yīn apothecary

01/21/2023

Francisco Segovia

12/18/2022

From the desire field
By Natalie Diaz

I don’t call it sleep anymore.
I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—
a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined
fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.
Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant
when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes,
I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,
hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover,
then I am another night wandering the desire field—

bewildered in its low green glow,

belling the meadow between midnight and morning.
Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising
and many petaled….

11/26/2022

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acupuncture, herbs, chinese medicine, healing

11/23/2022

• W A T E R •
Natural elements in the body, like rivers and water, imbue a geographical and natural connotation. Geography further elucidates the body as a landscape. The natural world is woven into each acupuncture point and meridian.
For example, the large intestine meridian is the 11th point, LI11, Qū Chí which is translated as a
crooked pond or crooked moat. A crook in a pond is a place where bacteria, nutrients, and algae proliferate. Qū means fermentation. These areas jn the natural world are similar to a marsh which filters and purifies stagnant water.
Isn’t it amazing how your body can do this too?
📸:

11/08/2022

The understanding of the spirit (shén 神 and the fluid body challenges and expands the Western usage of the metaphor of the body as a machine. The reorientation to the magic of the body that is promoted through Chinese medicine allows for the organic properties that are expressed throughout the living world to be revealed, which leads to possibility. This reorientation inspires.
Similarly, when we think of the natural world as alive rather than inanimate we are forced to see what is living. Interacting with nature, trees and natural processes allows us to be a part of a dynamic dance.
What do you think?

10/27/2022

Sarah Allen, a professor and author of The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue states, By exposing the metaphoric structures that are implicit in the language of Chinese philosophical discourse [and medicine], we reveal the organization and internal relationships of its terms and categories. Thus, we begin to acquire a means of structuring our own thought in a manner that more closely resembles that of the ancient Chinese. This effort cannot be entirely successful, but it allows our imaginations to glimpse the possibility of seeing the world in another way. And although the revelation may be limited it allows us to gain insight into the relationship between language and thought...
📸: brain photos courtesy of .manner

10/12/2022

• b o d y as a metaphor •
The body is a metaphor. Ancient Chinese used natural processes to describe complex functions and interactions in the body. A metaphor contains a transmission of meaning from one concept to another. Metaphor is often an unexpected comparison between seemingly dissimilar items.4 The idea of the body as a landscape is a metaphorical use of body imagery. Body metaphors reveal that all humans use concepts to describe body structure and sensual experiences.
I will explore metaphors from both Chinese medicine and Western medicine metaphors.

09/25/2022

“the land may be the ‘matrix’ of linguistic meaning for oral cultures. Leslie Marmom Silko has described how “ the continuity and accuracy of oral narratives are reinforced by the landscape” for Laguna Pueblo people. In Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, Keith Basso notes that “place-names are arguably month the most highly charged and richly evocative of all linguistic symbols.” A linguistic anthropologist , Basso had cowboy with and worked among the Western Apache (Ndee) for years when an elder asked for help in making Apache maps of their land near the Salt River in eastern Arizona. Basso came to understand the sacred, indivisible nature of place and words for these people. Theirs is a language that situates ancestral knowledge and traditional narratives, mind and heart, time and space in the lives of a person and a people. The Ndee word ni’ means both land and mind, calling on the inseparability of place and thought. In ni’, Earth and thinking converge: “wisdom sits in places.””

- Trace by Laurent Savoy

09/21/2022

Chinese medicine uses the subjective experience to understand how the emotions and experiences of self are tied to disease. Subjective experience allows for the medicine to be located in the felt sense and validates all experiences. Logical-mathematical and cognitive was of knowing are cerebral ways for people to interact with the world.
🎨:

09/14/2022

All ways of knowing are equally valid. Understanding the cultural context that Chinese medicine provides and operates in is a part of comprehending the medicine.
How dis-ease presents and how a culture copes tells a narrative about the medicine and the culture it resides.
Chinese medicine is a 2,000 year-old tradition that functions outside of its culture and outside of its time. Practicing Chinese medicine in the United States is challenging because the Western medical system values different ideologies and epistemologies.
A variety of approaches are important for any aspiring practitioner. Practitioners of all sorts access the body via different maps. Often, practitioners of Chinese medicine use multiple maps of the body. For example, if a patient has neck pain, the practitioner uses the microsystem of the foot, dermatome, cranial rhythms, and muscular maps. Maps lead us to insight and influence how we see the world. In the case of Chinese medicine, its medical maps lead people to connect with the natural world. In American society, the body is viewed as an isolated entity, but the body is more complex. It is constantly responding to the world whether or not the person is conscious of the dialogue. Maps of the body are not a common way to view the body, however, they may serve as a way to distinguish important features and biases.

09/09/2022

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“And, it should go without saying, bodies are fragile thing. That’s what makes them different from ideologies— they are bound to matter, they are flesh that can be touched, held, scarred, that can dance and laugh, that will decay, that will remember.”
~ johanna hedva ~
🎨: by Paul Isenfels

09/06/2022

“So perhaps time actually extends from within us and beneath us, from our pasts. And because we are in active movement, each moment of present time is actually our future. Our bodies are our future. Our landscapes are our future. So if we return to the manifesto of an anti-colonial future, we can also employ an anti-colonial hope. One that doesn’t rely on linearity but that is deeply intimate, from the deep space and time of the self. One that is birthed from the deepest parts of our bodies and times. For me, the best way to achieve this is through storytelling and language. I think maybe this is an answer to the question about the impossibility of poetry: the possibility of storytelling. Storytelling has the ability to conjure the deepest parts of ourselves and reimagine time and thus reimagine hope. Storytelling allows us to embrace what is far away, remember what was forgotten, and hope for a future existing now. It starts with Ałkʼidą́ą́, “Once upon a time…””
The Other House Musings on the Diné Perspective on time by Jake Skeets in