“Send me a picture of your feet.”
A text from my sister surprises me near the end of a long day of back-to-back patients. I’m tired, and texts like this simply elicit thoughts of spam. I text back, “?”
“Oh I’m curious about your toe spacing, since you’re often barefoot.”
It’s her. That’s her voice. I snap a photo and blitz it over. I can imagine her grunting on the other side.
“We have sturdy feet,” she shoots over a picture of her own, “Yours remind me of Ma’s.”
As we shift from the Fire Element heat and fanfare of summer into the contemplative Metal Element clarification of autumn, we rest into the in-between space of Earth Element late-summer or long-summer (chang xia 長夏), where the days feel like they lengthen as they noticeably shorten, it gets hotter before it starts cooling (here in so-Cal), and we bite into the two apples of Autumn Equinox (秋分) on 9/22, and the Moon Festival (中秋節) on 9/29.
My big sturdy feet with well-spaced toes tromp around above glaciers and glissade down mountain passes, tromping back and forth between America and Taiwan, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, and intersectional places of thinking, feeling, and being. The Lunar New Year (新年) and Moon Festival are the two biggest Chinese festivals of the year, coinciding with the first full moon of the New Year, and the full moon that falls in the middle of the lunar calendar.
I feel both childlike delight and aching loneliness during these holidays. Living in California again, as I have for almost a decade now, I am divorced from the familiar traditions of families gathering, friends celebrating, fireworks, incense, ancestral offerings, and more. I feel adrift, anchored only by memories and phone calls. Reweaving the quilt of my indigenous ancestry within the urbane oceanic fabric of my modern life here in Ventura on the edge of the Pacific with various other cultural orphans, we cocreate. I spearhead grassroots community ecstatic dance, the “Tea Talks” podcast series, a new Moon Lab, my clinic and retreats…
I am an idea-machine with finite energy but boundless vision. I know what deep connection feels like: laughing uncontrollably glissading down a snowy mountain pass paralleling my old friend, in as full control of the situation as we can be, left hand sturdy on ice ax head, right hand leveraging ice ax handle into snow, flipping onto our bellies when we start rolling too fast, self-arresting by jabbing ice ax head deep into snow, where it holds.
A mountain seems stable, but rocks are always moving, changing, shifting. Snow. Ice. Fire. Sun. Floods. Flowers. Changes loom, happen, make themselves known with scree fields, avalanches, and whole swathes of trees broken at the same level. Eyes moving across a landscape as I tromp, I stop. Close. Take a breath. Open.
Cultural traditions seem like mountains, steady and unchanging. But, lightning on the high crags. Rain. Hail. Sleet. Snow. Sky. Sun. Changes always happening. Active verb. Present tense. Usually small, sometimes an avalanche.
Walking between-with-through the intersectional landscapes of first-generation American citizenship, Chinese medicine practice, and more− I cup my hands to my mouth, sipping the fresh glacial melt of rock-water from mountains and sky: unchanging change. I am open yet deeply rooted. All that came before passes through me onwards into all that comes ahead. My only prayer: Let this be beautiful.
Glacial melt, up and over the pass. Eastern Sierra, CA
Coming up
- Equinox Ecstatic Dance at Bodhi Salt in Ventura, CA. Free for members, sliding scale $15-30 for public. Next dance Sept. 22 with community-DJ Nohemi Ramos!
- Elemental Creativity at Green Gulch Farm in nor-Cal— art, movement, and meditation with Zen Monk Fu Schroeder, Art Monk Abbess Suiko McCall, and me! Nov. 29 - Dec. 3
- Ojai Herbal Symposium! Nov. 11-12 in Ojai, CA and online. Offering 12 CEUs for acupuncturists! (Pending CAB approval)
- The Five Elements of Yoga & Chinese Medicine retreat at Esalen with Paula Wild and me, Dec. 11 - 15
Recommendations
- New Nurtured Herbalist | Tea Talks Roundtable podcast interview with Camille Freeman & Erika Galentin
- Plant Stories with Richo Cech, interviewed by Thomas Dick and me!
- I am delighted to find the podcast of fellow intersectional author & human Joanne Lee Molinaro− who wrote The Korean Vegan (yum)
- I often miss the wilderness for weeks after backpacking trips; I often have trouble reintegrating back into ordinary reality. Listening to this book-on-tape while doing the dishes and folding laundry, life feels a bit more manageable: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson
❤️ Unchanging change,
acupuncture . herbs . yoga
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