Spring, Chestnut Flower Essences, Hexagram 1, Qian (the Creative), The Spleen, The Snake.

Hilma af Klint. Aesculus hippocastanum (Horse Chestnut). 

 

Spring, Chestnut Flower Essences, Hexagram 1, Qian (the Creative), The Spleen, The Snake. To help myself understand the transformative aspects of 2025--so far a dynamic Yin Wood Snake year--I’ve drawn together some reflections of writers and artists for their power to make the hidden visible. They’ve deepened my appreciation of the energies, so I wanted to share them with you.

The failure on our part to accept the reality of pain, or anguish of ambiguity, of death, has turned us into a very peculiar and monstrous people.  It means, for one thing, and it’s very serious, that people who have had no experience have no compassion.  People who have had no experience suppose that if a man is a thief, he is a thief; but, in fact, that isn’t the most important thing about him.  The most important thing about him is that his is a man and, furthermore, that if he’s a thief or a murderer or whatever he is, you could also be and you would know this, anyone would know this who had really dared to live.                                                                                       --James Baldwin, 1964, from Colm Tóibín's On James Baldwin, 2024.

 

The directions In and Up are fundamental to the Spleen Organ Network and the Chestnut Flower essences. They describe how we draw information from the outer material world so that we can transform and ascend. 

The Spleen organ network (which includes the pancreas) is the last of the Earth element organ networks on the clock and the calendar. It follows the Lung, Large Intestine, and Stomach networks which establish our humanness at a material, embodied level and produce the tactile environment that sets and sustains the stage for life’s unfolding. The Earth organs are responsible for creating the vehicle for our higher spiritual endeavors. As the final earth organ network, the Spleen is also a bridge toward the Heavenly organs.^[1]

The Spleen’s work is to take in the material world and break it down to nothing--extracting from the stomach subtle essence from drink and food to send moisture upward to the life-giving “cloud layer” of the Lungs. The spleen sends our defensive Qi throughout the body, to the extremities, and is the origin of blood.  A serving organ, humble and hidden, it is a critical locus of power.  Here the mythical teacher and physician Qi Bo describes spleen function to the Yellow Emperor in Chapter 29 of the Huangdi Neijing^[2]:

                       

Qi Bo: 

‘All the four limbs are supplied with qi by the stomach, but

[the stomach qi] is unable to reach the conduits [directly].

It is only because of the spleen that the [four limbs] get their

supplies. Now, when the spleen has a disease and is unable to move the

body liquids on behalf of the stomach, the four limbs are not

supplied with the qi of water and grain. [Their] qi weakens day

by day; the vessel paths are no [longer] passable.  The sinews and

The bones, the muscles and the flesh, none of them has qi to live.

Hence, they do not function (483-485).

           

The lifting, drying, and warming mechanisms of a healthy spleen not only elevate the essences, but are essential for maintaining healthy muscle and connective tissue, ensuring that blood flows well within its vessels and that viscera are lifted and toned. The Spleen is associated with the most mental of all the organ psyches: Yi. A healthy spleen helps keep us even keeled, promoting a sense of confidence and well-being. It is critical for the learning process, allowing us to study, reflect, absorb, and communicate life experiences. It supports our creative endeavors.

Virginia Woolf opens A Room of One’s Own ^[3] with a close-up of the spleen. Charged with preparing a presentation on Women and Fiction, the narrator visits “Oxbridge” where she takes her meals in both the men’s and women’s dining halls. She describes the meals and their resulting effects on her physical, emotional, mental, and ultimately social body in splenic terms.

Lunch at the men’s college is rich and carefully prepared--served in opulent courses with free-flowing wines. It lights what Woolf calls the “flame”.  Note the lifting, drying, and warming of the “flame” effect (demonstrating a healthy spleen experience) in the passage below.

And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is

the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call

brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound,

subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of

rational intercourse.  No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody

but oneself.  We are all going to heaven and Vandyke is of the

company—in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet

its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance how admirable

friendship and the society of one’s kind, as lighting a good cigarette,

one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat (10-11).

 

The Men’s mess hall provides nourishment that promotes easy self-assurance, a passage to reason, to “rational discourse”, and even a religious boost: “We’re all going to heaven.” The spleen is in good working order, and the narrator feels fine.  Despite a haunting awareness of the war that though ended cannot be cleansed, the narrator feels uplift and enthusiasm —like viscera that defy gravity and the flow of blood upward.

