Good Wood quotes

I have looked through the list of quotations illustrating the Wood element which I gave our SOFEA students;  I am offering them here to my blog readers:


"She felt like a bulb must feel, she thought, at the supreme moment when it has nosed its little spear successfully up through the mould it has endured all the winter and gets it suddenly out into the light and the splendour of the world.  The freedom of it!  The joy of getting clear.” 
                                                                                        Elizabeth von Arnim: The pastor’s wife


The essential thing was to plot my next move.  But that was precisely what gave me the most trouble, the thing I could no longer do.  I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at all.  The only future that had ever belonged to me was the present I was living in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually overwhelmed the rest.  I had no ideas anymore.  The moments unfurled one after the other, and at each moment the future stood before me as a blank, a white page of uncertainty.”
                                                                                                        Paul Auster: Moon Palace


"He was an old man, and he hated the snow.  Pushing on toward the river, he seemed to see in the storm the mortality of the planet.  Spring would never come again.  The valley of the West River would never again be a bowl of grass and violets.  The lilacs would never bloom again.  Watching the snow blow over the fields, he knew in his bones the death of civilizations - Paris buried in the snow, London abandoned, and in the caves of the escarpment at Innsbruck a few survivors huddled over a fire of chair and table legs.  This cruel, this dolorous, this Russian winter, he thought;  this death of hope.  Cheer, valor, all good feelings had been extinguished in him by the cold.  He tried to cast the hour into the future, to invent some gentle thaw, some clement southwest wind - blue and moving water in the river, tulips and hyacinths in bloom, the plump stars of a spring night hung about the tree of heaven - but he felt instead the chill of the glacier, the ice age, in his bones and in the painful beating of his heart.”
                                                                                       John Cheever:  The Wapshot Scandal

“It is ever so with the things that Men begin:  there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas.  “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for.”
                                                                                  J.R.R. Tolken: The Return of the King

“He was one of those sticklers for form who in every possible circumstance know the appropriate regulation, and are able to discuss it impersonally and accept it without question.”

                                                                                           Boris Pasternak: Dr Zhivago
 

“Mrs Thatcher has not come to terms with her abrupt departure from office last November.... Her interviewer says she appeared “a woman disoriented”.  Mrs Thatcher told her: “The pattern of my life was fractured.  It is like throwing a pane of glass with a complicated map upon it on the floor.”

                                                                                                  From a newspaper interview

 
And the following were things some of the things my Wood patients told me:

 "The world’s at your feet, but I have a total sense of lack of direction.  I feel rootless.”

“Damaged roots become warped maturity.”

 “All this abundance - I would like to get it into order.”  (A patient talking about spring)

 “It’s like living with somebody in forward motion all the time.” (A girl about her Wood boyfriend)

 

 

                                                                         

 

 

 

 

The Seven Ages of Man (and Woman)

I have always liked to see the five elements as each embodying one of what are known as the Seven Ages of Man (though two of those ages are shared between the five elements).  If we think of human life as circling in stages from birth to death, each life forms a similar progression to that of the elements, as it passes from its beginnings in Water on to Wood, to Fire, to Earth, to Metal and finally back to Water again.  As Shakespeare puts it in Jacques‘ famous soliloquy in As you like it:


“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant…..

And finishing with:

………………Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

I see each phase of this circle of life as imparting its own quality to that life, each adding the quality of the element which it represents to those whose guardian element it is.  There will therefore always be something of the child in a person with Wood as their guardian element, as there will be something of the exuberant joyfulness of the young adult emerging into the wider world of the adult in all Fire people, whatever their age.  Each Earth person will show something of the mature adult throughout their life, as will a young Metal  person show something of the wisdom of those approaching old age even in childhood.  Water, always the most mysterious of all elements, the beginning and end of all things, will show both the naivety of the child which Wood always shows and the age-old wisdom of those living at the end of their days, which Metal hints at.

