The Beauty of Something Small and Real

Lak Lake, central Viet Nam

A few years ago, I spent some months of rich learning with Malidoma Somé, a writer and educator from Burkina Faso. Malidoma’s ancestral people, the Dagara, believe that each individual comes to this world with a destiny; village elders meet before the child is born to divine his or her purpose in this life, and choose a name that reflects that destiny. Malidoma’s own name means “become friends with the stranger/enemy”, and he has done exactly that, sharing the wisdom of his ancestors with the people of America and Europe.

When I was a child, my parents, under the influence of the American dream of boundless possibilities, told me I could be and do anything. For much of my life I had no idea who I was, or rather, I had too many ideas of who and what I might be, and no clear notion of what I was cut out for.

Recently, my pal Pete gave me a book, “The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun”, by Martin Prechtel. It’s a Mayan teaching story, and after telling the story in his ornate and fragrant prose, Prechtel elucidates several layers of meaning. One of them struck me deeply. He relates that if our parents and our culture are proud of their own origins, and proud of us as extensions of their ancestral pride, they will consistently remind of us how immense we must become in order to live up to such grandness. Treated as something that big, we come to believe we are that big; seeing the world from those grandiose heights, our own subtle shape and unique abilities appear small and indistinguishable; any particular thing is too small to embrace. To become an individual, he says, means to fall in love with the beauty of something small and real, and we must find the courage and personal ingenuity to get back down to earth to be with what we love.

James Hillman says something similar in ‘The Soul’s Code’, where he speaks of ‘growing down’ rather than ‘growing up’.

This message came at me again last week when a sentence leapt off the page of Pema Chodron’s book “The Places That Scare You”, right into my face: “We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential”. There it was again: “our own little plot of earth”. Something limited, something small, something real.

The hexagram that speaks of this limitation is Hexagram 60, which is formed of Water over Lake; the water is contained in the lake, which can hold only so much. The name of the hexagram is JIE, which means limitation, moderation. It’s the idea of boundaries, self-restraint, regulation: knowing when to say enough. Part of the character is the graph for bamboo: jie is the knot or node between sections of bamboo, and it denotes all sorts of key points of change. The ba jie, for example, are the solstices/equinoxes/cross-quarter days, the turning points of the year; jie can also refer to the beat in music.

So jie is the knot or node where something gathers and concentrates, before another surge of growth: the point where you come to a limit and something changes.

The text reads:

Boundaries
Fulfilment
Bitter limitations do not invite commitment

This is a warning against excessive restriction. We need to put limitations in place, but they shouldn’t be oppressive.

The Rogue River Commentary on the text says, in part:

The world is far too big for one life. The options open to us are too vast and breed far too fast to act them all out. One person cannot even walk all of the possible paths through one tiny field. We cannot catch all the water in our miniscule pools, but we can choose what to keep and what to let pass.

When we try to be and do everything, we often end up achieving very little. But if we can define ourselves, or our endeavors, in accordance with what they themselves are asking for, this can serve to gather and concentrate our power.

It is often easier to produce a poem within a traditional form, such as a sonnet, than to produce good free verse; it is easier to play a sonata than jazz. Those who do produce good free verse, or jazz worth listening to, have internalized the rules of metre, or harmony: those ‘natural laws’ of structure that arise from the medium itself, rather than being imposed arbitrarily.

Boundaries mean fulfilment. We recognize the limits of what we are so that we may flower and reach fruition within those limits, rather than dissipating our energies; we set limits on what we do so that we may achieve success in our endeavors, rather than scattering our efforts.

The danger, of course, is not only that restrictions might be too severe, but that the boundary might be the wrong shape, riding some hobby horse of an idea rather than following the contours of our nature. I’d venture to guess that those Dagara diviners sometimes get it wrong, and hand down a name that pinches like a badly fitting shoe. We all have to find our own shape, and draw our own boundaries in the end.

And William Blake certainly had very strong feelings on the matter when he wrote “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.”

We, too, are minutely organized Particulars: unique, small, real, and beautiful.

www.ichingconsultation.com

Coming home

The bluebell wood where I walked with friends last week

Yo, dear readers, I’ve been away for a long old time. Somehow the rhythm of my life got interrupted – a fortnight of Hakomi in Sheffield, a week-long visit from my old pal Pete from Italy, a fortnight in California helping my father settle into an assisted living facility, and most recently a visit from my beloved friend Courtney from the Pacific Northwest. Writing has taken a back seat.

