Monday, December 10, 2007
Dui Yao
An elegant old combination
first of ginger, then adding green tea,
cured her icy blackened feet
Waiting almost too long to call,
my friend said her hands and feet
were always cold, not realizing
She might have lost some toes or even
a whole foot, but they're warm now,
as warm as a child's without a care
I haven't forgotten though;
the specter of gangrene still
scares the wits out of me
I experience the deepest gratitude
to those ancient Chinese physicians
who reach across millenia, teaching us
To invigorate blood, to dry dampness,
and to move qi, nourishing these bodies
we inhabit for a frantically short time
Allowing bodhisattvas to live out
their lives a little less encumbered,
helping us appreciate our precious gift
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3 comments:
Oh, this is wonderful. A poem that is a recipe [recipe that is a poem?] Do you soak the feet in this infusion? Give it to drink? What?
Last year I learned that an infusion of ginger can be used to clean your dishes and just about everything else in the kitchen.
FA
Hello, FA: Forgive me for again sounding v. didactic. But here goes. You grate the ginger (maybe a tablespoon resulting, for each cup or two of tea) and put it in spring water--maybe 1 cup or 2. Then you bring it to a fast boil, then turn down the heat making sure it's still boiling. In 15-30 minutes, depending on how strong you want it, you strain the decoction into a cup, and the patient drinks it, either all at once, or sipping it like a regular cup of tea. If the taste seems to bitter, you can add a little honey as you might for any herb tea. The ginger will turn around very cold extremities, and is very good to take throughout the winter, because it also aids the digestion by warming the "middle." The difficulty with ginger is that is it very drying; getting too dry makes the patient susceptible to cough, so at the point when the person starts to have a light sweat all over the body when he or she takes the plain ginger tea, you must add green tea leaves (pref. organic, high quality) after you boil the ginger, and steep as you would regular tea leaves.
The "dui yao" of the title refers to the practice in Chinese medicine of combining herbs--usually herbs that are from rather different classes of action. For example, ginger is warming, even hot, and because it's a root, grown underground, it's strong. It dispels both externally contracted and cold from an insufficiency of yang qi, which was the case here. When taken over a period of time, without adding anything to moderate it, it can damage the yin and disperse the qi, leaving the patient is worse shape than before. (It should not be used during pregnancy, for example.) So, once you know the qi is moving, (her feet and hands and whole body are beginning to warm up), you have to add something to modulate the hotness of the ginger, such as green tea, or jujube (fruit). There is actually an old formula specifically called "Frigid Extremities Powder," but if you are not a doctor, as I am not, and you still need to help someone, you can use what you have. In Buddhist convents all over Asia, the nuns always may a tea of ginger root as the winter starts to come on, in order to keep their yang qi moving, to prevent chilled hands and feet, and to aid digestion, and warm the middle.
Here endeth the lesson!
Wenders, thanks for all this. I love ginger tea/infusion already; now I'll add green tea and drink it to warm my toes.
Also, I hadn't realized my e.mail wasn't on my blog. Now it is.
FA
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