Riding the waves of change
Recently, I have noticed the leaves yellowing on the low plants along the side of the road and a few swamp maples flashing scarlet amongst the green canopy. Every year it surprises me. It seems too early and I have to remind myself that summer energy concludes at the end of July (36 ½ days after the summer solstice, see diagram below) and then we are in the Earth phase of transition that is the harvest until August 17th when fall energy comes in. So, of course things are ripening; tomatoes as well as the leaves on the trees and shrubs. They have done their work of gathering energy to store over the winter either in the form of seeds for next year or sugars in the roots of perennials, and are ready to start winding down into the resting state of winter. Still, it seems to early. I’m never quite ready to let go.
In recent decades, this feeling of winding down and getting ready for winter has mostly been marked by the arrival of back-to-school sales and catalogs advertising winter clothing lines. Historically, the serious business of the harvest season, the success of which would determine winter survival, would begin in earnest now. Every able-bodied person was expected to help with gathering and storing food for their families and their livestock. It makes sense that we would feel a little anxious, like there are things we must do to get ready and prepare ourselves. Our ancestors were busy dawn to dusk with bringing in the harvest and wildcrafting so there was no question about what needed to get done. In the absence of that focus, businesses have taken advantage of that urge to fill the root cellar to sell us material goods that we don’t always need yet we somehow feel better having done something to get ready.
This year in the midst of the pandemic, I am noticing that some people are meeting that urge by dusting off their masks and worrying about what the winter will bring in terms of the limitations and dangers of life in a pandemic. It is helpful to understand that the normal vibration of autumn includes the need to pare down to the essentials and focus on the anxious question of future survival. Of something big and possibly dangerous coming that we have no control over. While we are not quite ready to let go of the lightness of summer, we feel the pull to get back to work on projects that we put aside to take advantage of the sunshine and long days. As the birds instinctively know when it is time to fly south, human beings instinctively know when it is time to prepare for winter. In modern life, what exactly we do with that pull gets muddled.
In Chinese medicine, there is a named emotion that describes each of the seasonal resonances as we experience them on the emotional level. The movement of autumn is grief, letting go. In autumn, the energy is descending and contracting as the plants pull the energy toward their roots and their fruit and foliage fall to the ground. The sun (our energy source) is getting further away every day, plants and animals have finished the expansive growth phase of spring and summer and are moving toward the deep storage (hibernation) phase of winter. This movement of down and in, is a kind of paring down, condensing and concentrating of summer energy, that is needed to put the abundance of summer in a form that can be stored for winter.
If you have ever canned garden produce, you will have had the experience of starting with a very large pile that gets sorted, pared, cooked down (condensed) and put in tidy little jars on the shelf for later use. Traditionally, it is easy to imagine that a family’s wealth could be measured by the total of what they were able to put by, each jar on the shelf representing highly valuable calories come the dead of winter.
Emotionally, grief is what we call the energetic movement of going from abundance to something very valuable to be stored. When we think of grief, we think of loss, particularly of a loved one. In that instance, we have the abundance of time we have shared with someone who has added significant value to our lives. When they pass, we are left to take the piles of fresh experience and condense them down into the most valuable memories to store in the depths of our hearts.
In the past six years or so and particularly in the past eighteen months, we have all experienced so much loss personally, nationally, and globally that the daily structure of our lives is quite different, and in some ways unrecognizable. Some aspects of our lives that were thriving, had the energy that kept them going abruptly cut off by the pandemic and they are no longer viable now. Composting is how the natural world takes plants that have lost their viability with the decreasing of the energy of the sun and condenses it down to a valuable substance that is essential to sustaining life. In my garden all the spent plants will go to big piles that will decompose and leave me with a surprisingly small pile of very valuable material by spring, out of which something new can grow next year. “Black gold,” as gardeners are fond of calling it, is valuable because it is my whole garden in concentrated form that contains energy that can be used to create a whole new abundant garden next year.
On a large scale, we are at the autumn phase of the industrial age of humanity. Many of the structures, institutions, ways of life (particularly here in the West), are breaking down because they have outlived their natural life span, are no longer viable, and so they are composting. When you add to that the energetic nature of autumn, it has an additive effect of grief on top of grief on top of grief…. It is much easier to ignore that we are in a global composting phase when nature is in the energetic phase of summer with its emotional resonance of joy. The movement of joy is rising and bubbly. Like butterflies and hummingbirds flitting about and pollinating beautiful flowers. This upward, bubbly movement, in contrast to the downward condensing energy of autumn, kind of holds us up a bit despite the composting going on around us. But now, in autumn, that feeling of grief is especially acute because we no longer have summer energy buoying us, and we are getting that uh-oh feeling of winter coming.
