Rooftop Cosmonauts (A Crash Course in Divination)

The coin flipping began back in high school, when Jonny Quiktune and his legendary partner, Oscar Ramirez, would prowl the streets of the Upper West Side by night.  Jonny in his seventies motorcycle jacket, Oscar in his big chrome ‘iron specs.’  The normal course of our weekend ranging encompassed certain choice city rooftops (where the water towers on surrounding roofs looked to our starry eyes like rockets about to blast off), the Jerusalem falafel joint (where fez-clad Muhammed let us crack open a bottle of cheap bubbly in the restaurant’s gloriously grimy environs one memorable New Years, before he disappeared back to Syria) and Sal and Carmine’s Pizza (still the best slice in the world, R.I.P. Sal!), and down to the Village to Small’s jazz club, back when it was B.Y.O. booze and jazz cigarettes.  Indian Row on East 6th was a favorite haunt; we’d let the touts vie for our business for a while, gleefully bargaining down the price of the already dirt cheap dinner special and enquiring as to the contents of their Mulligatawny soup, before settling inevitably on whichever identical little christmas light-lit, mirror-ceilinged restaurant was featuring live sitar and tabla music that night.  Then we’d stop into the corner store and buy an absurd amount of beer to quench the fire.

Fact is we had it pretty good as teens in the city.  But sometimes all of Manhattan’s parks, pizza places, rooftops, jazz clubs and blind-eye-turning bars weren’t enough to occupy us.  Sometimes a certain restlessness would take hold, and all the familiar pleasures of the city would seem stale.  This, I imagine, is how the coin-flipping began.  

Picture, if you will, our two protagonists, on a windswept city corner, a gleam in their eyes and a devilish itch in their minds.  What to do on such a Saturday or Tuesday night?  Jericurl James is grounded; Doktor Milkbar is lost to the world in the mythical land of Staten Island; Andrew the Sleepy Pinwheel’s phone has been dead for days and Dead Dave seems actually to have perished this time.  We are two, and two is trouble.  We could roam the zoo of St. Mark’s Place, browse the record shops, get weird and then get some Belgian fries--or rent out a dingy rehearsal room at Funkadelic Studios for a couple hours and make some noise--but such schemes smack of the ordinary, the tried and true.  We crave excitement, adventure...are these not our alter-egos we’re wearing?  Is this strange city not our oyster?  

At such a moment, one of us reaches into a corduroyed pocket and extracts a shiny quarter.  Heads we head East.  Tails West.  (Tacit agreement as to the sacrality of the act, later we’ll spell out explicitly that such fate is not to be trifled with; coin flips are final).  A moment’s suspense, and we have our answer.  The coin has spoken.  We’re headed to Brooklyn (or the park, or the coffeeshop, or the waterfront).  The coin has spoken.    

Simple 50-50, heads-tails flips provided for countless nights of unexpected adventures, for once you start flipping coins for trivialities there’s no logical stopping point.  A particular sequence of heads and tails might land us at someone’s apartment having Turkish coffee or on an unexplored rooftop having a smoke, fourteen stories above the city’s twinkling lights.  I’m sure I ended up miserably seasick on an all night fishing boat out of Sheepshead Bay once because of the divination god’s sense of humor.

If flipping coins was something of a novelty for a while, though, it soon receded to another tool in the kit.  It wasn’t an end in itself but an expedient.  It became, for me at least, a way of acknowledging that I don’t know what’s going to happen anyway no matter what I decide or plan to do.  A way of creatively and explicitly inviting chance to play, rather than pretending control over the millions of variables present in every moment.  It became, at various times and to various degrees, a point of pride, a lifestyle choice, a handicap, and an inspiration.  

When the time came to decide which college to attend, after some consideration I finally turned to the trusty quarter.  Heads, I email University X and play their game, telling them I am committing to their program so please go ahead and let me in off the wait list.  Tails, I tell them to screw their wait list and accept the offer at Small Liberal Arts College Y.  The coin god spoke, and I went to Swarthmore.  In retrospect, it was the right choice, though I’d never have been able to suss out why in advance. Perhaps the big, stuffy Ivy League school would have somehow set me on my path as well. Maybe there are no wrong choices, only more and less interesting ones. In any case, I’ve never yet had cause to regret a coin flip.

