We as human beings are not only intimately connected to the seasons, we ARE the seasons. We are physical forms of a similar essence. Just as the nutrition of the tree stores in the winter among the miles and miles of roots down below the frozen ground, there is also a hibernating, a storing, of our vital force within the deepest recesses of our wondrous body through the cold months of winter.
In the beginning of spring the sap of the tree awakens and begins, through warmth, to rise and reawaken the tree. The blood that courses through our body, nourishing every inch of us, is our equivalent of the tree’s sap. It begins to warm, to move, gaining momentum as the days lengthen and the sun warms our body. Of course our blood is constantly moving 24 hours a day 7 days a week, but doesn’t your own experience tell you that there is a different feeling of expansion in the spring? Of a reawakening, a creaking open of cold stiff doors? Of the warming and flowing of blood within our vessels?
In Chinese medicine, the Liver ‘is’ the Blood. The Liver ‘is’ the wood element, the spring, all things green, the upward rising and expansion of energy, anger, of muscular movement and of growth. These are different manifestations in our reality of the same quality of the Life Force. Just as the winter is the mother of spring, the kidney water is the Mother of the liver blood. As water nourishes the roots that grow a tree, the winter nourishes the expansion of spring.
Gui Zhi, or cinnamon twig (interchangeable with Rou Gui, or cinnamon bark), is the imperial herb of the Liver and of spring. It is one of the most common medicinals I use in our clinic. It boosts a long history of use, dating back to the Early Han dynasty (200 BC to 200 AD). Cinnamon is in the earliest Materia Medica, the Sheng Nong Ben Cao (The Divine Husbandman’s Materia Medica), and a bit later included in the Tang Ye Jing (Classic of Decocted Drinks) where the beginnings of herbal knowledge were being consolidated into theory and Formula Science.
Cinnamon is acrid, sweet and warm. It has many functions, and we use it in the clinic with constitutions that tend towards spontaneous sweating, fear of wind and cold, pain in the joints, vexation, and heart palpitations. How we can think of it here and in our kitchen is in relation to the sweet sap of spring. Cinnamon warms, and unblocks the ‘yang qi’ (the life force). The life force stirs and the blood warms and flows in order to nourish and open. It is like a crocus pushing through the frozen earth, how much energy that little plant must have to unfurl itself! It also has the function of controlling too much opening, when the rising expansive energy is not contained. Cinnamon helps to ground the upsurge that can manifest as certain bodily feelings of anxiety, palpitations, and a bubbly feeling in the upper epigastrium. It is quite miraculous.
Cinnamon is a common herb we find in our kitchens, and Wikipedia says that the most common form of the spice we find in our markets is Cinnamon Cassia, or Chinese cinnamon. So you are probably using the same medicinal I have in my pharmacy (at much lower doses of course)! I use cinnamon quite regularly in my kitchen, and you can as well in order to nurture and warm the unfurling of your vital force this spring. We use it almost every morning with oatmeal. 
I use it in yogurt and keifer drinks. It goes well with meat, with beans, with lentils..its sweet fragrance nicely balanced by it’s spicy and pungent flavors.
There are some contraindications for the use of cinnamon in the clinic, but you as homemakers are using such low doses I really don’t think you could cause harm. Please use your common sense, of knowing yourself and how things feel in your body. Look for feelings of over warmth or of course, of allergies. If the cinnamon doesn’t feel good to ingest, then stop.
Use cinnamon as a kitchen medicinal in these early days of spring to warm and nourish, open and unblock, and grow your tree so that it will, in full bloom, be able to take in all the life force that is offered to us in the summer. May the still and quiet nights of your winter storage smoothly unfurl into the vigorous warm, fresh rejuvenation of your spring!
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