But my reading this morning was Hexagram 24, Line 5 – which is a wonderful line, and it has returned me to this blog, amongst much else.

Hexagram 24 is formed of Earth over Thunder; its name is FU.

FU carries meanings of coming back, coming home, returning or resuming. The text speaks of returning to the Dao, that is, of finding your way again – maybe you got lost, or maybe there was just a digression.

If we look at the form of the hexagram, we can see that one yang line has entered a condition of total yin; it corresponds to the return of the yang just after the winter solstice, or just after midnight. At those times we do not see spring flowers or a glorious sunrise; the yang is protected deep in the earth, and on the surface it’s still cold and dark; but we know the light is on its way.

I’ve had this hexagram a lot in the last few months, but never this line before. (I have, several times, had Line 6, which is pretty hairy). But Line 5 is a sweet one:

Honest return. No regret.

Dun, translated as honest, means good, honest, sincere, loyal, generous, someone with integrity, on whom you can rely. This could be a person, or it could refer to a return to this state. Lynn translates it as “simple honesty”; Wang Bi’s commentary says it is magnanimous and free of resentment, and the Commentary on the Images refers to self-examination.

And the Rogue River Commentary on this line spoke so clearly to me today:

This time he went way too far out. The path went on forward, yet he came back, and will not do things that way again. To stay your own best friend after a misadventure like this needs more than forgiveness, but to whip yourself for acting the fool is to play the fool twice. So he had a rough time, made a mistake, believed wrong things, drank and turned into a jerk, got angry and lost a few friends. We need to turn our regrets into lessons. Honesty stings, but the toxins dishonesty swallows will kill us. A straightforward, critical inventory is the shortest way back home, less loops than shame or guilt or repentance. Good judgement might pronounce some atonements, but it takes the best lessons forward: ahead is work to be done, a smarter life to be lived and consequences to own. Why live out our years in memory of our regrets?

I became aware today of so many things I’m coming back to. On a mundane level, I’m coming back to regular exercise, which has been interrupted by travel and guests, and is something I need in order to feel at home in my body. Food, too: getting back to a diet that feels natural for me.

My worries about my father have settled, now that he is happily settled into a fabulous care facility. I stayed there for a fortnight myself while helping him move in, and am confidant that he is in good hands.

I’m ecstatically getting back to gardening: the clematis has burst into bloom, the wisteria is about to do the same, lots of buds on the new rose, lilies of the valley and jasmine opening white perfume, loganberries and the grapevine full of infant fruit, fig tree opening frilly fists with tiny green buttons behind. The first globe artichokes have appeared; runner beans are nosing up the poles, and the tromboncino’s have sprouted.

One of my best friends, who had disappeared into New Boyfriendland for six months, is back.

I’ve returned to teaching, more than the Yi workshops. After a break of nearly ten years, I’m running a series of workshops on the therapeutic relationship.

And I’ve returned to this blog.

The Rogue River Commentary on the text for Hexagram 24 says, in part:

Is this not a high, holy thing to spend some time where we belong?

And LiSe says:

Only by being oneself over and over again, one fills in one’s place.

I feel like I’ve been away, and have come home to my own life; I can let my hair down, kick off my shoes, and wiggle my toes in earth that I know, and that knows me. And yet I wonder: How is it that some parts of my life feel more like ‘my life’ than others? Isn’t it all my life?

That’s how I’m using the Yi these days myself: as a gentle reminder to ‘notice this’, a ‘thought for the day’, an invitation to observe my life that day from a particular angle. It’s a bit like looking through pinhole glasses – sometimes when you narrow your view, you can actually see more.

www.ichingconsultation.com

Stuff

I know I’ve blogged Hexagram 41 before – last July, actually. But when I threw the I Ching on New Year’s Eve for a guiding theme for 2008, that’s what it handed me. And it’s going swimmingly thus far.

To briefly recap Hexagram 41, it’s Decrease, or Decreasing. It’s all about shedding what you no longer need, and making the space to move forward.

On my return to the UK, one of the emails waiting for me had a link to “The Story of Stuff”: (http://www.storyofstuff.com/), quite a worthwhile little 20-minute video, about the real cost to our world of the ‘stuff’ we manufacture, buy, and dispose of.

