The Shady Side of the Hill

The words yin and yang began as the two faces of one hill. The hill never changes. The hour does.

A single rounded hill at low morning sun: the south face washed in warm cream light, the north face in cool charcoal shadow, a soft line of mist at the base, bare paper sky

Before yin and yang were a symbol, before they were a philosophy, they were a hill.

Look at the two Chinese characters and you find the same small sign in each: a mound of earth. Next to it, in one, the sun. In the other, the moon. Yang was the sunny side of a hill, the slope that faces south and gets the light all day. Yin was the shady side, the north face, where the snow stays longest and the moss stays damp. Old place names still carry this. A city called Hengyang sits on the sunny side of Mount Heng. The words were geography before they were anything else.

Hold on to that picture. Not two forces. Not two sides at war. One hill, with two faces, and a sun that moves.

Watercolor of the sunlit south slope of a hill, warm grass, bright rocks, a single bird — The south face. Nothing special about it except the hour.

Now think about where you are standing

Put the hill down for a minute and think about the last time your life felt like it had moved somewhere dark.

Maybe it was the stretch after a breakup, when the apartment you used to love felt like a stranger's. The year the work dried up. The winter after a parent died, when everything was the same and nothing was. Or maybe it is right now, and you cannot put a name to it; you just know that last summer you were a person who laughed easily, and this person does not.

From the north face, the sunny slope looks like a different place entirely, somewhere other people live. It is very easy to believe you have been moved to a different hill. That the warm life was someone else's, and this cold one is yours now.

You have not been moved. It is the same hill. The ground under your feet is the ground that was warm last year and will be warm again. What changed is where the light is falling, and on a hill the light is the one thing that never stays put.

Not a different hill. The same hill, at a different hour.

Watercolor of the shaded north slope of the same hill, dark mossy rocks, lingering snow, ferns — The north face. Where the snow lies longest.

What the shady side is for

It is tempting to make the sunny side the good side, and to treat the shade as a problem to wait out. The hill does not see it that way. The north face is where the water holds. It is where the ferns grow, and the moss, and the things that would burn in full light. Some seeds will not open on the sunny slope at all. They need the cool, the damp, the long patience of a face the sun does not reach until late in the day.

So the hard season you are in is not an exile from your life. It is the part of your life where certain things can only happen. The slow thinking you never had time for. The rest you would never take if the light were on you. The kind of grief that needs shade to do its work. The honest look at what you actually want, which is hard to take in bright sun with everyone watching.

There is a silver yin yang with one half rough and one half polished, which is more honest than the smooth ones. A hill has a rough face and a bright one. Both are the hill.

Watercolor of one hill painted three times across a sheet, at dawn, noon and dusk, the shadow sliding from one face to the other — Dawn, noon, dusk. The shadow is the only thing that moves.

Name the hour

A small practice. When a season feels like the wrong hill, say the hour instead. Not my life has gone dark, but I am on the north face, and it is late afternoon. It sounds like a trick of words. It is not. It puts the sun back into the sentence, and the sun moves. You can say it out loud, in the car, to no one. It still works.

The symbol itself was drawn to show that movement, which is why the line between its halves is a curve, not a line. This is one of a series of short essays on the yin yang. The rest are gathered here.

Somewhere a hill is turning its shaded face slowly toward the morning, as it does every day, without being asked.