10/23/2010 – Crunch, Crackle and Pop!

I took a walk last night past the park behind the school, and down by the river. It was 9:30pm, the sky was dark granite save for the bright light of the moon through wispy, fast-moving clouds. The light wind sweeps the streets in gentle curls, like the released lock of hair from a curling wand unwinds and bounces slowly before it settles into shape.

It was the first time I’d been out for a night-time walk in many months. The air was chilly and crisp. The scent of distant fireplaces wafted through the air and the chatter of dry leaves could be heard occasionally as the wind would bring some news of coming change, providing a new subject for the trees to chat about. As I walked past the creek the cool, humid air wafted from the river-bank bringing with it a decay of leaves and twigs.

I was anxious walking down this wooded alley – a cotton tail would zoom out of the bushes, sending a scurry of activity ahead of me, awakening my senses. Walking through the mausoleum of trees, with millions of small unburried bodies rotting in the night while the ghosts and groundsmen of this graveyard, the sentinels of the night kept watch over my journey. The scents of various trees gave away their personalities through scent as the night blindfolded me, and made me present to their formlessness. The essential smells of death surrounded me - A nutty oily burnt crackle, a mossy moist wet cigarette tobacco, a lemon-bright and crispy peat, a smoky mushroom-like rotten log. Richness, subtlety, spiciness, and essentiality.

As I crunched through the leaves I heard the sound of coyotes’ wailing in the distance, crying out towards the moon. The Halloween lights of the houses brought a warm orange glow, scattering the darkness. My throat, lips and mouth were getting dry, and my nose cold and battered by the crispness of autumn air. I put the hood over my head, becoming a shade with the rest of the night.

The spent structures of life lay all around in refuse heaps under the trees. As the essence is withdrawn, only the fiber and minerals remain to be moved by the waters to come into the depths to become possibility again in the spring.

Since the Metal element, and the balance between dryness and moisture determine what essences we absorb from the food, the air, out experiences, and facilitate the shedding of the inessentials through drying out the mass of content, and extracting the finest minerals – spiritual and mental constipation cause an excess of dryness, or a lack of dryness in the case of diarrhea, where we grasp for value everywhere we go, or cannot extract any value in our lives at all.

If people shed even the essential and only leave the structures of their lives in place, their lives would be as dry, mournful and barren as the autumn winds. Such people, lacking inspiration would become brittle, breakable, or hardened against life like the dry leaves and branches that lose the essences that give them life. Like dry bones, lacking essential miners to give them strength, these people would be as breakable, boring, and lifeless as an autumn branch. With complete dryness, their logic would lack space for emotion, whimsy, mystery and the imperceptible, and would instead define the world by ways of unemotional, cold, incisive logic born from analytical clarity. When the air is dry, we can see forever and can make out the small cracks and crevices of all life we behold. When we’ve dried out all the inspiration, emotion, and spirit from life, we can see all the structures that make life possible. To see the world so dryly our logic is impeccable, yet spirit and love are not logical. Through too much dryness we fail to see the things that make life worth living. Once a person has lost all inspiration for life, what would be left but to mourn existence itself.

The fall in some places brings mists and fog that cover the earth – obscuring the world in fantasy, the unknown. The fogs offer space for the imagination. The Metal element would thus live either in a space of wonder and awe at the meaning of the meanderings of life’s obscurations, or would live in an infinite state of anxious searching, longing to reach through the mist and grasp something solid, something firm, substantial – a point of reference for their lives. The dryness in the air can bring clarity to one’s life where one is bogged down by impurity that mists and confuses the mind. It is due to dryness that we can see the heavens and the earth clearly and without obstruction – but when dryness is all there is, the glaring reality of life ceases to inspire, and instead causes us to mourn the lack of mystery that gave us reason to quest in our lives for the essential in the first place.

The dichotomies of mysterious and ordinary, inspired and dry, beautiful and ugly bring into focus the duality of life, and within it, the oneness of the process of taking life in, and letting it go. No other element intercesses between the gates of life and death like the Metal element and no other season provides such poignancy.

I’m reminded of the Metal point of the Kidney (Water) meridian - “Returning Current” – the lightning bold of inspiration, the return of the waters of life from the gate of death, through and out of the gate of life as the Sheng cycle completes and life returns to the void of possibility. The point itself occurs to me as the high priest, perhaps the demiurge that presides over the process of reincarnation itself. Metal returns us to the father – the void. Inspiration and spirit are beckoned to come through the gate of death to arrive and flow into the sea of possibility itself as a thunderous surge announces “Spirit has returned to incarnate as you!”