This added to my growing feeling of how uncomfortably cluttered my life is, and not only with 'stuff'; a mental ‘to do’ list follows me around like a dark cloud extending along an endlessly receding horizon of unfinished business.

Much of that clutter is self-created, consisting of creative projects that have stopped by for tea and camped out in my living room, sometimes for years: half-made objects, found objects which had inspired ideas for things to make, sketches of those ideas, additional materials for those ideas. A lot of it is paper: course outlines, workshop notes, half-written articles or poems. Trunks of wool for felting. This is all stuff that is waiting for the time and my inclination to get round to. This is all basically work in progress, still alive, gestating.

Then there are the things that are hanging around because I simply don’t know what to do with them. They are perfectly useful, but not to me. Things like the two pine doors that were part of a house improvement project abandoned when my ex-husband moved out; an old radiator I’d removed years ago from my clinic when the pipe that fed it started leaking; an exercise ball that is too small for me; clothes that seemed like a good idea at the time; clothes that were a good idea at the time; a pair of shoes I once fell deeply in love with, but which have never fit me properly.... Stuff, stuff.

It became clear to me, at a visceral level, that I needed to make some space. I became hungry for space, both physical and psychic. If I could clear out the things that are no longer useful to me, it would create some space to work on some of those incomplete projects that still wanted to get done.

So I started setting about it. The clothes were easy – they went to the Oxfam.

Normally, when I’m ready to get rid of something that still has some useful life in it, I offer it to my son, or to friends. If not, I think of selling it. I knew none of my friends wanted this stuff (because I’d asked them), and I really could not be bothered to ship an enormous radiator to Birmingham, or to advertise an exercise ball on eBay. I just wanted to be quit of them.

On the other hand, they were perfectly usable, and it seemed criminal to add them to landfill.

At which point, enter FREECYCLE. I’d heard of Freecycle for years: “I got this fab bike on Freecycle”… “We paved the path with bricks we got on Freecycle”...

So I had a look online.

The Freecycle network (www.freeecycle.com) consists of over 4000 local groups all over the world, people who offer items they no longer need or want, for free, to other people. Their purpose is to promote reuse and recycling, reducing waste and keeping stuff out of landfill. A bonus -- three, actually -- is that you meet some great people; you can get things you need, for free; and people come and take away the things you want to be rid of.

Thus far – and I only signed up 5 days ago – I’ve acquired something really useful to me (3 lever arch files), and found a good home for a lovely old autoharp that has been gathering dust, a wooden storage unit, a set of wood carving tools, the exercise ball, a brand new curtain I've had in a drawer for years, and a garden trellis. I’ve dug up several bags of self-sown seedlings from my garden for a young couple who are trying to start a garden that will survive the attentions of their 18-month-old son. And best of all, three boxes of cassettes of childrens’ songs by the brilliant American singer-songwriter Courtney Campbell are no longer mouldering in my shed, but are now on their way to schools in Ghana.

This is all very satisfying. It has something of the satisfaction of giving the perfect Christmas present (evidenced by the obvious joy on the face of the recipient) + it costs nothing + it buys me space!!

Tonight I had a look at the Rogue River Commentary for Hexagram 41. Really, you have to laugh. Brad’s translation of the Great Image could almost be an ad for Freecycle:
Outstanding opportunity
Nothing is wrong
But it calls for persistence
Worthwhile to have somewhere to go
How is this applied?
A pair of simple rice baskets may be used for the offering

And the first line of his commentary reads:
To give a thing up is not always a loss if it goes to where it is needed and it comes from where it is not.

Amen to that.

I’m still hopeful that someone will want those two pine doors and the radiator in my shed…it’s a fetching shade of hammerite blue…

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

Returning

Pfeiffer State Beach, California

Heartfelt thanks to all of you who sent good wishes, via the blog or directly to me via email, for my father’s recovery.

And the good news is….he’s come through the crisis, and is slowly, and very painfully, learning to walk again. His general health at the moment, though still delicate, is probably better than it’s been for a couple of years.

When I arrived in Los Angeles, things were not so good. I will spare you the details of the long list of his medical problems, but suffice to say the prognosis really was not positive. This was compounded by the fact that hospital policy dictated that the doctor on his ward changed at least once a week, and the nurse in charge of his care changed every day; during the weeks I was there he did not have the same nurse twice. Nevertheless, most of the doctors were wonderful (one held my father’s hand while he spoke to him), and managed to keep him alive -- no mean feat! -- despite barely having had a chance to get their heads round the complexity of his medical issues before they were rotated away to another ward. The nurses were consistently competent, patient, and caring: walking examples of what Hakomi calls ‘loving presence’. So were the physical therapists, respiratory therapists, and auxiliary staff. It was actually a healing environment; it was what a hospital is supposed to be.

