Archive for August 19, 2009

August 19th, 2009

Yellow Lights and Long Summer Shadows

Earlier this week in my Spicy Summer Sundays blog tour post, I talked abut transition. As well I invited readers to talk about it, which they did so beautifully and thoughtfully that it has inspired me to continue to ponder the topic. (It appears I wasn’t the only one — check out the beautiful flash story Craig J. Sorensen created.) Yesterday as I was driving home, I noticed the “long shadows” that Rick had mentioned earlier as uniquely characteristic of evening in late summer. I wasn’t looking for them, but as I looked out the windshield at a large flowering bush, I suddenly did notice a particular kind of light. I realized the lighting appearance was that of the long shadows he had just been talking about — a sign of late summer.

As I mentioned in my poppy seed post, according to Traditional Five-Element Acupuncture we are in the season of Late Summer* — the season of transition. After writing the post and reading the extraordinary discussion that followed, I have been noticing transition more, and sometimes I have been deliberately pondering it as well.

As I noticed these long summer shadows, I simultaneously seemed to feel a quite vague, mysterious, and fleeting yearning. It occurred to me that transition may seem so fascinating to me because historically there has been an orientation in me distinctly disposed to focusing on extremes — a “one or the other,” “all or nothing,” black and white mentality. I remember when I was a kid, long before I learned to drive, I didn’t understand the purpose of the yellow traffic light. Seriously. It seemed to me you either go or stop — what is the in between of the yellow for? After I learned to drive, of course, the purpose of the yellow light made sense, but it seems funny to me that even now I can remember feeling genuinely confused by its existence.

Transition. The yellow light signals transition (interestingly, the color that corresponds to the Late Summer season in Five-Element Acupuncture is yellow). And in a way, transition flies in the face of that focus on extremes that has historically operated in me. Scarlett Greyson mentioned in a comment after the poppy seed post on Sunday the transition of fresh water to/from ocean water — an example I found exquisite, as well as one I don’t ever remember occurring to me. To the historical “extremes” perspective in me, there is fresh water and there is salt water. There are places of each. Somewhere in a cold mountain spring, the water is as fresh as can be. In the ocean, that freshness is nowhere to be seen in the utter saltiness of seawater.

Yet somewhere, there is a transition between. Somewhere, there is a meeting in which the extremes are not yet defined.

I felt actually startled when this relation between transition and non-extremes occurred to me, as I don’t know if it had ever quite occurred to me that way. Unsolicited, different areas of transition began to occur to me, along with how the historical orientation in me toward extremes may have influenced my perspective or experience.

First came writing. For almost as long as I can remember, I have loved the act of writing. Sometimes I have experienced it as evoking a near-euphoric feeling in me. In Jeremy Edwards’s Spicy Summer Sunday post, he asked what readers’ favorite phase of the writing process was. An answer I gave, very sincerely, is that one of my favorite parts of writing a story is when I finish it. I mentioned a possible reason for that as well, and a number of reasons for such have occurred to me before, but this drive yesterday was the first time viewing it in relation to transition had occurred to me.

I have noticed — numerous times — a part of my psyche that has seemed to operate with “the story has not been written yet” and “the story is done” being basically the two aspects it feels aware of or interested in. The middle literally seems like a blank. The act of writing, when I’m doing it, may feel magnificent, but if I am not writing and examining what to work on or do, I have often felt this orientation in me front and center.

As though it looks at the actual writing of the story as a transition. And it does not feel interested in that as per its zeroing in on the extremes — the story is either done or it is not started yet (or barely started during a time of aforementioned euphoria-producing writing but obviously not finished yet).

I wondered as this occurred to me what this part of the psyche in me does not like about transitions. Possible answers came forth again unsolicited. Transition may be a time of uncertainty, of disorganization, of fragility, and perhaps most of all (maybe in part due to those things) of vulnerability. It was not new to me to recognize that a part of me has historically not felt comfortable with those things. It was new to me to consider them specifically in the context of transition.

At which time sex occurred to me. When I was younger, the perspective in me about sex seemed often not interested in transition. In fact, it seemed distinctly opposed to it and wanted to pass over it as quickly as possible/practical. The orientation in me at that time was to literally go from determining the interest in and practicality of fucking someone to the act of doing so in as little time as possible. The area of transition was where things like emotion and, perhaps relatedly, vulnerability could develop. Of course in these encounters I was interested in mutual respect (in fact insisted upon it), connection, and to some degree affection, but serious emotional experience or certainly intimacy (which I’m not sure this part of me even had a conception of) seemed disorienting, frightening, or utterly foreign to this part of me and, according to it, were to be avoided.

When I first became a patient of Five-Element Acupuncture in January 2006, the layout of the five seasons was explained to me (the familiar four plus Late Summer), and it came to light also that each season presented unique offerings and gifts. At the time, I liked summer and that was about it and had found plenty of reasons to disdain the others. During the course of treatment, my acupuncturist presented the different offerings of each season, and a significantly new appreciation for all of the seasons and their incredible respective offerings developed in me (so much so that I was actually just moved to tears as I typed that).

As I write this I feel like the examination of Late Summer has perhaps been the least focused on for me. I’m not sure why — maybe because we haven’t seemed to work as much on that element in me (each season corresponds with an element in Five-Element Acupuncture, which relate to meridians in the physical body), or maybe because its being the transitional season has made it not seem so much like a “season” to me as the four with which I was previously familiar. In any case, the opportunity really seems prominent to me right now for me to appreciate and explore this season of transition. I feel deeply grateful as such.

Love,
Emerald

*I would guess that now we are actually quite close to or even into Autumn according to the Five-Element calendar, which does not follow or coincide with the official Western calendar (e.g., the Western calendar places the beginning of such seasons as summer and winter around their actual solstices, which according to the calendar of Traditional Chinese Medicine is actually their peak).

“And look for the stars as the sun goes down…just sit back…prepare for the best and the fastest ride…everything’s magic…”
-Angels & Airwaves “Everything’s Magic”