On Tuesday night, 24 hours before my neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills caught fire, I stepped onto my hillside to secure a fallen branch and was beseeched by the unspeakable violence of the winds. I used to say that I loved extreme weather events in LA. They awakened long-dormant mythic powers, breaking us out of our styrofoam packaging to remind us that weather patterns were the Old Gods & Goddesses who demand we contend with ancient forces in a way that our evergreen dreamscape typically circumvents. The Santa Ana winds hold a particularly hallowed perch in our collective imagination, numinous noir darlings of local heroes like Didion, Chandler, Cain, and Koontz that prompt thousands of us to write essays and songs marveling at their legendary pathos. The Santa Ana winds of January 7th were neither a literary device nor a mystical benediction. They were a pathogenic symptom of a mounting discord about to overtake the entire city like a contagion. The winds of January 7th were tearing out trees by the root and flinging them across the hillside into my windows. My house was shaking like it was overtaken by a perpetual earthquake. There was a sense of being at the bottom of a mounting wave that was part of an untameable, unnameable force. And while unnameable forces peddle in uncertainty, I do know a few things about breath and wave patterns, and what I know about rising waves is that they accrue enormous energy from trough to crest before they come crashing down. And I needed to extricate myself from the arc of this wave immediately.
I later learned that the winds blowing north from the valley onto my exposed home on top of the Cahuenga Pass were an unprecedented 80-100 mph, with some gusts exceeding 100 mph. Some would say I had an intuitive sense to leave my home before the Sunset Fire broke out, but in thinking obsessively about the events of the last few weeks I am certain that there was nothing intuitive about it. The vast majority of my job as a Physician of Chinese Medicine is observing the pattern language of nature. This is not abstract, nor should it be esoteric or unnecessarily complicated. Chinese Medicine is a science of pattern recognition, based upon thousands of years of observing the movement and transformation of natural phenomena as they occur in the body and the world around us. In learning the pattern language of nature, we can assess what is out of balance, what stage of transformation we are undergoing, and respond swiftly and accordingly with a plan. Nature is simultaneously astonishing and predictable, and when I felt the ripples of an ecosystem tipping severely out of balance on the night of January 7th, respond swiftly and accordingly is exactly what I did.
When I enrolled in a postgraduate training program last year in Neijing Nature-Based Medicine with Dr. Ed Neal, my hope was that I would become a better doctor through becoming fluent in the pattern language of nature. I thought I would be using this skill to diagnose and treat disease patterns in my patients. I had no idea it would become a lifesaving skill for navigating my safety while living on the wildland-urban interface of LA during the death-rattle of the Anthropocene. The Huángdì Nèijīng (The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic) is a collection of writings by anonymous authors compiled by unknown editors, most likely during China's Warring States period and Han Dynasty (475 BCE–220 CE). The Neijing is the oldest medical text still in use today, and is the fundamental source text of Chinese Medicine that presents a system of health cultivation based on Taoist principles, emphasizing prevention of disease through living in harmony with nature, which requires us to seek balance through attuning to natural rhythms such as seasons, cycles, circadian daily (solar), and lunar (monthly) rhythms. Beyond just a medical text, the Neijing is also an ecological treatise that gives a comprehensive description of the principles of the cosmos and nature such that we can thrive in a world whose only certainty is change. There aren’t just doctors of Chinese medicine in this program, there are ecologists, geographers, archivists, artists, western medical physicians, landscape designers, tenders of watersheds, and healthcare workers from diverse paradigms. All have gathered to see the world in new eyes through performing an archeological dissection of a two thousand year old text.
Having been in this field for nearly 20 years (I started working for an acupuncturist at age 25), I arrived at this course already keenly aware of medicine as an ecological practice. However, my previous training in pattern recognition and ecological coherence came primarily through grouping clusters of phenomena together - i.e. headaches, absent menstruation, dry skin, depression - into diagnoses of imbalances such as wind, cold, dryness, dampness, and heat in various tissues, organs, and viscera within the body. But what’s different about Neijing Medicine is that you don’t just take into account what weather patterns create - i.e. tumors, rashes, moodiness, and pain - you look for the invisible forces that created the patterns, what precisely tipped the scales of the body out of homeostasis such that disease could manifest. One of my favorite quotes from my teacher Dr. Neal that sums this up so eloquently is: “At its core, Chinese medicine is a medical practice based on the unseen patterns of motion and transformation that govern nature, the body and the universe. In contrast, western medicine studies the things created by these unseen patterns and not the patterns themselves. We study the ocean, waves and the patterns that create and move them, while western medicine studies the waves alone.”