At the end of leisurely meal, the narrator casually reaches for Tennyson’s poetry at the table and floats on the verse all the way to Fernham, the women’s college: "It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road” (14).  It is October, but she is sufficiently fueled to imagine spring (NB spring, particularly the warming, lifting, and drying fourth month of the Chinese calendar is associated with the spleen) “All was dim, yet intense too as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword—the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth—Here was my soup (17).  The soup at the Women’s dining hall in Fernham breaks the spell: “Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in October” (17).

Plain and watery, the soup and the rest of the meal at the Women’s college is prepared from ingredients that conjure scenes of “bargaining and cheapening”. The only thing to recommend the meal is to appreciate that there is food at all: “coalminers doubtless were sitting down to less”. Water instead of wine is passed to soften hard biscuits and then—"That was all, the meal was over” (18).

In contrast to the exaltation after a leisurely lunch in which the narrator can superimpose spring on October, the meal at Fernham Women’s college produces a sort of spleen pathology, wherein “Yi” is diminished, and we have weariness, mental fog, doubt, and difficulty communicating.  The warming, lifting, drying lamp does not light.

Indeed conversation for a moment flagged…a good dinner is

of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well,

sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not

light on beef and prunes.  We are all probably going to heaven, and

Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us round the next corner—that is the

dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end

of the day’s work breed between them (18).

 

When the quantity or quality of food or drink does not satisfy, nutrient qi cannot be perfectly extracted to move upward to nourish the lungs resulting in dampness, stagnation, and cold. In a chronic condition there can be muscular atrophy, distension, weakness, fatigue and viscera prolapse.

Cue a sullen after dinner conversation reckoning with the poverty of the women’s college, and a resignation that it is unlikely to change. Now we have a stagnation, and even a blaming (another hallmark Yi disorder.)

And it was only after a long struggle that they got thirty

Thousand pounds together [to found a college]. So obviously

we cannot have wine and partridges…We cannot have sofas and

separate rooms. “The amenities…will have to wait” At any rate…

there could be no doubt that our mothers had mismanaged their

affairs very gravely. To raise bare walls out of the bare earth was the

utmost that they could do (20-22).

 

On our planet of dualities, nourishment and life events often fall short of comfortable. The point of the Spleen is not to only experience the best, the positive, the pleasant. Its raison d’etre isn’t to maintain the cozy chummy feeling of exclusive dining halls. Rather the spleen’s energetic and material work is to be able to accept what is showing up in the external--bad or good--as useful information to metabolize, integrate and take the purest part of its essence as nourishment for transformation. Is there always a reward of satisfactory resolution? Perhaps not. Perhaps we earn the reward of surrender to the experience of greater consciousness.

The Spleen is central to our human practice of exploring frequencies and learning from life to obtain an expanded awareness—to both know what it is to enjoy the experience and aftereffects of dining very well, and to know the struggle of those who can’t or don’t.  To become one with all that is and to cultivate compassion.

Like food that doesn’t suffice, information or events deemed too difficult to accept will not let us metabolize the external. Stagnation and inability to pivot upward can cause circular thinking and worried states that can’t receive solutions to navigate life’s challenges with confidence.

As somatic dysfunctions destabilize the emotions and the energetic field, so can imbalanced emotions and a clouded energetic template affect organs. For Chinese medicine, emotional imbalance is a disease factor. Chestnut flower essences address symptoms related to spleen pathology and can promote emotional balance which positively influence the physical body. White Chestnut is a remedy for circular thinking and worry.  When these symptoms are eased, the pivot up is easier to access. Chestnut bud is the remedy for people who have difficulty absorbing information and repeat mistakes. It is a useful remedy for people taking exams, but at a deeper level, it helps us absorb life. Red Chestnut is useful when we are overly worried for others and place our worry burden on our loved ones; we privilege our need for control over their relationship to their own life. Sweet Chestnut is for extreme and paralyzing anxiety in the face of external circumstances. It helps us to soften and integrate the pain and fear of the external. The very form of white and red chestnut blossoms indicate ascent with their pyramidal “candle” shapes.