A particuarly memorable flip occurred a year or two later, when Oscar and Dave (back from the dead) and I converged during Winter break for a New Years road trip.  Canada was our destination; this required no divination (why flip a coin for something so obvious?).  We were also assuming that we would head to Montreal, but upon consulting a map we realized that Toronto was equidistant from our Upstate New York locale.  A moment of deliberation; then a flip. Tails: to Toronto we go, by way of the Finger Lakes.  What followed was an unreasonably joyous expedition, as revealed in the photos: the three of us beaming in the spray at Niagara Falls, spontaneously playing a song at an open-mic that seemed straight out of 1994, and, on New Years Eve, sharing champagne with some extremely random Japanese tourists.  On the first day of the New Year, we flew back across the border so fast in my green Honda (no tickets in Canada! it seemed) that we got a hefty, buzz-killing ticket almost immediately after crossing back into NY State.  

In my old age I’ve cooled it a bit with the coin flipping.  This is not to say that I don’t indulge, just that I tend to go for modest tosses.  Where to go for dinner, say, or which river to head to on a hot day.  My divinatory spirit is alive and well, however; for complex or intractable issues, I’ve learned to consult the grand-daddy of coin flips: the I Ching (or Yi Jing).  The ancient Chinese oracle, and quite likely the oldest book on Earth, is akin to a sixty-four sided coin.  And though the traditional method of consulting this oracle involves yarrow stalks, it can be done with six coins.  Each of the oracle’s symbols consists of a solid line (yang) or a broken one (yin), and yang lines can be in the process of changing to yin and vice versa.  That gives four types of lines.  Call these 6, 7, 8, and 9: 6 is yin changing to yang, 7 is simple yang, 8 simple yin, and 9 yang changing to yin.  Then assign heads a value of 3, tails of 2, and flip a coin three times for each line (starting with the bottom one and working up).  Tails-tails-heads means 2 + 2 + 3 = 7, a yang line.  Three flips for each of the six lines yields up the Hexagram, which is keyed to a number of further symbols and statements in the text of the Yi Jing.  If you haven’t encountered it before, welcome to your latest obsession.  

Still, for simple binary questions--yes/no, left/right--the simple coin flip remains king.  Asking the Yi Jing whether you should turn East or West on a New York street corner is like breaking out the sextant and compass to figure out which way the sun sets, or looking up “crunk” in the Oxford English Dictionary: massive overkill, and not likely to succeed.  The Yi Jing sings in 64 tones, each a shade of grey; a coin flip is and always will be nice and black and white.  Anyway, the Yi Jing is heady stuff, powerful and often confusing; coin flipping has a way of seasoning one for the work of serious divination, if only by developing faith in the power and wisdom of chance, or fate, or whatever you prefer to call it.  

Another reason never to spend the last quarter in your pocket...

Chinese Organ Networks: Liver

And so we come around to the Liver.  The Liver is a frickin' doozy.  Enough so that I'm actually procrastinating jumping into the meat of the matter, because I hardly know where to start.  This is an organ system rife with rich associations and layers of meaning that seem to shoot out in all directions like fresh green tendrils in springtime.  Stubbornly spreading up and out, against gravity, persevering against tough odds--namely the laws of physics, which luckily seem not to apply to living things.  Or rather, life finds the loopholes and bends said laws to its own benefit and makes of Newton and Descartes a gleeful mock.
                                                                          ^An ancient Etruscan bronze liver, probably used for divination instruction and practice

As usual, the macrocosmic position of the organ reveals much of its nature.  We saw how in a sense the Gallbladder marks the beginning of the new year, as yang (light, warmth) makes its return--as yet unfelt, perhaps, but influential all the same.  To the Liver falls the task of continuing the what the Gallbladder has initiated.  The Gallbladder's job was romantic--the spark in the dark, setting things off with a little explosion; the Liver's is decidedly less so.  The Liver doesn't take that critical first step back towards the light, but rather the equally critical second step.  It plods forward, against the flow, against gravity.  It perseveres.  Its animal symbol is the ox: the creature best suited to long, hard labor.  The ox wants and needs something to push against.

