Saturn Returns! (And Brings the Pain You Crave)

I sent a link to this blog to a friend recently, and his response was this: "damn boy, don't you know the attention span of this generation is about a 30 second clip on you tube?"  I've never intended to go the route of mass appeal here--wouldn't know how to begin--but perhaps 1,800 words on the esoteric aspects of a metaphorical and/or metaphysical Chinese 'organ' was a bit much.  I plan on continuing with the organ posts, if only to satisfy my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but I'm gonna try to balance out each of those with something more personal, funny, or spontaneous.  Starting...now.  Right.  Um.  Seems I'm out of practice.  But seeing as how this blog started out as an open journal of sorts, I s'pose I'll talk about, well, me.  Or, rather, myself and most every other late twenty something I know.  Yes, here are the inklings of a topic coalescing out of the stew of thoughts--the Predicament of Generation Something.  Or is it the Predicament of Ze Modern Age (supply French accent here). 


Today I was talking with Alex--old friend and current room-mate and chief co-conspirator--and we realized that our culture tells us that we should have the best of everything.  Not just cars and gadgets but less tangible and mass-producible things (like relationships) ought to be new and shiny, the latest model.  With my gourmet tendencies, I'm pretty well embroiled in this paradigm: I am impelled to sample everything, it seems, and pick out the rarest, the tastiest, the most refined.  Our (the 'we' being privileged white folks, mostly) precious liberal arts colleges present smorgasbords: a little econ, a little bio, a bit of ethnomusicology.  Sample it all!  I don't entirely miss the point of a Well-Rounded Education, but it's a problem when it's so round as to be hollow.  When there's nothing at the heart of it to make it all cohere and mean something, dammit.  So that it's not considered abnormal to reach the age of twenty-two with little idea of one's place in the world, one's role.  I mean, I know 15 year olds in Nepal who are much more mature in many ways than a lot of the 25 year olds I've met, myself included.  And these kids may not have so much as a tenth grade education.  Education is an incredible privilege, I realize, and it's given me the time and space to stumble upon what I see as my own path.  I can't complain too much.  But it seems very much that my stumbling onto whatever it is I stumbled onto here happened between the cracks of my education.  I mean, looking back on my college years, with the notable exception of a few specific classes and the pivotal semester in Darjeeling, it was the walks in the woods and the homebrewing and the hours spent cooking in my off-campus apartment that had more to do with setting my feet on the path than the actual studies did.      


Good golly, this is getting out of hand already.  Higher education is not really my intended target.  Contain yourself, Jonny.  Be reasonable.  Be nice.  At least be concise.  I was getting around, somehow, to this predicament of ours, and I hadn't gotten so far as deigning to say just what the predicament might be.  It's an elaborate confection, composed of some combination of aimlessness, jadedness, laziness and malaise.  It comes in a million different permutations and varying degrees, but it's a pretty common factor amongst the youf dese days.  You know.  The youf.  From where I sit, it has a lot to do with the lack of an orienting perspective on the world.  We have too much data coming in and not enough of a framework to make sense of it.  We have too much in general.  Too much knowledge, too many choices.   Confronted with a million different models of how to live life, we're caught like in the "paradox of choice" as if we were standing in aisle twelve, staring down a wall of breakfast cereal choices (Props to psychologist Barry Schwartz, who has researched and named this phenomenon).  Tugged in one direction of another by inclination, accident, passion and necessity, we're each in a different boat, we young whippersnappers.  We all have inklings of how we might want to live when we grow up, probably even convictions about some things.  But we're often duped into thinking we can have it all, and end up with none of it.  The grass is greener on the other side, so we run panting from one yard to another like the Pericardium puppy (remember him?).  And when we sense that this is a lie, that green is good enough, greener a trap, and greenest an illusion, we find we haven't been given and haven't developed the tools we need to start doing the Work, whatever that may be.  In my experience, that's where a lot of 27 year olds are at.  Starting to realize that we can't have it all, so we'd better have a little bit of something rather than a tiny taste of everything, since ultimately that amounts to a big fat nothing.  To dip into English's rich cache of cliches, this is the time when we recognize we have to fish or cut bait, shit or get off the pot, go aboard who's going aboard.  All this requires some difficult to come by traits, though, such as commitment and faith.   Sound old-fashioned, don't they?  I am not aware of any new and improved substitute for them, however.  


Those who resonate with astrology's particular symbolic language like to talk about the years from roughly 27-30 as the "Saturn return."  It's when Saturn, the slowest moving of the planets, returns to his natal position and closes off a major life cycle.  Masses of anecdotal evidence suggest that ask someone in their thirties about what it was like to be 29 and you'll usually get a big exhalation or a shake of the head and a "well, let me tell you..." Now in general Saturn is not the most well-loved of the planets, being associated with the drying up of all that is juicy.  He's harsh, it is true, and seems to like to punish.   But Saturn is badly misunderstood.  He's the responsible older brother, or OK, the responsible but weird, reclusive foreign uncle, but either way he just wants what's best for you.  Really.  He wants you to stop messing around and do the hard work to fulfill your potential, and he'll pull out all the stops to jumpstart this process--usually at around age 27, if one hasn't gotten with the Saturnian program already.  In Southasia, where astrology is generally much better studied and better integrated into the culture than here, Saturn (known as Shani, the slow mover) is greatly and widely feared and respected.  He is understood as the force that ripens one's stock of old karma, generally difficult old karma, thus bringing the challenges and hardships out of which strength and direction--and maybe even faith and commitment--are born.  He's recognized as great, the greatest of the planetary archetypes.  There's an excellent little book translated and annotated by Ayurvedic luminary Robert Svoboda called The Greatness of Saturn which pretty much sums it up.  