It seems the spleen is healthier with when we’re less attached to an identity. Both aversion and overattachment to external material reality have a hand in forging our personality and can interrupt spleen function and can put equanimity out of reach. 

Fetishism for food, money, things, belief systems and stories that create and maintain our identities entrench our attachment to the unmetabolized state of the outer world. We guard these externals in unprocessed form at the expense of our ability to engage with them as mirrors. Too much focus on maintaining the material di per se can cause overwork and overthinking that stems from a need to preserve an identity. It exhausts jing—vital life essence and this gets in the way of creative flow.

The spleen In Baudelaire’s “Spleen and Ideal”^[4] draws from Hippocrates’ definition of the organ as the source of black bile, one of four humors which when out of balance produces melancholia.  For the Poet it signifies boredom and squalor, a dense feature of the human condition and a default character flaw of society. Hippocrates’ spleen is distinct from the spleen organ network in Chinese Medicine, which among other things is characterized by its transformational nature and includes the pancreas. Baudelaire’s spleen nonetheless corresponds with spleen pathology of Chinese medicine. Transformation is the Poet’s work in negotiating between Spleen (melancholia) and Ideal (beauty) as a critical function of Les Fleurs du Mal.

In the poem “Consecration”, Spleen is characterized as Boredom: a miserable, dragging, unengaged and hungry state. Greed devours creation whole, giving no attention to its flavor, absorbing nothing and ready for more.

(…) This beast would gladly undermine the earth and swallow

 all creation in a yawn; I speak of Boredom which with ready

 tears dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe. Reader, you know

 this squeamish monster well, --hypocrite reader, --my alias,

--my twin (11).

                                                                       

In “Spleen (I)”, we have cold, damp, phlegmatic and sunken--smoke without flame or fire:

           

February, peeved at Paris, pours

A gloomy torrent on the pale lessees

of the graveyard next door and a mortal chill

on tenants of the foggy suburbs too.

 

The tiles afford no comfort to my cat

that cannot keep its mangy body still;

the soul of some old poet haunts the drains

and howls as if a ghost could hate the cold.

 

A churchbell grieves, a log in the fireplace smokes

and hums falsetto to the clock’s catarrh

while in a filthy reeking deck of cards

 

inherited from a dropsical^[5] old Maid

the dapper Knave of Hearts and Queen of Spades

grimly disinter their love affairs (74).

                                                                                   

 

In “Spleen (II)”, notice the diminished Yi and circular, stale thought.

Souvenirs?

More than if I had lived a thousand years!

No chest of drawers crammed with documents,

love-letters, wedding invitations, wills,

a lock of someone’s hair rolled up in a deed,

hides so many secrets as my brain.   

This branching catacombs, this pyramid

contains more corpses than the potter’s field:

I am a graveyard that the moon abhors,

where long worms like regrets come out to feed

most ravenously on my dearest dead.

I am an old boudoir where a rack of gowns,

perfumed by withered roses, rots to dust;

where only faint pastels and pale Bouchers

inhale the scent of long unstoppered flasks (75).

                                                                                   

In “Spleen (III)”, boredom, blood stagnation, and the inability to extract essence from life and food:

I’m like the king of a rainy country, rich

but helpless, decrepit though still a young man

who scorns his fawning tutors, wastes his time

on dogs and other animals, and has no fun;

(…)

The alchemist who brews him gold has failed

to purge the impure substance from his soul,

and baths of blood, Rome’s legacy recalled

by certain barons in their failing days,

are useless to revive this sickly flesh

through which no blood but brackish Lethe seeps (76).

                                                                                   

In “Spleen (IV)”, a sunken hopelessness.

When skies are low and heavy as a lid,

over the mind tormented by disgust,

and hidden in the gloom the sun pours down

on us a daylight dingier than the dark;

 

When earth becomes a trickling dungeon where

trust like a bat keeps lunging through the air,

beating tentative wings along the walls

and bumping its head against the rotten beams;

(…)

and giant hearses without dirge or drums,

parade at half-step in my soul, where Hope,

defeated, weeps, and the oppressor Dread

plants his black flag on my assenting skull (76).

                                                                       

Beauty is Baudelaire’s “Ideal”. It is life, enthusiasm, and goodness, but not easily attainable. Finding the ideal is the work of the Poet, who suffers the human condition and is self-consciously splenic himself.  With his unenviable identity and low status, he has less to lose and thus more easily accepts and examines the unspeakable. In so doing, he transforms and transcends. Note the upward direction, the fire, the good food, and the ability to keenly comprehend the language of mute things in “Elevation”.