Labor...pushing...if this is all sounding suspiciously feminine, it's not a coincidence.  The Liver is the organ most closely associated with womanhood, most obviously through the blood, which the Liver is said to store.  "Women are blood, men are qi," goes a Chinese medicine saying.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.  We aren't finished with the ox.  Could there be a more specific connection between oxen and women?  Here's a hint: take a look at a picture of an ox head or skull.  Georgia' O'Keeffe was on top of this one (though she chose a ram, the effect is much the same.)  The relation of head and horns is strikingly similar to that of womb and ovaries via the Fallopian tubes.  Women, in some sense, have the power of oxen: to push, to persevere, to plod forward and continue the endless work.  Masculine energy is more apt to come in bursts; men are often good initiators and warriors, hunters, whereas women keep the ball rolling.  Hormonally, women may be better suited to traditional "women's work"--not just the obvious maternal activities but such slow, methodical, careful work as weaving, spinning, seed-sorting, knitting.  It's not just a matter of culture.  Women are rich in blood, which in Chinese medicine also means certain hormones, and this hormonal reality shapes much of physical, psychological reality.

Of course it's not just women who benefit from the ability to push, to go against the flow.  This type of sustained work is at the heart of self-cultivation practices, from martial arts to meditation and everything in between (Tai Qi and Qi Gong and genuine Hatha Yoga tend to fall towards the center of this spectrum).  The Chinese sagely ideal is of wu wei, effortless action; but in order to achieve such a state of skill it is necessary to train intensively.  The archetypal Zen master who flows so artfully through life does not achieve their mastery except through rigorous training.

There's yet another feminine connection to be made.  The Liver's cosmological time is most of January and the beginning of February, a period which overlaps (even if it doesn't completely correspond) with the Western astrological sign of Aquarius.  At first glance the associations are disparate; the Liver with blood and femininity and Aquarius with water, creativity, prophetic change.  Symbols take us deeper, however.  The traditional shorthand for Aquarius is a double squiggle, like two letter M's nested on top of one another.  Now it is an interesting fact that the word for "mother" in virtually every language begins with or contains the "m" sound.  mother, mama, mom, mu, ma, aama, maman...there are probably exceptions, but I can't come up with any.  Infants seem hardwired to make the "m" sound in relation to their mothers.  The letter M even look like a couple of a pair of bent legs, spread, as in a reclining birthing position.  Aquarius is also classified as an air sign; we'll soon see how air or wind relates to the Liver.

That's two liver-blood-femininity strings of association so far.  We've momentarily come up for air; time now to dive down and pull up one more set.  The Liver stores the blood, has everything to do with this vital substance.  What is the blood, on the level of micro-macrocosmic correspondences?  It is our vital water, our veins and arteries like rivulets and streams and great rivers.  They all flow into the sea, our great reservoir of blood, the Liver.  Another way to look at it: evolutionarily we come from the ocean.  Primitive sea creatures need no closed circulatory systems, but when we crawled out of the watery depths, we needed a way to bring some of that ocean with us.  The blood, and especially the Liver's blood reservoir, is that oceanic remnant.  It's noteworthy, too, that we're not talking about fresh water here.  The ocean is salty, and so is the blood.  Nor is the saltiness of either composed of simple sodium chloride, though that is the most prominent component of ocean and blood salts by weight.  The ocean contains hundreds of trace minerals in solution, and so does our blood.  Though nutritional science hasn't uncovered a physiological need for every such mineral, more and more are being found to be essential to health.  This is why unrefined sea salt (including salt mined from ancient sea beds) are so critical to health.  Remove all those essential trace minerals, and you compromise the quality of your internal ocean.

