Seasons greetings from Botanarchy!
Throughout California, early autumn is wildfire season, the spurious offspring of the slow climate apocalypse, the shifting winds, and encroachment upon the urban-wildland interface that ravages our typically halcyon homestead. In the Five Element cycle of transformation, the element Fire shapes, melts, and controls the element Metal, and when the two meet in the blustery, shifty, liminal cauldron of autumn we all feel their capricious chemistry. Fire melts the order of the Metal element, disintegrating the hardened belief that all is tidy and contained, that we have some modicum of control over the shenanigans of the heavens. Metal is mastery, and for all the things we have yet to master (ala WEATHER and ELECTIONS), Fire can threaten Metal’s sense of stability and adeptness. I see this emerge clinically every year, even more so in an election season where there is an angsty edge to the Santa Ana winds and the spirit of grief looms heavy in autumn’s leafless bower. Anxiety, apprehension, desolation, sorrow… these emotions are weather systems that can pass through during this elemental phase shift, and when they visit they often bring the physical symptoms of Fire attacking the Metal element and lungs: dry cough, parched nose and throat, over-sensitivity to wind & the environment, porous boundaries, low emotional resilience, eczema flares, blood-streaked phlegm, lingering sore throat, and that scurrilous ‘black gunk’ lodged in the back of your throat that you try to dislodge by coughing with varying degrees of success.
But then, at the peak of autumn’s turbulent crest, a magical phase shift occurs. As nature continues to cool, contract, and descend, energy returns to its roots and fires both proverbial and literal slow and abate. Some of those health issues spontaneously clear up. At the edge of sorrow for autumn’s losses lies surrender, a discovery of the peace, serenity, and wisdom that lies in the darkness. This is the transition from autumn into winter, or Metal into Water in the five element seasonal wheel. In the Taoist cycle of time, darkness feeds life the way that a buried seed accrues potency in the dim boudoir of mycelia and mud. Some get uneasy in the naked bardo of autumn’s barren garden, but it’s this aspect of Metal season that I love most - it’s unsentimental, cuts to the core of things, prunes the superfluous, and gets down to the proverbial brass tacks (metal pun very intended) that give life anatomy and architecture.
Which is what compels me to write this seasonal missive. This year, our sense of scorched loss is capitulated by an uncertain future after an election outcome that has many of us fearing for our sovereignty, personhood, and the ecological health of our rivers, soils, and air. Many of my patients have asked how to navigate the shadowy morass of an uncertain future in the rivers and soils of their own bodies. The Huang Di Neijing, the sacred writ of Chinese medicine, speaks to how emotional energy has vectors, predictability, and movement, like weather patterns that blow through our internal ecosystem. Fear, unsurprisingly, causes qi to sink. To understand how fear relates to the kidneys and Water element, think of the last time you felt fearful. Not the spectral fear you feel on the daily lurking in the recesses of your psyche and soma, but the type of fear that descends like a bolt of ice from the heavens in response to an immediate threat like another Trump presidency. Fear, like water, plunges to the depths. Our bodies collapse into survival mode, our spine curls inward to protect our vital organs, a cold shock pulses through our fingers and toes, and our energy quite literally drops into our lower loins, the spaces that speak to fundamental safety. You might even pee your pants (look, we’ve all done it).
More poisonous than a pestilence, fear keeps us frozen and unable to accept change, inhibiting us from manifesting the seeds of our potential. Cold and frost delay growth, and it’s no surprise that the Powers That Be and their horsemen of the slow apocalypse hurl ice bolts of fear when orthodoxy is threatened. If you find yourself living in perpetual fear of your health and safety, your Water element may be out of balance and require tending. And so, I offer you an AUTUMN INTO WINTER SEASONAL SYLLABUS to move from fear into wisdom, and embody the sacred nature of the season with grace and reverence.
In autumn, energy goes back into the roots like melted metal seeping through the molten core of the earth. This is a time to honor embryonic water, the magic of the womb. Suspend yourself in a liquid matrix of placental stillness. Dive into and embrace the darkest of dark inner spaces. Create a sacred vessel for unstructured time, clear your schedule on the perpetual. Face a lingering fear. Get more rest. Spend time with water. Honor your ancestors, for their own abilities to face fears and endure hardship ensured the continuous flowing of life-force that percolated transgenerationally to culminate in your being.
One of the virtues of a healthy embodied Water element is a vast reservoir of tenacity. Think of the intrepid will it takes to flow freely forward with a cavalier spirit in spite of obstacles, or the determination of the seed to break its shell and burst outward undaunted. We all hold a kernel of this gallantry in the nest of our kidneys and adrenals, but flip the coin and you encounter the other face of Water, one that’s plagued with the grey creases of adrenal-fueled bravura, where the fundamental drives of the body have been distorted and the candle burns relentlessly.
The dance between our Zhi - willpower - and Qi - energy - is a delicate one, for a strong will can mask deficiencies of energy (until the proverbial piper gets paid, of course). When my patients refer to themselves as having a ‘superhuman amount of energy’, or being a person that ‘never gets tired,’ they may actually be exploiting their natural resources and ignoring the rhythms of their body. This is not always the case (no supreme truth says I), but it is an invitation to investigate how we plod our course through the day, and from where the motivation to plod springs forth. This is made all the more salient by my refusal to exploit east asian medicine as a tool for maximizing our output in a capitalist labor market by increasing motivation and productivity.