(…) Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere

to a higher plane, and purify yourself

by drinking as if it were ambrosia

the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness.

 

Free from the futile strivings and the cares

Which dim existence to a realm of mist,

Happy is he who wings an upward way

On mighty pinions to the fields of light.

           

Whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise

Into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked,

Outreaches life and readily comprehends

The language of flowers and of all mute things (14).

 

David Lynch, another examiner of the darker side of the human condition, perceives the “tortured artist” trope as a counterproductive focus on an externally referenced identity. In Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity he writes^[6]:

Some artists believe that anger, depression, or these negative

things can give them an edge.  They think they need to hold on

to that anger and fear so they can put it in their work.  And they

don’t like the idea of getting happy—it makes them want to puke.

They think it would make them lose their edge or their power.

But you will not lose your edge if you meditate.  You will not lose

your creativity. And you will not lose your power. In fact, the more

you meditate and transcend, the more those things will grow, and

you’ll know it.  You will gain far more understanding of all aspects

of life when you dive within. In that way, understanding grows

appreciation grows, The bigger picture forms, and the human

condition becomes more visible… If you’re an artist, you’ve got

to know about anger without being restricted by it. In order to create,

you’ve got to have energy; you’ve got to have clarity. You’ve got to

be able to catch ideas. You’ve got be strong enough to fight unbelievable

pressure and stress in this world (92-93).

 

Lynch’s metaphorical “puke” is a literal pathological counterflow symptom of a spleen that cannot metabolize to transcend--the external won’t stay in. Here artists prize and guard the stories that keep their anger and depression unresolved to draw motivation from them. Anchoring deep into the stories, they endlessly recommit to a specific identity.  Again, the gift of Yi is trust and metamorphosis when a confirmed and rigid identity is forfeited.

Consider the upward movement and failed ascent in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Unwilling to accept Eurydice’s death and confident that he might employ his talent to bring her back, Orpheus descends to the underworld: “to see if he might not move the dead”.  With song and lyre, Orpheus persuades Hades to allow Eurydice passage back to life and earth. “I longed to be able to accept it, and I do not say I have not tried: Love won”. (Metamorphoses, Book X)^[7] Hades releases Eurydice on the condition that Orpheus does not turn back to look at Eurydice during the ascent. But needing to materialize her and perhaps trusting too much in his own ability to control life and death by means of his musical mastery, Orpheus turns back a second time (the first turn back being his refusal to accept Eurydice’s death); in that same instant she dies a second time and falls irretrievably back into the underworld.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a poem about transformation that opens with: “Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies. I summon the supernatural beings who first contrived the transmogrifications in the stuff of life.”^[8]  In this context the tragedy highlights surrender and acceptance of the cycle of life and death.

After losing Eurydice a second time, Orpheus tries once more to bring her back. He blames (again a pathological Yi hallmark) Amor for his own inability to accept death the first time and the cruelty of the gods for not getting his way the second time: “He took himself to lofty Mount Rhodope, and Haemus, swept by the winds, complaining that the gods of Erebus were cruel”.  He doesn’t learn; it is the preservation of identity at the expense of ascent. It is also a transgression of Eurydice’s covenant with her own path. This is a case for both Red chestnut and Chestnut bud.

If the artists Lynch refers to hold onto their pain to preserve an identity, Orpheus attempts to hold pain at bay to sustain himself as Orpheus with a living Eurydice. Either way, there is a need to exert control and maintain an external condition rather than receive and allow for change.

This is not to deny Orpheus’ claim that accepting a painful reality feels impossible. Hence photo historian Mary Panzer’s observation: “Sometimes to simply look [at suffering] is a subversive act” (NYU lecture 2003). To look at (not back) is to begin to receive.