In the current reality, we resonate to that energy and interpret it as having something to do with the pandemic and get our masks ready. It is helpful to be mindful of and understand the seasonal vibrational effects that we are resonating with so we can more easily sort out how much of the anxious uh-oh feeling belongs to us personally, which we can endeavor to mitigate, and how much of it is the energetic of the season compounded by the energetic of the decline and decay of the industrial age in which we are living. It is a complex intersection to be sure, but we can learn to use the natural movement of the seasons to better nourish and support us.
The concept of energetic resonances in this context may not be familiar to most folks. I found this fun little video of a big guy in a swimming pool demonstrating how to make huge waves by jumping up and down in the same rhythm (in sync) with the waves bouncing off the sides of the pool. This is what I mean by energetic resonances being additive and making bigger waves of grief. Take a watch, it is a fun explanation of how the physics of waves works. It is titled, “How to Make 3’ Waves In a Swimming Pool Jumping Sync…”
He mentions in the video that noise cancellation works by creating a wave 180° out of sync with the first wave. So, that means he would start jumping in the trough of the wave to damp it down and cancel out the big waves. We can work with that same concept. How do we damp down our individual anxious wave pattern, so the multiplying effect of autumn and world events doesn’t swamp us? Of course, the wave patterns of everything else going on in the world will still be there, but we will fare better if we can learn to surf as the waves of change roll in.
How exactly do we do that? It is definitely a skill set that we have to build and adapt over time. Having more conscious understanding of the movements of nature and how they affect us will most certainly help. Allowing ourselves to embody the season in how we nourish ourselves (earth phase), to creatively keep moving forward in the midst of rapid change (wood phase), to harness our passion and fully be in the world as it is now (fire phase), to explore and strengthen our deepest values (metal phase), to tap into the depths of our unconscious and bring forward the self-knowledge and wisdom out of which something new can be born (water phase). Take another look at the seasonal diagram at the top of this blog with this in mind. You can see that these are the phases of the energetic movements of each of the seasons.
The class starting in September, Cultivating Resilience and Joy in Turbulent Times, will bring these high-level concepts into a more usable, everyday form so you can start to apply them. We will be learning about how the seasonal energetic phases move and change and how we can work with them to cultivate more resilience and joy in our lives. By meeting monthly, we can gain the perspective and skill to work with the energetic phases as they change over the course of the year to become better “surfers.” This is an experiential class as much as it is learning new concepts because we are learning to work with the energetic resonances of the seasons as they move in our bodies and minds. The class will meet on the third Sunday of each month from 4:00-6:00 p.m. for 12 months. We have meeting space on Maverick Street in Rockland at Midcoast Strong Studio. Those gathering in person must be fully vaccinated. Zoom will be available if you are not able to attend in person.
Here are some tools to use in daily life that carry the resonance of autumn and will help you embody the metal phase. The reasons for each would require a deeper explanation and are part of what we will be learning about in our class. So, for now, here is a simple framework to get you started. Let the salads of summer give way to more warm cooked foods. Include more moistening oils to counterbalance the drying nature of autumn. White foods such as pears, potato, turnip, parsnips, cabbage, and coconut as well as pungent foods like leeks, garlic, onions and ginger all benefit the metal phase. Take time to notice beauty and what inspires you in nature, art, music, connection with loved ones or in other ways. Maybe make notes somewhere that you can pull out in winter to enjoy the warm memories. These will be things you find great, true value in, like jewel-colored jars of jam on the pantry shelf. Allow grief and sadness to move through you as they arise. Remember that we are in a process of condensing, composting and breaking down all that has happened in the last year and that takes time. Resist the temptation to let the sadness tip into anger. If you find yourself getting angry about the state of things, see if you can find your way back to the sadness even though it is very uncomfortable. The “do something about it” energy of anger is spring-time energy and we are not there right now. Consider ways that you can add value and connection to the lives of those around you with thoughtful gestures. The lung and colon are the organs of metal. Get started on projects to get things sorted, discarding that which is no longer useful. Getting more organized and tidied up in preparation for the resting period that is winter will feel especially satisfying. As always, but most especially in autumn, spend time with conscious breathing. The lung is your vital connection to life.
Please feel free to share this with friend and if you have any questions feel free to contact me at amy@amyjenner.com