Below is a series of contemplative prompts from Five Element Acupuncturist Lonny Jarrett that I consider a core practice in the work of refusing to industrialize the rhythms and cycles of the body. I often give this exercise to patients when we are working on adrenal fatigue, burnout, autoimmune diseases, and stress.
We should all be pruning on the regular, but the stinking pyre that is Late Capitalism has us clutching and hoarding like there’s no tomorrow. Pruning brings an elegant austerity to things which is in abundance in natural states, but lacking within the confines of culture. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - ‘austerity’ is as sexy as it comes when it comes to both words and concepts. Austerity invokes the efficiency of a well-oiled machine, where everything has a purpose and nothing is gratuitous. Austerity can also be mystical, but in a ‘Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram’ kind of way - pragmatic, everyday, purifying, preparatory. It’s the kind of mystical that gives rise to value and structure, much like minerals and metals do for the earth, plants, us. If we take this time to prune and prepare, we will have an abundance of life-force to call upon and rise up when the season calls for it.
My favorite elemental tome likes to say that Metal provides “the structure that enables us to apply the metaphysical to the mundane". This is a spirit I like to invoke each autumn through a practice of crystallizing values I call the ‘Ritual Inventory’. It’s as simple as making a list of your daily habits, practices, protocols, and pruning what has become superfluous, rote, mechanized, lacking purpose. If you have trouble figuring out what gets the chopping block, you can use this simple equation:
As vapor condenses into droplets of water increasing its potency, make a conscious choice to become more close, compact, concise. An under-nourished nervous system can be very seduced by the 24/7 war march of the attention economy that demands our lives become a platform for personal branding. When so much of our qi is projected outwards onto screens for public consumption, we often fail to resource the deepest parts of ourselves that need to photosynthesize by the light of something greater than an iPhone screen.
The best things in life - Druidic rituals in oak groves, reading in bathtubs, conversations between you and the moon - enrich the very fibers of our fascia with a generative magic that defies broadcast. For the first few years of the oak tree’s life, when the acorn sprouts and sends its roots a-courtin', above ground growth is painfully slow. In the sapling’s very first year, only one set of leaves are produced, and the tree grows barely a few inches tall. But its growth rate below ground is another story altogether. Over time, their root mass may spread to to occupy a space four to seven times the width of the oak’s crown. The oak balances its skyward preening by sending most of its qi downwards into the depths of the earth, tapping into the generative well deep in the underworld that bubbles up like a spring. It knows it must sequester its magic underground, in the dank dirt full of ancestor bones and occult secrets blessed by mycelial might that infuse the tree with the durability that comes from being connected to source. In return, this taproot becomes the oak’s chief support, and that of countless creatures who rely on it for its stabilizing sorcery.
This is the time of year to preserve your precious resources and resist externalizing your every movement and thought. You can still maintain connection and visibility while protecting and preserving your emotional energy.
“Desires and mental activity should be kept quiet and subdued, as if keeping a happy secret” — Huangdi Neijing
Stay warm as the air condenses and cools and forces contraction in the body. Soups, scarves, hot baths, warming teas like cinnamon, ginger, licorice, cardamom, turmeric… think like a woodland crone and adopt her sexy accoutrements. My circulation is legendarily frigid, so to avoid muscle spasms and chronic pain in the dark moon of the year I keep a hot dossier of tricks at the ready:
Increase moistening foods – such as apples, pears, walnuts, persimmons, figs, pumpkin, honey, rice, sesame seed, eggs, and spinach – to prevent chapped lips, dry skin, sore throats, and constipation as the weather becomes drier. Try baked pears to warm and moisten the lungs and prevent seasonal coughs, wood ear mushroom stir fry to nourish yin and circulate blood, or a nourishing congee for the digestion. This time of year, I add ghee to my coffee, flax seed oil to my veggies, and a tablespoon of seeds into my porridges, smoothies, or salads. I handle a parched respiratory tract with the legendary Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa cough syrup, dry brush and oil my skin daily with Everyday Oil, and would NEVER EVER think of cleaning my skin with anything other than Best Skin Ever from Living Libations.
Once the hand of Autumn prunes away the superfluous in Nature’s annual striptease, the bauhaus architecture of barren trees makes way for a limitless sightline into the mountains and horizon. This is my favorite moment in the entire year, as it makes for EPIC mountain gazing, a most cherished pastime. My daily ritual is to eye-gaze with LA’s resident Sacred Mountain, Mount Lee, otherwise known as the hill they plopped the the Hollywood Sign atop. Mountain-gazing puts me on literal Mountain Standard Time - it aligns me with the unhurried breath of nature, makes me a better doctor, and allows me to be an empty vessel for nature and magic to flow through. If you don’t have a resident Sacred Mountain, you can do this with the horizon, a sunrise, a lover - resist the seductive siren call to gaze at your phone and fix onto something steadfast, unhurried, enduring.
I can never write a missive without giving credence to my skaldic ancestors. The Anglo-Saxon rune ᚪ represents the magic of the acorn, who holds within it the divine spark the gods imbue into every being, the seed potential that if nurtured correctly unfolds a cosmic blueprint for growing into a godly oak. As your Anarcha Taoist physician, it is my wish for you this holiday season that you resist the pace of culture and allow your cosmic blueprint some time to slowly unfurl. I assure you, it has some wisdom to tell you about what comes next. Do not let the chaos of culture shut down the wisdom of your body, dear patients! If you need some gentle tending, Botanarchy will be open through 12/23, with a brief closure until the new year when I retreat into my yearly hermitage.
In health and solidarity,
Carolyn
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