If a five element practitioner is unsure which element dominates in one of their patients, and they are unable to get enough information from their five senses to point towards one element, an attempt to see their patients in terms of how they appear in relation to the kind of stage of life they represent is a further way of helping our diagnosis.  In my book Keepers of the Soul  I gave the example of my mother, definitely of the Wood element, as showing a childlike enjoyment of life at nearly 90 years of age, and I have a Metal son who I turn to to put me right about decisions in my life which my Fire element does not appear mature enough to make.

In this context, it is interesting to note the emotional ages of the friends we choose.  I have always chosen those who are further along the cycle of the elements than me, predominantly the Metal element.  I notice, too, that other people’s choices of friends reflect something about the need for their own element to receive sustenance often from an element not their own which stimulates them.

I have never made a statistical survey of people’s elements compared with the elements of their friends;  this would indeed prove an almost impossible task, given that we need to treat a person for some time before really being sure of their element.  But I suspect that many of us choose friends from amongst elements other than our own.  I have always certainly done so, because, I have decided, I do not wish to have to observe in my friends the weaknesses I see in myself.

An example of the insensitivity of modern medicine

I am often appalled by the insensitivity the medical profession can show towards its patients.  Hidden within the well-intentioned aim of ensuring that patients are not banished from any discussion about what the future course of an illness is thought likely to be, doctors have started to err on the side of telling patients too much about the possible implications of some slight symptom or some tiny deviation from the normal in the results of some medical test or other.  In so doing, they seem to forget that they are handing over the kind of information which is likely to frighten their patients.


I recently heard an example of this.  A friend of mine went for a general check-up to a newly-appointed doctor at her medical practice who conscientiously read through all her notes to familiarize himself with what was wrong with her.  She had had a slight stroke some years back and was on medication to stabilize her heart.  The doctor looked up from his notes, and said “You realise, don’t you, that it says here that you are likely to get Alzheimers at some point in the future.”  Apparently some research had shown a correlation between having a stroke and Alzheimers.


I asked my friend how hearing this had affected her.  She is a very balanced, practical person with a good deal of understanding of medical matters and a sensible approach to her own health, certainly not the sort of person who would indulge in worrying excessively about what the future held for her.  But she said that, despite her best efforts to ignore what she had been told, his words were still preying on her mind and had changed her approach to how she viewed her health.  And yet there was no indication whatsoever of her having the slightest symptom of Alzheimers, nor was there any medical or lifestyle advice which the doctor could have suggested to reduce the “likelihood” of it occurring in the future.  So what possible purpose, apart from making her fearful, had telling her this served? 


My father, who was a doctor, always said that he had seen so many miracles in his long medical practice that he learned never to predict the course of an illness, and to take away hope was in effect condemning a patient to an earlier death.  A little bit of hope was taken away from my friend yesterday by those few words, spoken no doubt with the best of intentions, but unfortunately with the worst of results.


We should never take away a patient’s hope.  We don’t have to pretend, even if it is obvious that a person is close to death, and we need to answer truthfully if asked, but if a patient wants to pretend that they have more time than we think they have that is their right.  And if hope allows them to feel a little better, however ill they are, they are likely to live a little longer, and perhaps die more peacefully.

 

The effect of treating a Window of the Sky point on an Inner Fire person

I always love getting feedback about the effect of treatment from patients, and never more so if this is immediately after needling.


I treated a long-standing patient with Inner Fire as his guardian element (the Small Intestine, rather than the Heart).  He always loves having his Windows needled, either II (SI) 16 or II (SI) 17, and occasionally both together when he feels the need for an acute sense of vision.  Today I needled II (SI) 16.  He told me that immediately I had treated this point, his sight cleared.  His vision had felt a bit blurred before, but it was now as if a veil had been lifted.


How lovely when we get confirmation of what an official can offer, and especially what a specific point adds to that official’s effect.  No element is more self-aware than the inner aspect of Fire.  As we know, it is the supreme sorter, and as we needle it, it immediately starts sorting out what its reaction to treatment is.