Another conceptual leap: the Liver and blood relate directly to Wind and the nervous system.  The most basic connection is to be found in the trigram Xun, The Gentle or Wind or The Subtle.  It shows a single yin line penetrating up through two steadfast yang lines.  It is yin moving upwards, and represents the pervasiveness of subtle influence.  This is how a breeze operates: it is gentle, but if it maintains a consistent direction it can be powerful in the long run.  But Xun is also a symbol for Wood, the upward growth of springtime.  It is the yin aspect of Wood, just as the Liver is the yin Wood organ (and the Gallbladder yang Wood, as represented by the trigram Zhen, with one yang line thrusting up below two of yin).  Wind, the force of movement and communication, is related to springtime.  Spring is, after all, the time when things are shaken up, when the "winds of change" blow.  That, roughly, is how the physiological force of Wind or Air is related to the Liver.  (An interesting contrast with Ayurveda here; in that system, Wind or Vata is more associated with the large intestine, and while it is closely related to the nervous system, the concept of blood and the liver is largely separate.  At least as far as I understand it.)

So the Liver is responsible for Wind, for proper movement.  Movement of what?  Of qi, primarily.  Of subtle energy, including perhaps the electro-chemical impulses that are the language of our nervous system.  Now it may be less surprising that trace mineral deficiencies have been implicated in a number of growing disorders including ADD and ADHD.  These can be viewed in terms of Wind; hypermobility; an ungrounded and in some sense overactive nervous system.  When our blood is not well fortified with the natural ocean's mineral spectrum, our Wood and with it our Wind go out of whack.  In our terms, its a Liver problem.

We've yet to look at the Confucian 12 officials system.  In it the role of the Liver is clear cut: it is the general.  It commands, strategizes, schemes.  Physiologically, the little-L liver sorts out thousands or millions of chemical reaction pathways, sending this here and that there and generally ironing out an operating plan for the Gallbladder to execute.  The Liver is resourceful.  As a commander it wants to win; it strives to live.  See?  It's not just the Chinese language that contains plenty of forgotten symbolic resonance.  The liver is the only organ that is capable of fully regenerating itself from a small fraction.  It's that (re)generative power of Wood.

Finally, the herbal side of the story.  The herb that best represents the upward and outward exuberance of Wood is none other than the familiar cinnamon (Chinese Gui Zhi (twigs) or Rou Gui (bark)).  Cinnamon was anciently classified in the Tang Ye Jing as a "Wood within Wood" herb, meaning that it is the essence of Wood.  Although modern TCM likes to treat the liver in terms of suppressing flaring liver yang with cold herbs and smoothing out the liver qi with herbs like Bupleurum (Chai Hu), much modern Liver pathology has more to do with cold in the blood.  Here our internal ocean gets frozen over, leading to blood deficiency and stasis, with signs like cold extremities, menstrual cramps with clotty bleeding, and sexual frigidity.  Bulldozing through the ice with qi-moving herbs won't work; we have to melt the ice.  Cinnamon gets into the blood layer (Jue Yin) and does just that, especially when combined with the star blood herb Dang Gui (Chinese Angelica).

Sources: as always with the Chinese Organ Networks series, virtually all the material for this post comes from Dr. Heiner's Fruehauf's Chinese Cosmology lectures at NCNM.  Hail the chief!

Chinese Organ Networks: Gallbladder

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know exactly where the gallbladder is, or what it does.  That’s the little-G gallbladder we’re talking about, as opposed to the big-G esoteric Chinese organ system.  But bear with me on this atypical anatomical aside.  The gallbladder happens to be a dark green sac tucked under the liver, where it stores and concentrates bile.  Bile is what our bodies use to emulsify fat.  This means breaking big globules of fat into tiny little droplets.  Bile works like soap: it ‘cuts’ grease, through a bit of chemical magic making it essentially water-soluble.  Because let's face it: our bodies wouldn't work very well or look very nice if we couldn't get oil and water to mix.  Thanks to the gallbladder and its bile, it becomes possible to absorb said fats via the villi of the intestines and put them to work everywhere from our cell membranes to our brains to our sex hormones.  Yes, fat is sadly underrated.  

