locus of:
(As I) sit quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes and grass grows of itself.
Liver 8: 曲泉 "Spring at the Bend" is in a class of acupuncture points we call he-sea points. Located around the elbow and knee joints where qi carried by many meridians 'gathers together as one hundred rivers meet before pouring into the sea’, life-force is deep and abundant in these flowing tributaries. As the he-sea point of our embodied wood element, we use this point clinically to water our wood, bringing movement, grace, adaptability and flow to the places the liver meridian inhabits. When water is deficient in the wood realm, there is an undernourished brittleness to the body that manifests in dry skin, brittle hair, nails that are weak and break often, fatigue, tight tendons, light or missed periods, and cramping muscles that plague the body with a pervasive tension. We may feel brittle from mental, physical, or emotional strain, pushing past our capacity without taking the time to regenerate in stillness and draw upwards from the depths. Water within wood allows it to be flexible, supple, and move smoothly in many directions, taking up nutrients from the water and soil and using them to fuel growth, development, and repair. If this transformation is impeded, rigidity takes hold and growth becomes impaired, thwarting the movement and fluidity needed to bring our creative visions to life. Spring At The Bend breaks us out of rigid structures, bringing us back into the spontaneous flow state of natural movement that is the watermark of wu-wei.
We also use Spring at the Bend to bring a surge of fresh, moving water to that which has stagnated in the crooks and bends of the body. Anyone who has observed a mountain stream in reverent awe knows what happens when water languishes too long in a crook or a bend - a layer of festering pond scum rises to the surface. In the parlance of the Old Medicine, we call these festering pockets of stagnation ‘damp-heat.’ Just as the wood element in nature facilitates the filtration of toxins by removing pollutants from soil and air, Spring at the Bend clears damp heat from the liver meridian. Damp heat in the crooks and bends of the liver meridian might manifest as an ovarian cyst, abdominal distention, a feeling of heaviness in the lower body, a bitter taste in the mouth, vaginal itching, discharge, burning urination, or pain and swelling in the genitals from a UTI, viral infection, yeast, or prostatitis.
Wood energy needs to grow and endeavor in order fulfill its natural impulse towards movement and flourishing expansiveness. Out of balance, wood energy can manifest as impediments to growth, purpose, vision, and clarity. If your wood energy is stuck, you may feel locked up with apathy, or beseeched by anger, indecision, depression, stubbornness, tension, hopelessness, and aimlessness. A person with strong wood energy needs to be beseeched by purpose, creating tangible things from intangible visions, and growing towards something in new and novel ways in order to feel fully alive.
Think about the qualities of resurgence, regeneration, and renewal in your life. Can you tap the underground coffers for the motive force to grow upright, have the vision and moxie to carry the will of water forward into the above-ground world? Or is your wood feeling soggy and water-logged, dampened by too many rains? Have you been scorned by fire? Do you have the grit and tenacity to hold soil in place in veneration of the earth? Can you shield us from the downfall of rain, sleet, and hail? Are you giving your carbons back? How can you participate in the local ecology? What creatures can you shelter in your boughs, what moths & mycelia can you feed from your prodigious body? Are the structures of your limbs supple and pliant, a haven from the eight winds that bend the flowers and leaves across the rocky cliffs of Reverence-Pavilion Mountain? Are you participating fully in the birth-death-rebirth cycle of life?
If any of these functions feel impaired, you can work Spring at the Bend to restore the self-regulating interdependence of a thriving inner ecosystem, to become the limbs of a sycamore interlocking in waves of undulation with mountains, clouds, and silent springs bubbling underfoot. You can work your fingers into your sinews, allowing the unstoppable motion of eternal source and the pulsing peregrinations of flowering seeds to dance together in the generative rites of spring, like an ivy-crowned Bacchus warbling his native wood-notes wild (thank you, Milton). As David Hinton writes in China Root:
A POEM WITH PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES BY ERASMUS DARWIN
BUILD A BIRDHOUSE FOR YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD HOI POLLOI
WHAT MEMORIES ARE HELD WITHIN THE RINGS OF A TREE?