This is why those of us that practice acupuncture are exquisitely deft at treating all of the things that western medicine shrugs its shoulders at. “All human illnesses that have ever been or ever will be, arise as impairments of biological coherence” says Dr. Neal, and “all successful medical interventions that have ever been or ever will be, correct these impairments of biological coherence to some degree—this is the sole power of their effectiveness.” In essence, the science of Neijing Nature-Based Medicine can help us treat the highly nuanced and complicated diseases that befall modern humans through restoring biological coherence. But its skills transcend the treatment room and spill into all aspects of being. Practicing this medicine requires a sensitivity and deftness to percolations in natural phenomena that I’ve been slowly cultivating. It has actually made me a better listener, to both the wind and to my patients. When I was hiking the Dawn Mine in Altadena with my best friend the weekend before the fires, I no longer saw just a smattering of oak, sycamore, and chaparral. I saw the imprint of wind on trees and rock that told a full story of how it moved through a riparian canyon. The Neijing has made me more sensitive, more erotically entangled with all of nature.
We are in a field of aliveness, what poet and Chinese translator David Hinton calls “the existence tissue” — the cosmos seen as a single generative tissue that Taoism calls Tao. The Neijing states that “The people of ancient times understood the way of the tao. They based their methods on the patterns of yin and yang.” Tao is the way that breath moves in nature, yin and yang are the breath patterns that sustain life. Yang transforms, expands, and extends outwards. Yin stabilizes, returns, descends, and regenerates. Each breath in the cosmos reaches a terminal expansion of motion prior to reverting back to its source. In nature, this is called the ‘crown’ of the breath. Yin and yang are just the expanding and contracting breath patterns of nature. Dr Neal calls nature’s design “breath in form.” Recognizing these stages of transformation is the basis of learning the pattern language of nature. When you start to breathe with nature, you can feel the expanding and contracting manifest in all things. And you begin to understand the sacredness of all cycles and how this elusive thing we call health is our ability to resonate and respond to these dynamic movements.
As the fires enclosed further upon the city on day four of my evacuation in Frogtown, I listened to an old lecture from my teacher that felt so oddly prescient that I had to write it down:
The earth is a self-correcting microsystem. There is both pattern and chaos within the web. One of nature’s musical notes is dissonance and it opposes balance. Dissonance breaks structures down and is a sacred aspect of nature’s breathing.
Fire is another breath pattern that supports the self-correcting microsystem of the earth, a pattern that allows things to return and be remade. But fire has not been allowed to live out its natural impulse in a regenerative capacity, on account of the way we erroneously manage fire in our local ecology. This means that when nature begins to play the musical notes of dissonance, we must all pay attention. We must hone our senses to know what fire demands of us.
My brother, who has never read the Neijing nor cared much for cosmological processes, contends with this on a daily basis. My brother is a recently retired fireman, avid outdoorsman, and former swiftwater rescue technician whose training has taught him to risk assess deftly based on natural patterns. Firefighting, like Neijing Medicine, teaches you to live in right relationship with the elements, to be cunning and responsive when navigating natural phenomena as they swiftly transform in the world around us. When the Palisades Fire encroached on Mulholland and looked like it would spill over the valley onto where he lives, he maintained a confident, calculating tone and diverted his skills to where they were needed most - educating his family, friends, and community on the nature of fire. He created twice-daily videos, holding up a tiny pink flag at the beginning of each segment to show us which way the wind was blowing, and how that might effect the fire’s behavior. He dispelled myths circulating in the media about the response of the fire department, taught us about topography, geology, and containment, showed us how fire moves more quickly uphill than downhill, and what to expect each night as we went to bed. His understanding of relationships and risk within the natural world enabled him to be a touchstone for people in crisis, and it was because of him that we could sleep soundly at night, whether it was in our own beds or in the sanctuaries of the people who took us in.
