GLIMPSE OF MELANCHOLY
REFLECTIONS ON BLACK BILE
& ALL THINGS DRY IN THE PRAIRIE WINTER
YOU MIGHT FORGET, during the passing of the gentle seasons, that the Earth is dense and demanding. You may have grown, and live, in a place where the cold of the winter does not compulse you to brace your back, tense your shoulders, burrow your neck against the brutal wind pushing snow into your sleeves and socks.
The prairie winter is high altitude exposure. It is flat, its shrubs are diminished, the life giving fluid has shrivelled out of the plant material. Its few evergreens are calloused and hard. The wind is unforgiving, sucking the moisture from nostrils and eyes and lungs.
In my return to the prairies and the harsh winter and winds that remember me, I humble myself to the melancholy of the winter. Enter into the realms of atrophy with me.
REALMS OF ATROPHY
BLACK BILE IS THE DEATH of us, said the old Greeks. Lisa Fazio reminds us, in Southern Italian Folk traditions, that death is dry, and cold. A dry death is a good death. Restriction, atrophy, and tissue depression pull us down into our graves, finally.
The Melancholic Humor, or Black Bile, reflects the Earth element in the quadrant of the Western/Greco Roman Energetic System. Governed by Saturn, this humor represents our nerves, bones, and connective tissue. It is dry and cold, it is dense and heavy.
We can understand the Melancholic Humor as a state of growing constriction in the body. It is the body’s action to refresh itself, to bind tissue to itself. It is downward, restraining, closing and sedating. Finally, it is numbing, diminishing consciousness, hardening tissue, rigor mortus. It is simultaneously stagnation and constriction, obstruction and waste retention. It is winter, in its depths, it is a frozen corpse under a funeral of snow.
MANIFESTATIONS OF MELANCHOLY
THIS BLACK BILE IS INHERENTLY prone to pathology. The constriction first builds in the digestive system. Some small indigestion, acid spilling up, bloating, constipation. Seasonal obstruction, perhaps, we ignore the symptoms. The dry and the cold get deeper. The heat and flow of our liver and gall bladder diminish. Suddenly we are drunk, we choke on our meat. Our blood backs up as our hepatic portal system congests, nutritional dispersal is compromised.
The ease of hormonal cycles are latent, it begins to feel like things are piling up. Our lungs are tight, the blood that is supposed to reach it seems far away, we rasp and cough eternally. The dryness reaches our skin, which flakes and itches as the body struggles with its limits.
The degenerative changes reach our joints and bones. As circulation is restricted, muscles become ischemic. Knuckles ache, for the first time or the last time, and we slip on ice, unable to stop ourselves. Hips break. Joints ache. Bruises linger, purple and blue on our thighs where the Earth reminded us of its substance.
And through it all the nervous system is erratic, we feel deranged, we cannot process the shifts or take action. Capacity is thoroughly diminished, nervous exhaustion creeps in. Managing stress is no longer an option, we descend into cortisol excess, into burn out. In Melancholic Excess, we wonder if we are cursed.
AGGRAVATIONS OF THE ATRABILE
THERE IS NO STOPPING the winter. The little death of the sun is inevitable, and nothing drives the brutality of Black Bile like cold, dry, wind at high altitudes. Brace yourself. Fuelling the internal fire is a ritual and a prayer to life.
Melancholy builds itself. An icy drink, a stale cracker, a salad, a coffee. Innocuous and daily ignorance’s of the downward draw of demise. These cold and dry foods, raw foods and astringents pull us deeper into restriction. Missed meals, fried meats, inconsistent portions, late night television, prolonged stress, distraction is the glee of melancholy. Each avoidance and disassociation atrophies the life force, wasting away our chances of course correcting. As the coldest and driest Humor, Melancholy is the most difficult to purge or expel. It hardens, condenses, sticks and creates obstruction.
It feel like the sadness is here to stay.
PURGING BLACK BILE
THE DENSITY OF MELANCHOLY can take some time to warm and to loosen. Two weeks, some say, for the humor to ripen and purge. During this time, we are shifting attention to the sensitivity and brittleness we have developed.
Begin with the aromatics, inherently hot and wet in their volatility, they speak to our life force and breath heat into the body. Warming spices in every corner of a meal. Emollients, in the form of mucilage, relaxes the constriction. The natural salt in these plants stimulate the kidneys to begin undoing retention. Marshmallow root, infused at room temperature for a day, and Mullein leaf. Mushrooms.
Eat the roots of plants who know how to survive the winter, Burdock, Dandelion, Angelica, Fenugreek. Nourish the blood with nettles, boil your greens and roots and your meats together. Add ginger to everything.
This protocol is not exactly the direct heat I would imagine - the fire cider I am compulsed to turn to. Its more, softening, of the hardness of constriction, more, soothing, to the anxiety of atrophy. Its more about turning the body into a place where fluids flow, through hydrated tissue, with warmth and dance and a moist viscosity.
The remedy then, in salt and in water and in oil, is simply, hydration.