O Life-green finger of God,
in you God has placed a garden.
You reflect heaven's eminent radiancelike a raised pillar.
You are glorious as you perform God's deeds.
O sublime mountains, which can never be made low by the discretion of God.
Yet still you stand at a distance, as if in exile,
But there is no armed power which can tear you away.
In solidarity with the willow catkins spewing their pollen poetry into the Four Winds, I offer a smattering of spring poems from China’s Northern, Southern, Tang, and Sung dynasties. Many of these poems are from China’s "rivers-and-mountains" wilderness poetry tradition, pastoral paeans to contemplative life in the wilderness deeply steeped in Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) principles and lore. I will preface this smattering by admitting that I learned more about being a physician from classical Chinese poetry than I ever did in medical school. These poems are Tao woven into simple vignettes of pastoral splendor, and in their uncluttered aloneness they allow us to bask in silence, non-being, emptiness, and the inter-connectedness of all things. A complex warp and weft emerges from their seemingly sparse vegetation. They become a perch to witness landscapes within and throughout, to sense the emerging forms of the seasons and feel the transformation of the Ten Thousand Things. I read classical Chinese poetry every morning - it keeps me sharp and true, makes me a better doctor, reminds me of the cosmic principles, and allows me to let nature take its course.
You need to beckon a Mind of Spring when reading these poems, conjuring peony dewdrops falling into emerald grasses and glistening mosses breathing on the back of birch bark in a sunlit grove. You’ll come to find these poems aren’t about rivers and mountains, they are rivers and mountains, and you can wrap yourself around them like a gossamer fog, amble up and down them in your birch hat and bark clogs collecting rare roots from their sediment-rich riverbeds. So don your robe of fig leaves and sash of wisteria, and make like my favorite poet, the inimitable Hsieh Ling-yun, and
Cherish Transformation: mind will be unbound.
Embrace things: love will deepen.
In Reply
By THE ANCIENT RECLUSE
24.
By COLD MOUNTAIN
XII
By TAO YUANMING
Turning Seasons
By HSIEH LING-YUN
Early Spring East Of Town
By YANG CHU-YUAN
173.
By STONEHOUSE
Occasional Poem On The Arrival Of Spring
By CHANG SHIH
261.
By COLD MOUNTAIN
From South Hill to North Hill Passing
By HSIEH LING-YUN
Idleness
By LU YU
Light Rain In Early Spring
By HAN YU
Spring Dawn
By MENG HAO-JAN
Chingping Ode
By LI BAI
Spring Day
By CHU HSI
Spring Night
By SU SHIH
IV.
By TAO YUANMING
Following Axe-Bamboo Stream, I Cross Over a Ridge and Hike on Along the River
By HSIEH LING-YUN
Casual Poem on a Spring Day
By CH’ENG HAO
Wandering Up Ample-Gauze Creek On A Spring Day
By LI PO
Visiting A Private Garden Without Success
By YEH SHAO-WENG
89.
By STONEHOUSE
290.
By COLD MOUNTAIN
Night Rain At Luster Gap
By YANG WAN-LI
Thinking of Going Outside on a Rainy Day
By LU YU
Little Garden
By LU YU
The Wild Flower Man
By LU YU
Chuchou’s West Stream
BY WEI YING-WU
Responding to Secretary Chia Chih’s “Morning Court at Taming Palace”
By TU FU
North Mountain
By WANG AN-SHIH
Dwelling in the Mountains #18
By HSIEH LING-YUN
Reflections While Reading — I.
By CHU HSI
Bird-Cry Creek
By WANG WEI
Falling Flowers
By CHU SHU-CHEN
Spring Clearing
By WANG CHIA
Late Spring
By HAN YU
Late Spring
By TS’AO PIN
Visiting A Private Garden In Late Spring
By WANG CHI’I
Begonia
By SU SHIH
Inspired
BY TU FU
Seeing Off Spring
By WANG FENG-YUAN
Climbing A Mountain
By LI SHE
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