So much for the gallbladder; unless you’re unusually interested in medicine, you’ll probably forget the little tidbit you just learned about this organ and be none the worse for it.  And yet you may know more than you think you do about the Gallbladder, big-G.  The Chinese functional, cosmological, symbolical organ network.  Dubious?  Well, chances are you’re familiar with the saying that someone “has a lot of gall.”  Maybe you’re apt to say it yourself when the someone pisses you off, does something cheeky, bold, possibly transgressive.  (Granted, you might just as often hear that s/he has balls, or a lot of nerve, but gall is really the most accurate.) The saying indicates that, even if as a cultural we’ve forgotten, we used to think in embodied terms.  Like other traditional cultures, our ancestors recognized that emotional and physiological realities aren’t distinct and separate realms.  It is possible to eat your heart out, or, even worse, to screw your brains out.  (That's jing, essence, you're squandering!  Or so the Daoist sages tell us.)   

As the saying about “a lot of gall” indicates, the Gallbladder is for courage.  It is the commander of the battle, leading the troops by example, charging out first into the fray.  As such, it must be able to act decisively and intuitively.  Gallbladder types have no trouble deciding and acting, even if it sometimes seems they act and then decide. 

The Gallbladder holds a very special position in the macrocosmic organ clock.  In the last position we had the Triple Warmer, stationed at the most yin time of year, roughly early December.  Light--yang qi--was at its weakest then; the days were about to be as short as they get.  With the Gallbladder, we take the first step back towards the light.  This is the position of midnight, of winter solstice.  In some sense this is the yinnest time; in another, it is the most yang.  It is here in the dead of night, in the depths of winter, that we witness the rebirth of the light.  Christmas, after all, was originally a pagan festival, and it is no coincidence that it falls around the solstice and involves lots of candles and lights.  December 23rd may not seem to contain much more daylight than the 22nd, but the decisive first step has been taken.  The long climb back towards June 22nd and the summer solstice, and the Gallbladder’s clock partner the Heart, has begun.  

Of course, unless you’re truly observant and unusually sensitive, you won’t notice that the days are getting longer for some time.  You certainly won’t feel any increase in warmth, not for months yet; at bottom, this is because matter follows energy with a lag of 90 degrees (1/2 pi radians, a quarter turn of a circle).  The upward movement is already present on the day after the shortest day of the year; the shift has occurred, but it will take a while to manifest physically.  The energy of yang returning is subtle but powerful.  In the Gallbladder time, even if we don’t notice it, this decisive shift occurs.  In the hexagram corresponding to this organ position, one yang line shoves up beneath five yin lines.  The yang is back, it has been reborn, but it is small, and as yet hidden beneath the ground, like an unfurling plant that has not yet broken through the surface.  

This image of a plant shooting upwards is actually an ideal symbol for the Gallbladder; this is the first organ of the Wood phase element.  In 5 Element theory, Wood is the springtime, the force of upward and outward growth, exuberant new life, that comes after the dormancy of Water (winter).  The motion of wood is strongly upward, counter to gravity.  And, fittingly, the Gallbladder is responsible for uprightness.  A military commander stands up straight and expects the same of his troops.  There is strength in this kind of perpendicular straightness.  A flood of symbols come to mind: a flagpole, a skyscraper...perhaps an erect phallus.  The Gallbladder is an overwhelmingly masculine archetype.  Returning for a moment to anatomy and physiology of the corresponding bodily organ, it is the fat that the gallbladder helps break down that nourishes our endocrine and reproductive systems.  If we can’t digest fats, our courage and our libidos both start to break down.  

A bit of food for thought for the herbalists out there: could Spikenard, Aralia racemosa (and A. californica), be considered a Gallbladder remedy?  It is, after all, an herb that aids in the digestion and metabolism of fat, nourishing them endocrine system, and has been  said to lend courage and confidence that we can handle what comes.  Ah, beautiful Spikenard!

We’ve already alluded a couple of times to a theme that quickly emerges with the Gallbladder: taking the first step.  Initiating action.  A good image for the Gallbladder is a spark plug, a device that provides the initial impetus to get a powerful cycle moving again.  And like a combustion engine’s, this organ network’s energy can be explosive.  The Gallbladder can express a lot of anger; this is healthy, but if it comes out suddenly and violently, it is pathological.  The transition back into the light half of the year should be barely noticeable; it is happening underground, after all.  