My brother and I are both a product of Los Angeles’ peculiar ecology, which is a sometimes slanderous, often numinous expression of entanglement between the urban and the wild. Though I revere and exult the ancient Chinese recluse poets and occasionally disappear into the wilderness to forage for mushrooms and catch fish, my work in this lifetime is writing poetry about our resident sacred mountain, Mt Lee, and teaching my patients to awaken to nature through the sensual vessels of their bodies. I love that my red-tailed hawks encircle the Hollywood Sign, and that my arboreal hero is a lone pine that was the only tree left standing on top of Burbank Peak after the Griffith Park Fire of 2007 (it’s the Wisdom Tree, for those of you wondering). I’m a fourth generation Angelino on my mother’s side. My dad came here in 1961, and has never stepped foot on an airplane since. He came from a Ukrainian settlement in Johnstown, PA in 1963 to work on an aerospace assembly line after both of his Ukrainian refugee parents died when he was barely 24. It’s always seemed like an impossible triumph to be a woman living happily alone on this magical hillside I call home. Despite all its implicit risks, it still took a series of small miracles to deliver me here in the first place: free from famine, free from political persecution, in a generation of embarrassing splendor.
I watched a particularly noxious sentiment emerge on social media as everyone chimed in on the cataclysm happening to our city. Haters from afar rejoiced in our suffering, pointed fingers at us as if to say it’s our fault that our houses burn and our hills slide. That’s what we get for having the hubris to exist here instead of Any Other Town, USA. It’s true that Los Angeles experiences more wildfires than any other American city, and we’ve grossly mismanaged our land and natural resources in ways that court catastrophe. However, it’s also true that mobility for the low, middle, and even upper middle classes in Los Angeles is an illusion. Many of us remain fixed in the places we live like chaparral fastened to a hillside for reasons outside of our control. Most of us don’t own mansions built dubiously on the Malibu slopes. We live in rental properties, trailer homes, apartments, bungalows. Are we supposed to abandon our lives and communities? Where would we even go? Climate change spares no soul in the Anthropecene. And so we go back home.
There was a moment the Sunday after the fires began when the breath pattern of the cataclysm started to recede. It’s difficult to explain with words, but it’s the very same thing I have been trained to feel in the rhythmic waveform of a patient’s pulse that tells me when they are on the tail end of an illness. Half of my friends thought I was crazy to move back into my old mid-century cabin at the top of a long, precarious driveway that firetrucks cannot climb, perched on the edge of an open space preserve with no protection from the elements while wildfires continued to blaze. But I could recognize a shift in the web of life around me, a change in the wind and wave patterns and therefore a shift in my very own body. Safety is an illusion, and no one alive in the Anthropocene is safe from sudden disaster. Safety is not something that is given to you by Gavin Newsom, the LAPD, wealth, guns, institutionalized protections. Safety is something you can only give yourself, by staying deeply embedded in the procreative web of life. I think of the Neijing, which tells us that “All things in nature have their rise and fall. The wise observe these cycles and do not act recklessly against them.” If we are going to live in a time of perpetual climate crisis, we are going to need to expand our field of intelligence to understand when things fall out of coherence - and when they fall back in.
British wilderness explorer Tristan Gooley in his book The Nature Instinct: Relearning Our Lost Intuition for the Inner Workings of the Natural World, explores how natural phenomena can be used to create a map of our surroundings and reveal our place in it. “Each organism is telling us something about our environment, however seemingly trivial — a slithering snake reflects the rising temperature on a late spring day,” he writes. Much like the Neijing, his book elucidates how humans have a built-in capacity for perceiving and even anticipating natural phenomena. Los Angeles County is about 71.2% Wildland-Urban Interface, areas where the built environment intermingles with the natural environment and the possibility for natural disaster is significantly higher. Because our very existence here hinges upon peaceful coexistence in the qi matrix of the interface, we have to learn how to perceive and anticipate natural phenomena to keep ourselves alive. The work does not stop and start with understanding soil remediation, ecologically-sound building practices, native plant cultivation, controlled burns. We need to relearn to breathe in tandem with nature (who is, in turn, breathing us). You don’t have to be a naturalist or a Physician of Chinese Medicine to expand your field of intelligence and learn the pattern language of nature. Pick a hobby that teaches you to become intimately embroiled with the seasons, cycles, and movements of the land around you, like bird watching, mushroom foraging, hiking, native plant gardening, or beekeeping. Observe nature - and yourself - daily, in silence. In a time when most of our maps have been ripped up, these instinctual cultivation practices teach us the skills needed to risk assess by lifting our gaze away from the artificial light of our phones. It’s become increasingly more important for us to fix our eyes upon the horizon that houses the present moment, instead of casting our gaze downwards into the past and the haunting specter of the future.