And there came a point when we all tentatively dared to believe the crisis was over; he was reasonably stable, and both convalescence (for he was still very weak) and rehabilitation (learning to walk again) could begin. He was moved to a ‘sub-acute nursing facility’, where his numerous medical issues continue to be closely supervised, he receives high-level nursing care, and several hours of physical and occupational therapy each day.

That point – out of crisis, but still terribly vulnerable – is the next hexagram on from 23 ‘Stripping Away’; it is 24, FU, 'Returning’. The character FU shows a footstep, leaving a town, or going to market. It means to return to the way you used to go, to resume or carry on your own way, e.g. in the context of the planets, it means following their own orbit.

(Strictly speaking, 24 does not follow directly on from 23. Hexagram 23 is the stripping away of the last remaining bits of yang; 24 is the first re-entry of the yang. Between them is total yin, Hexagram 2, KUN, the Winter Solstice, the Womb/Tomb. 23 is like the day before the Solstice; 24 is like the day after.)

The text of 24 speaks of returning to your Dao, your way or path, i.e. finding your way again. You’re not yet really in the light, but you’ve put your foot back onto the path, and stepped out of the darkness.

The text reads:
Returning
Fulfilment
Exit and enter without anxiety
Companions arrive without fail
Turning around and returning is the way
The seventh day brings return
Worthwhile to have somewhere to go

Cheng Yi (an illustrious 11th Century scholar) explains why you need those companions who are going to arrive: “When one yang arises, it is extremely faint, and certainly cannot prevail over a group of yin to produce things; it must await the coming of more yangs…”

You can’t do much yet, because this really is not a yang hexagram; it’s only the very first hint of the return of the yang: one yang lines, and five yin.

And only in seven days! This is also not a fast hexagram. It is formed of Thunder under the Earth; Thunder is a mighty force, but here it is only the beginning of a sprout. Some day it will be a majestic oak, but at this point you can crush it under your foot with a careless step.

This is not a bawling baby, full of life. This is the moment of conception, and those first fragile weeks of pregnancy when anything could happen, or maybe nothing. Something momentous has begun, but only just, and it’s invisible to the naked eye. It still looks like Kun, the Womb/Tomb source of life, but you might have the feeling of something starting...

My father’s in the right place for his return. The tender seedling of his convalescence is being tended by an enthusiastic staff of nurses, auxiliaries, and physical and occupational therapists.

A few years ago, I had an astrological reading from a Vedic astrologer who pinpointed, from my chart, pretty much exactly when my mother had died, more than thirty years ago. I asked him if he could do the same with regard to my father. He pondered a moment, then laughed and said that if my father lived to the end of 2007, he’d live forever. There were many moments in December when I thought of that reading, and wondered if it was just a tactful way of saying he wouldn’t survive past the end of 2007. Now that he’s sailed into the new year, and with flying colours, I wonder if it was just a tactful way of saying he might outlive me. Now that would be a good laugh.

www.ichingconsultation.com

Mountain over Earth

I wrote this on the 17th of December, and the next day changed my travel plans and flew to L.A. on the 19th. The blog got lost in the shuffle of a full work day, and canceling appointments for the next week, and never got posted. Read on, and perhaps you can understand why...

My father is gravely ill. He’ll be 87 on January 2nd, if he makes it. I’m speaking to him on the phone two or three times a day. My sister is spending most of her days with him, in hospital, and has asked me not to bring my planned visit – just after Christmas – forward.

I love my father. We’ve had our good times and our bad times, but all that has faded into irrelevance long ago. What’s happening right now puts everything we are, and have been, and done, to and for each other, into a different perspective. I feel his love strongly now, and I know he feels mine.

I want him to survive this crisis, and regain a life he can enjoy. I think there’s a good chance of that, though every time I speak to him, both of us know it may be for the last time.

I’m praying a lot, and meditating, practising holding the poignant tension of the moment in my awareness, not shying away from it, trying (and sometimes succeeding) in holding that fine line between numbness, and fear, and the pain of loss, and a sense of desperation because I don’t know what to do, and at the same time know there is nothing else helpful I can do.