My experience of Saturn has been fairly considerable ever since the age of 20 or so and is only intensifying as the Saturn return looms.  Saturn has brought a drying up and a focusing in for which I am deeply thankful, though it hasn't always been fun.  I have him to thank for whatever direction, focus, and commitment I've managed to consolidate thus far; and while it's only a start, at least it's a start.  What I have learned about Saturn in the process can be summed up as follows: do the work, or get worked.  Saturn wants nothing more than for you to get busy with your life's work, and the further you are from there, the more it's going to take to put you on track.  But you can avoid some of the more devastating manifestations of Saturn energy by exercising focus and discipline in your day-to-day.  It starts with letting go of the greener grass and getting real familiar with the hue of your local flora.  It continues with putting most if not all your eggs in the one basket (the one you've been weaving in Underwater Basket Weaving 201).  Making the sacrifice of everything else you could be doing in that time and cultivating something in you every day, whether it's perfecting your basket-weaving or playing the baritone kazoo.  Where it goes from there I don't know.  Hopefully in the eventual direction of mastery, satisfaction, and success.  A leap of faith here.  Well, let's all keep each other posted as we bump along the road.  

Chinese Organ Networks: Triple Warmer

While living in Kathmandu, I would get a cold almost every month.  Normally I get a sniffle once or twice a year and figured it was the ever-present smog of Nepal’s fast expanding capital that made the difference.  Of course, the heavy, hazy air didn’t exactly encourage me to get outside much for exercise, so I had that working against me as well.  Eventually I noticed a third factor that seemed to be the decisive one.  I lived near a popular ex-pat restaurant that served some of the city’s more palatable pizza.  When I got tired of the ubiquitous daal-bhaat (rice and soupy lentils with just enough vegetables and chutneys to lend each hand-scooped mouthful some flavor) I would sometimes treat myself at the pizza place (the Roadhouse Cafe in Bhatbhateni).  What struck me after a few months was that my head colds would come on reliably the day after the pizza.  This shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise, given that I was in Nepal to study Ayurvedic medicine, and it is elementary in Ayurveda that cheese is a phlegm-forming, kapha sort of food that will tend to cause colds, cough, and congestion.  This knowledge may have slowed me down, but it didn’t stop me; I ate at the roadhouse quite a few times over the course of my tenure in Nepal, and while I didn’t get sick every time, it happened at least once or twice more.  (I did at least get smarter about it make sure to antidote the yak cheese with plenty of black pepper and other pungent digestives).  

What this little anecdote points to, besides the minor perils of ex-pat living, is the role of the lymph in immunity.  The lymph ducts form a sort of subterranean waterway that parallels the more familiar blood vessels, shadowing them through the streets and avenues of our bodies like a network of sewer tunnels.  Their job is to transport fats and oils (which are absorbed through a different mechanism from protein and carbs) as well as the white blood cells that constitute the various branches of our immune army.  Unlike blood vessels, they don’t have a heart to pump their contents along, but rely on the movement of our bodies to keep them from stagnating.  My little Kathmandu vignette is a perfect example of how to gum up the lymph: not much exercise, immune burden from environmental toxins, and then the kicker, a sudden load of fat.  When my lymph vessels filled with sticky cheese metabolites, the already under-siege immune cells got stuck in the muck.  The resulting colds can be seen not just as viral issue due in part to low immunity but also as the body’s way of clearing out the excess kapha--the dense, damp, phlegmatic humor--by melting it.  The fact that I felt like the dead for a couple days was a small price for my system to pay for clearing out the traffic jam in the immune highway system.  

And now for the ever-so-smooth transition to Chinese Medicine...

Like sewers, the lymphatic ducts work best when they’re empty.  The Daoist tradition is well aware of the value of this kind of emptiness: what else makes a cup useful, or a room?  This kind of strategic emptiness allows for another quality that is closely associated with the Dao: flow.  If we stay unimpeded, keeping our vessels empty, we make room for flow to happen.  Here philosophy and its sister, medicine, are imitating nature; those in pursuit of flow or Dao (“the way”) have long looked to water as a model.  Water is that whose movement is effortless--always flowing by the path of least resistance--and completely efficient; moving water is focused, relentless, and ultimately able to overpower harder substances such as rock.  Water embodies wu wei, the Daoist ideal of non-action.  According to this teaching, the highest form of action comes from a still place of masterful non-effort.  Wu wei is exhibited by the martial artist who turns an opponent’s attack against him and sends him flying with a barely perceptible motion, or an athlete “in the zone” whose every movement becomes fluid, instinctual, and highly effective.  Being “in the zone” means being in the flow of things, in other words, being like water.  