The Gallbladder channel runs down the sides of the body.  Actually it doesn’t so much run as it does zig-zag its way down just lateral to the eyes to the little toe.  It has a back-and-forth energy to it.  Gallbladder pathologies often have something of this back-and-forth, "half-in, half-out" nature.  The Gallbladder swings open and shut, acting like a door hinge.  Pathologies that affect the Gallbladder's Shao Yang layer are neither here nor there: Malaria is the archetypal example.  Its characteristic fever is the "intermittent" fever that comes and goes every few days, coursing through predictable cycles.  Alternating chills and fever are a hallmark of Shaoyang (Gallbladder-Triple Warmer) disorders, and the herbs that treat them tend to be exceedingly bitter.  In the Chinese system, there's Chai Hu, Bupleurum; in the New World herbal tradition, we have boneset, Eupatorium perfoliatum.  Not coincidentally, bitter is the flavor that stimulates bile flow, in effect opening the hinge and letting whatever is out.  


The Gallbladder animal totem is the humble mouse, or more properly the rat.  In Chinese mythology, the rat rides on the ox (the symbol for the liver, as the next post will discuss) across the river and hops off first upon reaching the other side.  Thus the rat wins the race; the Gallbladder is always first.  Rats are courageous, often disgustingly so; and interestingly, rats are one of the few mammals not to have a gallbladder.  That's probably a good enough head-scratcher to end on...

As usual with these organ posts, all credit due to Heiner Fruehauf and his Cosmology lectures. 

Ways of Knowing Plants

I thought I knew my plants, or some of them: a fair sprinkling of native Northeastern herbs and trees, some Rocky Mountain and desert species of the Southwest, and a cross-section of the flora of the Himalayan foothills.  Cultivated crops (sounds simple, but not everyone can recognize a potato leaf or the overgrown thistle that bears artichokes) and the naturalized European species that are more familiar than half our native plants.  I can take a walk down a Vermont back road and recognize Wild Sarsaparilla and Blue Cohosh and Dolls Eyes and Bloodroot; in Nepal I kept an eye peeled for Nirgundi and Chutro and Amala.  I knew them by name in three or four languages; I knew their traditional classification and uses and some of their constituents.  I often knew something about when and how to harvest them, how to prepare them for medicine, how to combine them with other plants to bring out certain facets of their personalities.  I knew, I knew, I knew--though I knew there's always more to learn, I thought I knew quite a lot.

But what is knowing?

This is a question at the heart of most of the debates surrounding so-called alternative medicine.  What is so challenging, so alternate, in traditional-style herbalism, or Chinese medicine?  It isn’t so much the techniques we employ, but the reasons we employ them.  It’s the fact that we rely on subjective instruments, on qualities over quantities.  The feel of a pulse and the look of a tongue instead of the clean lines of an ECG or the starkness of an X-ray.  It’s our subjective ways of knowing, our trust in intuition and in the power of the human instrument, that set us apart.  

Likewise when it comes to medicinal plants.  With them, there’s knowing and knowing.  I can recognize a species, know its names, its chemical constituents, its traditional classification according to one or another materia medica, and still not really know it, no more than memorizing the stats on Cal Ripken’s rookie baseball card makes me know the man as a person or even as a player.  The facts are signposts, fingers pointing at the moon; they are springboards, points of departure.

When asked who her own favorite teachers and sources of knowledge were, one of my herbal teachers replied “the plants themselves.”  At the time (not much more than a year ago) this struck me as a bold and perhaps outlandish response.  Direct communication with plants was something limited to those gifted in shamanistic journeying and plant spirit medicine, I thought.  Sure, chatting with the soul of Burdock or Queen Anne’s Lace was nice work if you could get it, but we mere mortals had to make do with study and accumulated experience.  

I don’t mean to say I hadn’t had any direct experience of the herbs I was coming to love.  There were inklings.  The sense of nourishment and groundedness I began to notice when taking a spoonful of ashwagandha after meals; the almost palpable fire-in-the-belly feeling that ginger can provide.  With these experiences, I started to realize that part of the work of becoming an herbalist is refining the senses; I suppose I’ve come a ways in that regard, since these days a sip of coffee sends an impulse through my system that I feel before any of the caffeine could have entered my bloodstream.  