A couple of days ago, after a night with the phone on my pillow, waiting for a call telling me the worst, my daily I Ching reading gave me Hexagram 23, Bo; it is formed of Mountain over Earth: one yang line on top, with five yin lines under it. The yin is pushing out the last bit of yang; it corresponds to the time of year just before the Winter solstice – which happens to be right now.

Bo means to carve, or to peel. You’re peeling off a bark or skin, stripping off the exterior, the last bit of Yang, which leaves you naked and vulnerable, exposed to a difficult naked truth. Bo also means to dismember, to slice up; to flay; to be stripped of rank or honour, to be deprived of your rights. Any way you look at it, it’s hard to take, even if it’s inevitable.

But there’s also a sense of carving away that which is superfluous; if you do this, what you don’t need falls away; that is the essence of carving. You can see this in embryonic development: the limbs begin as a generalized stump, which is then ‘carved’ back to form fingers and toes.

Wilhelm translates it as Splitting Apart, Huang as Falling Away, Lynn as Peeling, Brad as Decomposing.

The Decision is short and not at all sweet: Not worthwhile to have somewhere to go. In other words, stay at home, if you have one – and, may I suggest, under the table with a crash helmet on.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Decision says, in part:
To move in enduring ways, then, means allowing the heavy to fall, the old to die, the weak to be eaten and the low to fill up.

And the Great Image speaks of those above being benevolent and generous to subordinates, thus confirming their positions as if building houses on solid foundations.

The whole thing is about how to meet this time of the last dregs, the final ending, and clearing the past to make way for the future. There’s an implication of suffering, and the end of the world as you know it. The Mountain erodes, crumbles, and becomes the Earth – and that is the strength of this situation: Earth accepts everything, and (eventually) gives it back as life.

Anyway, Bo is for sure one of the Death Hexagrams, and I was sure my sister was just waiting until it was morning in California to call me.

That evening, I read a piece by Michael Ventura called ‘Temporary Goodbyes’, which begins with this paragraph:

"Goodbye" is such a temporary word. The soul doesn't adhere to it. Memory subverts the resolve of "goodbye," evoking images of the past beyond our power to deny them. When you're young you think you can leave places and people, but later, much later, you know you never can, you never did, you played with time and space but you never left. And as your friends and family die you discover that nobody ever really leaves. They reach for you and touch you with a kind of stillness, a strange stoppage of time; and from that stillness a gentleness spreads that you never thought was grief, the genuine grief, but it is: a hopeless and gentle and all-enveloping benediction. You feel the dead receive your blessing, and feel that their reception is a blessing upon you; logically you may think there's no afterlife, but something in you insists the dead can hear and even speak. (http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A75884)

The next morning, following my habit of reading a chapter of the Dao De Jing before my morning meditation, I opened to Chapter 38, which includes (in the Feng-English translation) the lines:

Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
And not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.

That afternoon, full of dread, I dialled my Dad’s hospital room phone, expecting him not to answer. But he did. We talked. I told him that my son – his only grandson – was confident he would recover. He replied, his voice muffled by the oxygen mask, a series of staccato gasps:

“He’s
optimistic.
I
used to be
pessimistic.
Now
I’m not
optimistic,
and not
pessimistic.
I’m just
facing
reality.”

I am in awe of his strength, and wish he did not have to suffer so much.

I feel held in the web of life, which is turning its dark face toward my family now, as it is turned toward many families now, and know that all of us – all of life, human and non-human – all of us are held.

As of this writing, my father is still alive. And I’m still praying.

And as of THIS writing, on the 30th, my father is STILL alive, and I'm spending every day with him. Of which, more soon....

Meanwhile, I wish everyone an abundance of blessings in 2008.


www.ichingconsultation.com

Meeting the Mensch

God bless the Bodhi Tree Bookstore (second-hand section), and God bless the person who handed in their old copy of “Shadow Dancing in the USA” to be sold on.

Because it was sold on to me. The first couple of chapters got me so excited that I bought several copies to give to friends; it’s out of print but you can find second-hand copies online.

“Shadow Dancing” is a collection of essays by Michael Ventura. Ventura has a particular talent for describing the many intertwining strands of meaning – historical, political, psychological, mythical, physical and spiritual – surrounding a cultural phenomenon, and weaving them into a whole that is rich with fascinating questions, and powerful in its call for a more conscious engagement with the human condition.

