Late Summer, the Earth element, and the harvest season: Summer is waning, the days shorten, the light changes and the land around us begins to look tired and dry.
Typically, during this season our gardens and farms are full of wonderful fruits and vegetables. An homage to both the vision and hard work of planning and planting in the spring. The harvest inspires us to prepare simple, beautiful meals.
This year, in the Pacific Northwest, our land is super taxed and dry from the unusually warm weather. Our fruits and vegetables are either ripening much earlier than usual or do not have the resources to make it to harvest. Read more about our unique food and resource challenges this year in the links below.
The Earth element is also about the sustenance of food and experience. Just as we digest food, we also harvest our experiences, digest them and transform them into understanding and emotional nourishment. The Stomach and the Spleen are the officials of the Earth element. The Stomach starts the digestion of food and experience while the Spleen has the very important job of mixing the various qi's together, transforming them, and then transporting the qi throughout the body and mind. Read more about this concept at the link below: "In Defense of Emotional Eating"
The Earth element is focused on the motherly energy that provides an axis of nurturing and sympathy. We are sharing time, congregating around each other and getting involved. The flip side of all this bounty, nurturing and caring can be an overwhelming sense of responsibility. If this happens, it is important to re-evaluate our commitments and scale back. A pivot towards simplicity eases our digestion of the physical and emotional bounty during this season.
The harvest of the Earth element is more than just the harvest from our land. It is the harvest of all of our life experiences. I encourage you to take this opportunity to sit back, collect your summer experiences and reflect on life up until this moment. It is a productive time of year to transform your experiences into food/fuel/energy for our mind, body and spirit.
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