But the ashwagandha and ginger were herbs I needed; what about coming to know the scores of others I had no personal use for?  The madders and yarrows, the docks and daisies?  I wasn’t going to take these for days and weeks to get a sense of them.  And I wasn’t subtle enough in my perception to get to know them from one or two encounters.  

Or maybe I was.  The key was sitting in plain sight all along.  It was deceptively simple: simply tasting the plants, usually in tincture form, and sitting with them in meditation to observe their effects.  I was introduced to this technique of plant meditation in my first session with the School of Traditional Western Herbalism, and it was a revelation.  

We tasted yarrow that first time.  When the little brown bottle--like something out of Alice in Wonderland--came around, I didn’t recognize the herb by taste, so my experience was unbiased by preconception.  On the tongue I noted spiciness, resin, pungency; bitterness too.  As the initial taste sensations faded, I noticed feeling of upward and outward pushing.  I became more aware of my skin, my surface, and of the back of my neck.  I don’t recall every nuance of that sitting, but as we went around the circle and shared our experiences, I was blown away.  Few of us had recognized the plant (it turned out to be tinctured from a high-altitude, unusually potent specimen), and though we all had varying experiences with the plant, a vivid and coherent portrait emerged. In my mind I’d had yarrow categorized as a blood herb, helping to move or astringe the blood (stopping bleeding) as necessary, and indicated (according to my teacher Matt Wood’s instruction) by a red and blue complexion; also as a specific remedy in certain kinds of fevers.  Now I began understand why and how the plant might have such effects.  More than that, I began to see the personality of the plant, its particular energy and presence.  It was not so much a blood herb as a surface herb: the skin-deep sensations I’d been noticing reflected its ability to govern the blood flow to the surface.  A number of us felt a warmth within that then diffused to the surface; this is how yarrow helps in fevers, by bringing out a sweat.  Neurons fired; connections were made; my intellectual understanding of the plant came face to face with the direct experience of it, and each helped inform the other.  I’ll never be able to forget what yarrow does, because I have at least a first level of knowing who or what yarrow is.  

There’s more to be said about trusting our senses, not just our vision but our smell and taste and the landscape of inner sensations I was first introduced to in Vipassana meditation.  I want to ramble about the value and power of the subjective.  And I want to describe all the plant meditations I’ve done since that first one, the plants I’ve started to get to know in a way that makes me feel like I’m starting my education all over again.  I’m sure I will write more about certain herbs as time goes on (especially if I pick up on any reader interest in that area--any herbal folk reading this?).  But my experience, conveyed in words, dies as it crystallizes once more into run-of-the-mill knowledge.  Maybe all I’m really trying to say is, ‘There’s a whole living world out there. Go taste it!’  

    

A Little Eye Candy

I'm awful wordy on these pages, so as I sit here in the Portland airport all sentimental I thought I'd reward the faithful with some eye candy: various favorite shots from Nepal and North India, 2008-10.  Shout out to Thandiwe Gobledale, Alden Towler and his Aunt Ninny for photo credits.  

Goat sacrifice at a rice mill to in honor of the goddess Durga.  Millions of animals are sacrificed every year at the culmination of this Dashain festival.  Tamang village of Borjyang, Kabhre district, Nepal.  

The annual Newar tradition Mha Puja (honoring one's own body) at a home in Patan, Nepal

At a rang waali's (color vendor's) stall in Kolkata, 2009

Getting the full treatment on Holi, the festival of colors.  Pedong, Darjeeling district, Spring 2009

Sadhus lounging at Pashupatinath, Kathmandu

A prayer flag in lower Mustang on the Annapurna circuit

Sorting coriander seeds on the porch of a village house on the outskirts of the KTM valley.  When asked how old she was, this woman shrugged and said in Nepali 'who knows, my eyes don't work, can't hardly get around, it's about time to die already'

One of a million little roadside shrines in Kathmandu

Bel juice vendor in Kolkata

3-tier sleeper class, baby

Where's Waldo material.  I'd be scowling too if I were buried in vinyl handbags in 95 degree heat...Bhubaneshwar, 2010

Near the fabled Jagganath temple in Puri, Orissa

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.