All this watery talk so far, and still no mention of any Chinese organ!  I have, I admit, been putting off introducing the unlikely-sounding Triple Warmer (or Triple Heater, or Three Burners), it being an “organ” that requires some explanation.  Unlike the Spleen, the Bladder, or even the Pericardium, the Triple Warmer has no clear anatomical correlate.  Its name refers to the three” “burning spaces” in the body, the zones of metabolic fire that causes our bodily water to circulate.  This probably isn’t a bad way to sum up the Triple Warmer’s function: the fire in the water.  Some more on the water half of this equation, before we delve into the more firey side.  

Another remarkable quality of water is that it connects things.  We even define geographic areas in terms of their watersheds, a watershed being that area which is drained by a given river system.  In theory, every drop of water that falls in a particular watershed ends up in the associated river.  Seen more organically, the river with its branching tributaries reaches out to every bit of land around it, so that no patch of ground is far from a stream or rivulet.  In the body, we see the arteries branching smaller and smaller in capillaries, until every cell is within spitting distance of life-giving blood supply (lymph works in a similar way).  Water is that which connects things, binds them together; there’s no separating my water from your water, which is why the tribe downstream from the river-crappers goes to war every time.  If the Triple Warmer has everything to do with flow in the system and with connection, we have good reason to look to beyond the lymph to the nervous system and, even more etherically, the endocrine system.  These de-centralized networks govern the communication and the flow of information, through electrochemical impulses and hormones, respectively; they affect everything that impacts our other systems and affects them back in turn.  

Before I lose you or get lost myself in a thicket of anatomical jargon, let me return to the thread.  By way--naturally--of a digression.  Our last organ system was the Pericardium, which corresponded to the autumnal equinox, when the darkness overpowers the light.  With this shift we are now in the dark half of the yearly cycle, the realm of yin.  And although the Triple Warmer’s month (the 10th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, if you’re counting) is not yet at the darkest time of year, it can be said to be the most yin month of all.  It is the time when nature dies back, life returns into the earth to rest.  It is the stillest hour of night, before even the faintest stirrings of dawn.  The next month will be even darker, deeper into the winter and the night, and yet it is that darkest month that contains the seed of light.  On December 22nd, the light is already returning, and on Christmas we unknowing pagans still celebrate this return with candles and feasting.  But here in Triple Warmer time we aren’t yet there.  Accordingly, the Yi Jing (I Ching) ‘tidal’ hexagram for this month consists of all yin lines.  This fits in very well with all our talk of wateriness.  Yin yields, is dark and cool, like water.  Finally, now, we’re ready to bring fire into the fold.  For just as extreme yin contains the seed of yang at winter solstice, we can see stillness as the greatest strength.  It’s wu wei again.  In vigorous movement, energy is active, at the surface.  Usually, too, it’s in the process of being spent: we speak of burning calories, and burning is exactly what we’re doing.  (The other side of this is that we’re burning something, and that ‘something’ may not be as replaceable as we tend to assume).  In stillness, on the other hand, that same energy is latent.  In this view, darkness is simply hiding light, or the potential for light.  A store of concentrated fuel.  If this sounds awfully familiar, it may be because this was the focus of the Kidney article a couple of months ago: the Kidney as battery.  The Triple Warmer overlaps with the Kidney here as an organ responsible for husbanding bodily reserve fuel and parceling it out as appropriate.  

Late to make her entrance, our representative animal this time is the pig.  The humble pig, so intelligent and clean--or is it dumb and dirty?  So...naked.  So oddly human-like; our bodies will often accept pig parts in transplants.  And, above all, so good at doing so little.  The pig is a symbol of wu wei: doing so little, and doing it so well.  Out of this porcine lassitude comes tremendous abundance: litter after litter of chubby little squealers, while the mama sow herself grows hugely fat.  This is perhaps the greatest talent of pig-kind: they make fat from almost anything.  In a world where fat was not so abundant as it is now (at least to the privileged classes, including more and more Chinese, with their prodigious appetite for pork), this ability must have seemed to verge on the miraculous.  It helps explain the pig’s status in China as a symbol of prosperity and plenty.  In this light, the following tidbit from the 16th Century herbal compilation Ben Cao Gang Mu may make more sense: “for skinniness disease...the fat of the pig’s kidneys.”  The fat of the kidneys is nothing other than leaf lard, which until the ill-omened dawn of the Crisco era was the preferred fat for making pastry here in America.  This fat from around the pig’s kidneys surely contains the adrenal gland itself; when we have leaf-lard pie crust, we are feasting on an aspect of the wu wei organ of the wu wei animal.  Provided that the pigs in question are allowed to do nothing in their inimitable way, outdoors, wallowing and rooting and doing that nothing that pigs love to do.  Factory pig fat doesn't have the magic.  So slow down, get in the flow--and get to baking with yon leaf lard.  Your Triple Warmer will thank you.