§ I · A note from the atelier · MMXXVI
By Ling, in M.'s hand
The English word menopause is from the Greek meno, meaning month, and pausis, meaning to stop. The word was first used in a French medical journal in 1821, and it described what was then understood as a clinical condition: a woman's body, having stopped doing what it was meant to do, had become a kind of disorder to be managed.
Two hundred years later, the framing has not really changed. The clinics call it the same thing. The pharmacy aisles confirm it. The marketing — when it speaks at all — speaks of symptoms and relief and staying young. The body has stopped. The woman is now a problem with a name.
In Chinese, this same passage of life is called 第二春 — dì èr chūn — the second spring.
The body is not stopping. The body is changing season.
The framing is not a translation. It is a position. To call it spring is to say that what is happening is not the end of something but the beginning of something. To call it spring is to say that the body is opening, not closing. To call it spring is to say that the woman is more, not less, than she was.
Two thousand years of Chinese physicians have used this word — or something very close to it. They were not being poetic. They were being accurate. The Inner Canon, written in roughly the second century BCE, describes the body as moving through cycles of seven years. At seven, the milk teeth fall. At fourteen, the cycles begin. At forty-nine — at seven sevens — the cycles end. The text calls this passage 七七 — qī qī, the seventh seven — and treats it not as a malfunction but as a turning. The body is not failing. The body is finishing one thing in order to begin another.
This is the position EASTRITE was built on.
When M. began to keep notes in 1973, the first thing she wrote at the top of her bound book was the character 春 — spring. She did not use the word menopause. She did not use the medical word. She used the word her aunt's neighbor women had used, the word her mother had used to her, the word that the women who came each evening to press her shoulders had used when they spoke about what was happening to her body. They did not say you are stopping. They said: you are opening into another spring.
This is not romanticism. M. was not naive about what the body was going through. She knew the heat, the wakefulness, the loneliness, the weight that arrived without warning. She kept notes, in detail, on each one. But the frame she gave to those notes — the title at the top of the page — was a season, not a deficiency.
This matters because the frame determines the medicine.
If you call it deficiency, you give what was missing — a hormone, a pill, a dose. The body is treated as a vehicle that has lost a part. The medicine reinstalls the part.
If you call it spring, you do something different. You ask: what is opening? What is the body trying to say, that the body has not been saying clearly for thirty years? Where is the heat going to, and what, in this woman's life, is the heat being asked to leave alone? Where is the dryness, and what is it asking her to drink? Where is the wakefulness at three in the morning, and what is it asking her to look at, that she has not been looking at?
The first kind of medicine treats a gland. The second kind of medicine treats a woman.
The five vessels of EASTRITE — The Pillow, The Stone, The Crown, The Flame, The Veil — are made for the second kind. They are not designed to suppress what is happening, or to mask it, or to push the body back to where it was. They are designed to support what is happening, so that the woman moving through it can do so without being told she is broken.
We do not call it menopause because the word does not describe what is actually occurring. We call it 第二春 because that is what M.'s mother called it, and what her mother before her called it, and what every woman who has come into M.'s atelier in the last fifty-three years has been called when she walked through the door.
The first spring was given to you. The second one is yours to keep.
— Ling
M.'s atelier · 苏州 · MMXXVI
letter@eastrite.com
If this writing reaches you at the right moment, you may want to take The Reading. Five questions. Two minutes. The vessel finds you.