Seeing Nature In the Lunar New Year
The Yi Jing and Seasonal Changes
Over the years, since my introduction to the Lunar calendar through Chinese festivals—most of which are tagged with the Lunar calendar—I found myself more in sync with nature.
What’s a Season?
Seasons never made much sense to me growing up. I grew up with a concept that months relate to seasons. And it never seemed to be a subject of discussion heard in classes I took in school growing up.
Yet having lived in China for twenty-plus years—becoming a curious-minded person—I contemplate the world in connection to changes I see taking place in nature and the seasons.
US culture sees things more from a static position—a sense of fearing change or fluctuation. We want things to stay the same. It’s bad to get old, and it’s bad when things wear out. Keeping things new and well-kempt—like the status quo of a perfect bluegrass lawn—is the epitome of American culture.
But in reality, things change. And we can see it everywhere—if we look. Or do we attempt to train ourselves to not see it? Hurrying to “fix” the cycle of life when it shows signs of fraying.
Secrets in the Shadows
Chinese culture boasts over 3500 years of written history and that includes hundreds if not thousands of years of oral history. This offers the Chinese a direct connection to their age-old thought traditions. And many of those traditions are based on understanding the world around.
We see these traditions in the Yi Jing 易经 (I Ching)—The Book of Changes. The essence of the Yi Jing maintains change at its core.
Fu Xi Shi 伏羲氏, the mythical first emperor of China, is said to have studied the natural world around him to understand the elements and how they interact with the world and humanity.
He realized the length of a shadow told the time of day, and foretold the change of seasons. A longer shadow denoting a colder season, and a shorter shadow a warmer season.
In his system of recording, Fu Xi expressed the concept of a longer shadow with a broken line and called it “yin 阴“ representing cool, dark, and feminine energy. And he used an unbroken line to represent the shorter shadow. He called it “yang 阳,” and it represents warm, bright, and masculine energy.
Combined, these two lines become one and represent the balance of entirety—the Taiji, the Universe—the “Whole.”
The Yi Jing teaches that once an energy reaches its peak, it flips to the opposite energy, 物极必反. This can be a naturally occurring energy or one that is controlled. It is the aspect of change that brings the energy to the point of flipping to the opposite.
Fu Xi established the Yi Jing on the concept of yin-yang. Yin-yang simply referring to the cycling of opposite energies, such as cool to warm, dark to bright, or weak to strong in any one thing or situation.
Consider the transition from night to day or winter to spring as naturally occurring, or introducing warm or cold air to change environmental temperature. Even controlling emotions through breathing or relaxation.
In the Yi Jing, we understand life as yang and death as yin. So, we see Summer as yang, full of heat and life, as two unbroken lines; and Winter as yin, full of cold and dying, as two broken lines. (Fig. 5)
In the expression for spring, we see cold, or yin—a broken line, moving upward toward warmth, or yang—an unbroken line. This also expresses death moving toward life, or winter transitioning to warmth.
When considering the transition from death to life, or winter to spring, the Yi Jing expresses this concept in a novel way. They express it as one broken and one unbroken line, read from the bottom up. We read changes in the Yi Jing upward, from bottom to top.
Living in a colder climate, I noticed the gradual shift from winter to spring just after the Lunar New Year, also called the Spring Festival, because it’s the start of spring, according to the lunar calendar. I noted the return of life and warmth earlier than what my cultural conditioning instructed me.
I noticed the sun changing positions in the sky, days getting longer, and movement in the world around that I had not seen for months.
Of course, the temperature is still cold, but the warmer days are increasing. Snow is still on the ground, the ground still frozen, but the shift of the sun becomes clear to the naked eye.
Nothing that exists in the Universe is immune to change. Only humanity has the mental capacity to deceive itself from seeing these universal truths.
This year has been none different. Two weeks before the Lunar New Year, I took my dog, LeLe 乐乐, to the dog park at three in the afternoon. Not long after arriving, the sun set behind the mountains. It immediately became notably colder.
However, just last week, running errands, I noticed it was nearly three. When I got home, I rushed in the house to get LeLe, so we could go to the dog park. As we drove toward the mountains—the location of the dog park—I looked at the sun in the sky, still bright. Then I looked at my car clock. It was approaching four.
Outside, it was cold, but the sun was higher in the sky than only a week before. And there was still an hour before the sun would disappear behind the mountains. I told LeLe, we still had plenty of time.
Every year, I begin to perk up my awareness of the seasonal change around the time of Chinese New Year. Each year, I see the expression of change in new and amazing ways.
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Todd Cornell is the author of Heart Of China, How Mindfulness Changed My Life.
Beyond beautiful and relevant, Todd. With all that's going on in my crazy life, i had forgotten that today is Chinese Solar New Year. Thank you for this wonderful lesson and reminder of today's significance. Looking forward to more of these sweet lessons. LeLe is the best!!