Liver season, baby

Is this liver season already? I guess since spring comes early in Arizona, so might liver season. 

In "Chinese medicine," which is probably not even a valid descriptor, spring is liver season. Putting all the NEWAGE bullshit aside about detoxifying and this and that, it's interesting to look at emotional dimensions of the change of seasons:

Now, right away, I get back to some of my own anger and belligerence around this empty-headed foolishness of categorizing emotions as positive or negative. I suffered with a lot of shame as a result of that bullshit and I think in general our culture does too. Emotions move like wind and water and fire and earth, however they want to fucking move, and classifying them as positive or negative is like saying "well, that ocean is negative, but this one is positive." The confusion results from the speech and action that arise from emotional states, not from the entirely innocent and probably indispensable emotions themselves. 

Anyway, it is beginning for me. The spring wildness of wanting to get out into the world, of feeling trapped in the straitjacket of routines, of buying into this or that bullshit that I myself have created, etc. I do seem to push through a cycle of sloughing, burning off, moving on from all sorts of shackling realities in spring, every year, somewhat to the degree of the heaviness of all of it. I guess this is just natural, even in my incredibly mild climate. I still have the seasonal cycles deep in my cells. 

In general, I wake up to a feeling of urgency. A feeling of just not having time. No time for shit. For stupid fucking arrangements I have made (usually unilaterally) that repeatedly rip me off. A light starts to move over those moldy and passive, codependent and lazy ways I have been treating myself. This tendency has gotten even more fierce as I have gotten older. The sense of the foreshortening of time and just not wanting to languish has gotten more urgent the past 6 years or so since I crossed 50. Peter Garland, the great minimalist composer, has his 66th birthday today, and his piece The Days Run Away is absolutely right. The days do fucking run away. In a blink. You turn around and say what the fuck. How did I get to be 56? And then you look forward and realize all the coming years are by no means guaranteed and are tumbling forward in an avalanche. 




You get this deeply unsettling existential feeling that you might as well already be dead, so hurry up with whatever is the most important thing. Now, obviously, you can't really live your life in that state of impending doom, but it does arise. And a natural reaction in its midst is to find the more grey, lazier, passively waiting and expecting parts in one's soul and get fucking pissed. Because NO. No time. 

I guess for me this is probably connected to being seasonally depressed, even living in a warmer and sunnier clime. If I do move somewhere with a lot more winter, I guess I'll have to buy a light box or schedule all of my desert field work for January and February, which would be excellent anyway. 

I'm connected now to a person with whom I would spend the rest of my life, in a heartbeat. First person I've ever wanted to marry, in spite of how amazing the women of my past have been. Hell, if I had a time machine, I'd go back 30 years and start there with this person. But as mentioned before, she's not available. Within not being available, she is also...not available. Like, not available in the long term, not available in the short term, not available on a daily basis, and often, not available when we are actually attempting to interact, due to entirely understandable realities. Additionally, I suspect this person to sometimes have an avoidant attachment style (maybe innately, maybe also just because that's what it takes to mother a two year old and a five year old), that is, a tendency to withdraw in the face of emotional situations. Or in the face of impending conflict, to seek to just dodge or hide. I am the same way, a lot of the time. 

I also have this tendency to just grit my teeth and claim I am okay, when I really am just not okay. Somewhere along the way in my life, I learned that having difficulty of any kind and expressing it amounted to me being a fucking pain in the ass. A problem. Being difficult and unreasonable. I mean, seriously, I once had a broken finger and it set improperly because I didn't want to cause any trouble. 

But then liver season kicks in and I go too far the OTHER way. NONE OF THIS IS FUCKING FINE. NONE OF IT. This tends to surprise people, since I've been claiming that all is well for weeks. I suddenly go from being the Denial Dog to being the fire. 

I do eventually find equanimity. That's good. It also helps to do some strenuous cardio. Go camping. Get away from the fucking computer. So-- see ya!