Returning to the spleen

By February the year has been long and the nights longer, and the people who come to us are not ill so much as worn thin: sleeping badly, forgetting names, a heart that flutters on the stairs, an appetite that has wandered off. The old physicians said the spleen makes the blood and the heart keeps it, and that worry spends both. Gui Pi Tang restores the two together. Ginseng, astragalus and bai zhu rebuild the ground; longan, sour jujube seed and dong quai fill the blood that steadies the heart; polygala carries the calm upward; a little mu xiang keeps the whole from sitting heavy. It is a slow formula for a slow season, taken for weeks, and it works the way spring does, from underneath.