What does anger have to do with spring?
- Dana Perry
- Mar 20
- 5 min read
by Richard Mandelbaum
This year’s equinox is on Thursday March 20, at 5:01 a.m. ET. I will wake up pre-dawn, and as I have for the past couple of years, I will walk to watch the sunrise from a special place. But this spring my mind has been elsewhere. Distracted and unsettled.
The transition from winter to spring is profound. Within weeks, sometimes days, we move from a snowy, barren landscape (or at least a slumbering one), to a vibrant lively, pointillist mosaic, accompanied by scattered quintets of songbirds and full-blown orchestras of frogs. It is a cause for celebration, that life returns.
The other day, walking through the woods that surround our home, I saw that the green daffodil lances are pushing up through the ground. More recently, while repairing the garden fence taken down by a winter storm, I saw the first flowers of Pennsylvania bitter-cress (Cardamine pensylvanica). The tiny white blossoms were not yet fully open, like our own eyes when we first awaken, a vague dream still lingering before it drifts away and the day begins...
In Chinese tradition the Spring is associated with the Liver and Gall Bladder. It is Wood. It is the living tree. It is a beginning but it is equally the culmination of a season of energy storage and rest. The energy of spring is upward, everything is beginning to emerge; it springs. Whereas fall has its more formal name of autumn, spring has no air of formality. It is messy and unkempt. It is just spring. We awaken, disheveled, and then we rise.
The Liver is responsible for the harmonious flow of energy, vitality, and thought. Spring time — Liver time — is action-oriented. And as the duality of strength and weakness are always one, it easily becomes chaotic. It is about doing. There is a time to stop thinking. There is a time when reflection needs to end. To stop stewing. And to do. And when we do not do, when we do not move, when we do not channel all of that energy, it can be like electrical wiring without insulation. Erratic. Prone to unpredictability.
We can feel unstable. We have to look down to make sure the Earth is still under our feet. We long to walk barefoot after months of socks.
The Liver and springtime is also traditionally associated with Anger. But what does this mean? Wood feeds a fire, and so the Liver is fuel for the Heart, the Spring the harbinger of Summer. As heat rises from a fire, it rises in our bodies, pulling energy upwards, creating tension in our neck and shoulders and headaches. Our blood pressure rises. We can feel frustrated. Angry. Tense.
We get worked up, and need to calm down.
Anger is born of frustration — a blockage. A halting before fruition. The fruit falls before it ripens. We watch it happen and we get mad. Frustration and anger, like all emotions, is a beautiful force in the world when channeled into action, bringing about positive change. And like all emotions, it can become toxic when it stews and stagnates, like stagnant water choked of oxygen, in which life struggles to survive. We calm the agitation not by sitting still, but by allowing it to flow.
“I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.” - Mohandas Gandhi
We are Earthlings. We can do nothing to sever ourselves from the rich, vast, alive dance of the planet. Just as herbal medicine is our Original Medicine, being a part of a rich bio-diverse ecosystem is our Original Identity — though in modern life we can be, indeed are actively encouraged to be — disassociated from this. We can deny the reality of our true selves, but the truth remains.
We are blessed to live such a diverse and resilient ecosystem. (System can be a cold, clinical-sounding word — perhaps it is better to think of it as an eco-dance). We know that with ecological diversity comes resilience; and with its loss disease and illness spread. Our cells themselves are the product of symbiosis between ancient ancestral organisms now sharing space within a membrane. We are colonies of bacteria, within our cells and without. Our genome itself an amalgam; we are indeed part viral in ancestry. And on the next fractal layer higher, we know that our ecosystems are stronger when diverse, and more vulnerable when sanitized and homogenized.
Our Human Society is an ecological dance that follows these same laws, that is no different — not metaphorically but literally. We are like an ant hill or a colony of penguins. As goes Ecology, so goes the Body. And as goes the Body, so goes the Mind.
Our actions on the planet are triggering a massive loss in bio-diversity, not seen since the mega-extinction caused by am asteroid hitting the Earth 65 million years ago. But this is different. This time it is us, crashing into the planet. Unlike an asteroid, we are from here, unlike an asteroid, we know better. Moving from telescope to microscope, from ecological to social, and all that lies between, we see the attack on diversity taking many forms. The consistency follows a logic; it may be predictable but is jarring and upsetting.
When diversity becomes a dirty word, it means we are drifting even further from recognizing our true ecological selves.
Just as a vibrant ecosystem is never static, we are always in disharmony. We never find balance, but we do our best to move toward it. Even if we could reach it, it is a moving target, and we find ourselves with the extra burden of feeling as if we have lost something that we never truly held, having to now survey the landscape to determine in what direction lies balance this time. The instability of the climate around us, in all it meanings both metaphorical and literal, is reflected in inner instability. How could it not be? It is all one continuous ecology.
We can feel uprooted, and need downward grounding energy to find balance. We eat tender bitter greens to draw and release energy downward.
The ushering in of spring (the usher pushes us along with nervous energy: Find your seat! The show is starting!) can also be overwhelming. I enjoy the subtlety and peacefulness of wintertime, and I often feel a gentle melancholy this time of year, as the calm of winter gives way. From a Five Elements perspective this could be seen as Wood insulting Metal — the Liver insulting Lungs. An imbalance or disharmony in how we respond to all that is raining down upon us, all that assaults us in its relentlessness, that moves us from frustration or anger, to sadness.
And so it moves, and changes. Seasonal changes are in-between time — liminal space. The Earth spins along in its orbit of our star; we pass through the equinox and in an instant it is gone. What had been anticipated is now behind us. And though distant, it is equally in front of us.
We forget, but we have been through cold winters before.
But now the winter passes.
The sap will rise.
The earth will soften.
The rhizomes and roots will awaken.
The buds will open and push upward.
The spring will come.
It always does.
Richard Mandelbaum is the co-founder of ArborVitae, as well as a core faculty member.