The fires brought me back to a decade ago when I warned my old landlord that a seemingly steadfast carob tree was going to come crashing down after I noticed a reishi mushroom sprouting from its trunk. A classic elf shelf in both appearance and temperament, reishi grows horizontally out of its host log into a varnished red mantle, a tiny glowing altar at the base of the tree. I wasn’t using tarot cards or practicing bird augury to predict the future. As an ardent mycophile who’s studied mushrooms extensively in both a clinic and on the trails, I knew that the sudden appearance of reishi could only mean one thing - despite its green boughs and prodigious roots, that tree was dead. I saw beyond the radiant gleam of the reishi conk into the pattern that created it, and foresaw that death was coming with a bang and a thud. Pedestrians were nearly taken out, a few cars were destroyed, and in a typically Angelino twist of fate he had to pay out a neighbor that tried to sue for destroying his car (the reishi tried to warn us). The lesson? Pay attention. Become more aware, accrue your knowledge in stillness and quietude - but be prepared to speak up. I keep obsessing over a quote from Donna Haraway I recently reread in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene:
“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”
There’s a concept in Chinese Medicine called grasping the wind, which is a process of engaging with the forces of change in a way that is both assertive AND yielding, reminding us that the medicine of duality contains both stillness and action. Nature is a switch who doms and subs with the best of ‘em. Winds are also vectors of sacred chaos and change, and if our instinctual cultivation practices have kept us nimble and nourished, we can harness their diaphanous oscillations with the grace of a limber tree. Through bending and swaying to the cadence of invisible forces, the tree allows Tao to move through it. If we aren’t engaging well with change within and throughout, all that sagacious stirring might leave us feeling shook. Winds remind us to be limber, pliant… to have a plan and grow towards it, but be open to being blown somewhere else entirely. This is why we breathe with nature, why we eye-gaze with mountains and tend to our backyard gardens. This is how we get through.
Donna Haraway’s voice comes to me again as I sit crying in front of my open window, looking out at the enduring San Gabriels. “Life is a window of vulnerability,” and in our vulnerability we become more porous to the web of life that we are infinitely ensconced in. I love this city, and am learning to navigate the unprecedented surreality of viewing fire outside of my window nearly every day since I moved back home. The first day I started writing this, arsonists set fire to Griffith Park, and when I saw the smoke and the fire helicopters outside my window I started shaking and fled again. The second night I slept in my bed, I called 911 on the full moon rising over the Hollywood sign. Its brightness was flagrant, and when I realized my error it was too late to pretend I just hit the wrong number trying to call Little Caesars for some cheesy bread and a pizza. These are all minor challenges that stem from the blessing of surviving this cataclysm with a home intact. I have been running a free clinic for all of my patients who lost their homes in the fires, and my typically robust boundaries have been completely dissolved by the heat of fire and the magic eraser of grief. Each day we weep together and hold each other in sorrow and gratitude. I am in treatment for PTSD, which is something I have not had to do for over a decade. This morning, the Hughes Fire started in Castaic, and the photo above is the view from my backyard as I type away on this missive.
This week, Los Angeles also lost David Lynch, its Patron Saint of the Liminal Hinterlands whose beloved body of work explores the trauma and magic of living in this numinous boundaryland, the precarious enchantment of the wildland-urban interface. “God is change,” says Octavia Butler, and I can only hope in this moment of dissolution and disintegration that God liberates us into a larger identity, one that is woven integrally into our landscape such that we come to treat it with reverence and respect. Between the loss of Lynch, the specter of ICE raids, and the barrage of fires, there have been moments when it’s felt like everything sacred in our city was poised for ruin, that Los Angeles as sanctuary was destroyed in the blink of an eye. The San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains are the sacred Taoist mountains of my own mythopoetic universe, and as I watched flames encroach upon Echo Canyon, Mount Wilson, Monte Nido, Millard Canyon, Will Rogers State Park, Topanga, Temescal, Mandeville, Castaic, Eaton Canyon, Griffith Park, Malibu Canyon, and eventually my own backyard, my army of muses became a compost pile. But then I remembered that Taoist mountains are the seat of generative magic, manifestations of the ever-changing yet eternal flow of existence. I will be mourning the losses of the Palisades and Altadena as long as I am bound in terrestrial form. Sometimes I think there is so little magic left in the world, and other times I think is there a set amount of magic that is recreating itself over and over and over again. Tonight I am hoping for the latter, as I bow to God - who is change - who is the universe in motion and transformation, and I pray that the wisdom of the ancients keeps me in right alignment with its undulations.
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