Master Seer John Berger inspired his friend the general practitioner Iona Heath to move beyond the looking to deeply see and treat her patients.  In John Berger: Ways of Learning, ^[9] she writes:

 

In ‘A Professional Secret’, John described the intensity of looking

required for its action to be transformed into seeing…’To draw

is not only to measure and put down, it is also to receive. When

the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware

of an equally intense energy coming towards one, through the appearance

of whatever it is one is scrutinizing’ This reciprocation seems fair

enough, but for a doctor it can take courage to submit to scrutiny and any flinching can disrupt an entire consultation.  For me the marker of flinching

is an inability to look someone in the eye and an inappropriate diffidence

which seems to make it impossible to say something which I know needs to be said (49).

 

Successful seeing is connection with a person or an event. If we agree to see, we begin to receive and integrate a reality that will very likely change us in small or dramatic ways.  It helps to be a bit featureless, less attached, less averse, less identified, to connect beyond the limits of our perceptions.

This brings us to the Snake, the animal of the Chinese zodiac associated with the Spleen. In 2025 we find ourselves in the year of the Yin Wood Snake. Here is an excerpt from artist Yu Hua Meng’s divination: “Yin Wood Snake: A Strange Unfurling”^[10].

 

The image of the Chinese zodiac is a circle of diverse responses

to life. The stream of 12 is meant to represent a fluid multiplicity

where nothing is left out. In this circle, we include a place for those

that don’t belong, even for those not that interested in belonging.

This is the Snake (…) The Snake is ultimate yin, representing the mystic,

coiling inwards, the disappearing act. Being descended from the Dragon,

we need to remember that the Snake is very powerful - if you can

recognize power that is hidden and shrouded in mystery… The Snake

is the interstices, the hyphen, the minus, subtraction, no-thing. 

 

The Spleen is also the most Yin of the Yin, seemingly invisible behind the scenes, but as a conduit for Yang brilliance, critically alchemical for the entire body. A healthy spleen gives energy to move through difficulty and still create. A pathological spleen invites us to explore pure presence and seek oneness.  Too much sweet, too tight a grip on an identity or a lifestyle can result in a spleen disruption that may signal an energetic limitation. When we accept even the difficult emotions, it neutralizes and balances them. In the realm of the Spleen, humility--the agreement to accept the low and eat the bitter—is power. Fear is swallowed, and skins are shed for change and renewal. Through the splenic lifting, warming and drying mechanisms, confidence and resilience are restored.

And out of this? Hexagram 1, Qian--Pure creativity with its six unbroken yang lines, which like the Snake, the month of May and the especially focused hours of 9-11 a.m. is also associated with the Spleen. It is the foundation of all things.

Mahasweta Devi’s After Kurukshetra^[11] is a story of hidden minor characters—widows—both kshatriya^[12] and tribal, set in the aftermath of the epic battle of the Mahabharata. The young kshatriya widows whose husbands made and fought the war find themselves honored, but forever bereft of color (they will always wear white mourning clothes) and companionship. The tribal women are also widowed—their husbands accepted their duty to help as foot soldiers in the “great war” that was not theirs. They fought without armor or recognition, and their deaths were so extensive that their funeral fires heated the earth to a temperature that rendered it unwalkable. Yet their widows will continue to live full lives despite their loss. Five tribal widows are asked (and accept) to entertain a young pregnant kshatriya widow who is so inflicted with sorrow that her relatives fear for the pregnancy. When the earth has cooled, the tribal widows take their leave of the young kshatriya widow:                                

 

If we don’t go…the fields will lie fallow, the cattle will be

uncared for. Once we return, all of us together will perform

the necessary funerary rituals for our dead.  Then the elders

will arrange marriages…As long as there is life, that life demands

fulfilment. Our widows remarry, are respected by their families…

They never deny the demands of life in order to exist as mere

shadowy ghosts, shrouded in silence.  Once we had husbands,

now we don’t. Crying won’t bring them back to life. Our husbands

fought and died in the kings’s war. No divyalok^[13]

for them. That’s only for the rajavritta^[14] (23).

 

When a kshatriya woman attempts to assure them of their reward: “All those who give their lives to the dharmayuddha^[15] will attain heaven, girls” (23), the tribal widows remain steadfast and sovereign in their sense of integrity:

 

This was not our dharmayuddha. Brother kills brother, uncle kills

nephew, shishya kills guru.  It may be your idea of dharma, it is not

ours…Don’t cry dear…And some day, if you ever see birds wheeling

over fields ripe with grain, smoke rising from village fires, or hear a

chorus of voices raised in song, just think to yourself, --that must be

their homeland (22-23).