I just finished reading the centrepiece of the book, a scholarly and passionate 60-page essay entitled Hear That Long Snake Moan, on the cultural origins and impact of American music, and I wanted to stand up and shout. I had “encountered the Da Ren”.

The phrase li jian da ren occurs 5 times in the I Ching.

“Li” signifies auspiciousness.

Some of the various meaning of jian are: to observe, be exposed to, consult, encounter, consciously, advice respectfully sought.

Da ren literally means 'big' or 'great' 'person'. It signifies someone not occupied with petty concerns, who can see the bigger picture and understand the situation more profoundly. A wise man, in other words. A mensch.

Wilhelm translated li jian da ren as “It furthers one to see the great man”. Brad Hatcher renders it “Rewarding to encounter a mature human being”, which I prefer – because ‘greatness’ is such a sullied word, so often either inflated with connotations of celebrity or trivialized: ‘You look great'.

But a mature human being…that’s as rare and as much of a treasure now as it was at the time the I Ching was written.

And the implication of li jian da ren is that you not only see the Da Ren – you not only encounter him, but you seek his counsel. There is an interaction, and consciousness is involved.

When I do a reading, I’m in that role. When you consult the I Ching, it speaks to the Da Ren in you, asking you to stretch yourself a little or a lot, to look from a broader, or at least a different, perspective. It’s no good to just look out from the eyes that asked the question; you need to step back, or up to the plate, and take a look from there. It’s an invitation to dream into the question, and wake up into a more inclusive reality, one in which you are more of a participant.

Reading anything by Michael Ventura does that for me. He is not only a virtuoso writer; he is a deep thinker, and a mature human being.

‘Maturity’ is a word that also has problems nowadays; it often comes with a package of odd pop-psychology connotations. It actually means ‘ripe, fully developed’, i.e. an adult rather than a child. But that means different things to different people. To my parents, acting ‘maturely’ meant being rational rather than angry, even when anger was an appropriate emotional response. For a lot of people, it means not taking risks. Ventura's take on the subject is more what I'm after:

"I'm looking for a maturity more alive, a maturity that's not afraid to be desperate, a maturity that isn't terrified of looking ridiculous. A maturity that's still willing to get dangerous if that's what it takes."

I think it’s a lot harder these days – roughly 3000 years after the I Ching was written – to be a Da Ren. Our world is one hell of a lot more complex than it was in the Zhou Dynasty. Politics, commerce, and technology in the Global Village – an oxymoron if there ever was one – throw up new and more demanding questions about what it is to live a good life, balancing private concerns with human responsibilities. We have lost the templates for family and personal relationships, and we are all finding our way in new territory, while the ground beneath our feet continues to shift. Most alarmingly, the very earth beneath our feet is changing in ways that are genuinely threatening.

We live in a world in which it’s as tempting as it is easy to be distracted from the central essentials of life.

Like frogs in the cookpot, we need wise men to help us notice that the temperature is rising. For example, that our

“sense of being overpowered by media has become such a fundamental part of our experience that we take such impotence for granted…We know the screen is not real, yet we feel unreal beside it. Our moments of love, trembling between fear and grace, are not “true love” – we’ve seen what that looks like on the screen. Our hesitant speech, with its painful silences, isn’t good dialogue. Our desperately awkward acts of survival are not real physical bravery. We are like people who’ve combed their hair in a magic mirror. The mirror shows only a state of idealized perfection, while we grow older and our hair is thinner and longer. No wonder, after dressing before such a mirror for eighty years, we look a little strange.”

He says, too, that we’re living in an Age of Endarkenment, and that

“What each of us must do is cleave to what we find most beautiful in the human heritage - and pass it on.”

and

“The future of the world is the future of the heart. Our capacity for love will ultimately have more effect than our capacity to store information.”

Over and over, he points out that history is not a spectator sport.

“Stop looking for other people to supply the solution. You’re the solution. If you’re not, there is no solution.”

That’s a Da Ren speaking, and inviting us all to be mature human beings.


“Shadow Dancing” may be out of print, but Ventura is alive and (I sincerely hope) well, and you can access a collection of his articles on his website: http://www.michaelventura.org/, and his up-to-date “Letters at 3am” on the Austin Chronicle’s website: http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Archive/column?oid=oid%3A73654

www.ichingconsultation.com

Nourishment

Tree-ripened figs, Arta, Mallorca

Usually, when we think of nourishment, we think of food for the body. This is perfectly valid, but there are other kinds of nourishment that are just as important.

