A central capital diary: autumn

On the train to the West Midlands recently I saw the ploughed fields, furrowing tractors with flapping flurries of seagulls feeding behind them. Other fields were grass-cropped, bailed, with some loaded onto trailers, leaving golden stubble and black, shiny, plastic packages.

Trees have lost their shiny lustre, the leaves, tinder-dry, tired looking, paling, thinning. The vegetation has reached the zenith… and gone over. Mists were rolling low down the hills, over the fields like white, heaven-spun spectres. Hedgerow and branch fruits are evident… there is the odour of rotting vegetation… some days are so still…

Here in the city I see and hear and smell nothing of this… I can though, feel an inhospitable, foreboding chill in the air. The wind seems to come from the west – I fancy it has the Atlantic Ocean behind it. It acts as an amplifier, carrying sounds of the city before it… a distant roar of a busy, anonymous, driven metropolis. A familiar image I have as the season progresses is of being on a tube train as it descends from the light and air into the dark stuffy, tunnel of travel.

There are some trees in my street – the one I see from my sitting room is chequered with several hues of dying green and khaki, the leaves relinquishing to the famishing of sap as the tree closes down, prepares to hibernate, scattering them in piles, crisp and curled on the pavement.

The days are shorter, starting later and finishing earlier – massively so now, three hours at either end. The trajectory of the sun is dramatically shorter and lower in the sky, its beams, watery, diluted, heat-weak, the light thin. How has it all come to this so quickly? Where is the party of summer – fire – where is the soft harvesting and the yields of late summer – earth?

In five element acupuncture autumn is associated with metal – metal underlines many structures, the skeleton, and natural waterways. Its mother is the earth element – providing it with material, its child is winter – a sparse season in which metal provides it with essential nutrients.

The metal element reaps the harvest of late summer, reducing, refining the material to its essence, letting go of the unnecessary, completing, perfecting, carrying it through the season, the core, the essential.

Metal is about transition, as all the season changes are – its organs are the lungs and large intestine. Its colour is white, its sound is grief, its odour rotten, its emotion, grief. The element is responsible for taking in, for inspiration, ideas, usually of a heavenly nature – and also for letting go appropriately, waste and extraneous matter.

The function of metal is also processing loss… regrets, grief. In the autumn of our lives we may muse on the harvest, the regrets, the sadnesses of our lives – but also on the core essentials of successes and achievements.

Here are some evocative point names from both meridians:

Heavenly Palace LU 3, Cloud Gate LU 2, Valiant White LU 4, Very Great Abyss LU 9, Joining Of The Valleys LI 4, Yang Stream LI 5, Heavenly Vessel LI 17, Support And Rush Out LI 18.

And finishing on some autumn quotes:

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon, rolls along the hills, gently bouncing, a vast balloon. Ted Hughes

How bravely Autumn paints upon the sky the gorgeous fame of Summer which is fled! Thomas Hood

The autumn road, the mellow wind that soothes the darkening shires. Rupert Brooke

A life is a moment in season. Alan Lightman

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease. Shakespeare

Thou knowest, winter tames man, woman, and beast. Shakespeare

Robert started adult life training to be a classical ballet dancer. After a ten-year career working in Austria, France, Canada and London’s West End, he retrained as an acupuncturist, graduating in 1992. He set up his clinic in a Buddhist-run practice in London’s East End, where he continued to see patients for the next 30 years. Alongside, he also worked in the admissions department of the British Acupuncture Council for 17 years.