Friendship, kindness, love, acceptance; satisfying work; beauty and pleasure; a sense of purpose and belonging in the world – all these are nourishment for the soul. Without them, something in us starves and fails to thrive; we become less than fully human.

What does the I Ching tell us about nourishment?

Hexagram 27 is formed of Mountain over Thunder. Mountain is stillness, while Thunder is movement and activity: a blending of two opposite forces in a powerful way.

The name of the hexagram is YI, a term for the lower part of the face: the chin and mouth, the jaws. It is usually translated as Nourishment; LiSe calls it Jaws, and Brad calls it Hungry Mouth. The shape of the hexagram shows a solid line on the top, another solid line on the bottom, and an empty space in between: the image of a mouth, open to receive.

The text reads:
Nourishment
Persistence is promising
Study the hungry mouth
From the searching mouth to the feeding

Why should we study the hungry mouth?


People come to me for guidance and healing – that happens to be the kind of work I do. The first thing I do is to listen to them. Often, the second thing is to encourage them to slow down and make a space inside, so they can listen to themselves, and hear – from the inside – what they really need.

I haven’t yet met anyone who hungered, in his heart of hearts, for a Big Mac or the next episode of Big Brother.

We live in a world so crowded, so hectic, so full of sales pitches, that few of us give ourselves the chance to study what it is that we really need. For many people, personal time has been eroded and pinched, and much of what is left is poisoned. There are studies indicating that the average American family spends only 20 minutes a day hanging out together. Other studies show that the average American spends roughly 40 percent of his or her ‘leisure time’ in front of the television.

It doesn’t take a PhD in Nutritional Science – or Psychology – to recognize that this is not wholesome, that it will not build the flesh and bone of a human life.

“Meanwhile the world goes on”, as Mary Oliver wrote. It is all still here for each of us, “the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain”, and the possibility of real love and fellowship, and satisfying work, and beauty.

The banquet is laid out before us. Why are so many people starving?

This is a real question, something to think about.


The word ‘suffer’ has basically two meanings: to feel pain or distress, and to tolerate or allow.

When an individual comes to me for help, I can help that person discover his or her real needs, and some of the factors that have prevented those needs being met. Choices open up for the person.

But I am still curious about why so many people suffer – in both senses of the word – the theft of their time, which is essentially the theft of their lives.

While writing this, I looked up the word ‘suffer’ in an online dictionary, and the first thing that came up was:

Buy Suffer

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Why do we put up with this sort of insult – in both senses of the word: “an insolent or contemptuously rude remark”, and “an attack or assault”?


The answer – or at least a clue – might be right there in Hexagram 27: movement and stillness, stillness and movement, and empty space – and time – in which we can be open to receive.

Time was – and not so very long ago – when most people lived closer to the land, travelled less, and had more time. Much more time. Before the 1880’s, there were no standardized time zones – indeed, there was no standardized time; clocks were not synchronized; ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ were as precise a measurement of time as most people needed. People lived together and worked together: as families, as extended families, as villages. There was time to make music, to tell stories, to daydream.

In fact, the further back we go in human history, the more time there was. It is generally agreed that hunter-gatherers – those ‘primitive’ societies that occupied the overwhelming bulk of human history – needed to work only 15 to 20 hours a week to sustain themselves.

That left an awful lot of time for taking the world in: for telling stories, making beautiful things, singing, dancing, making love, dreaming, and just hanging out together – all those activities that nourish the human soul.


Modern life has plenty of Thunder and not enough Mountain. In China, Mountain implies a mindful, receptive, inner stability. The character for Mountain, gen, shows a high place, where you can get a detached perspective. The character is formed of two parts: on the top, an eye; at the bottom, someone turning and looking you straight in the face. The first meaning of the word is to resist, to turn and say NO, to refuse to be moved, or to be coerced into an action you don’t want. It’s about being centred in your true nature despite all influences that would deflect and distract you away from it.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Decision for Hexagram 52 (Mountain doubled) opens with the line “When the time has come to recapture the centre of being, the peripheral life must wait”.

Without those moments of stillness, of mindful inner receptivity, we can’t even know what we need, much less take it in and be nourished by it.

Study the hungry mouth.

And please, don’t buy Suffer – not even in the January sales.


www.ichingconsultation.com