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

Make the most of the January Sales

Let us help you find the best deals

uk.shopping.com

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

Family

My mother died, many years ago, after a long, long illness that had involved much suffering for the whole family. I was not quite 24.

Suffering can bring a family together, or it can tear it apart.

In our case, it tore it apart, or at least it tore me away. I moved halfway round the world, naively thinking I’d put all that suffering behind me, and started a new life in England.

Meanwhile, my father remarried; Barbara was a wonderful woman, with two daughters of her own, and my then-teenaged sister was absorbed into that new family.

I had little to do with this new family, never felt part of it, and it was never particularly important to me, until my son was born. Little by little, on our infrequent visits back to California, we were gathered in to the family. My son has an uncanny resonance with my father. Barbara became my dear friend, and her daughters became my sisters.

In the past ten years, I have re-established a warm relationship with my own sister, and eventually – only in the past few years – have come to understand and love my father for the brilliant, generous, curmudgeonly eccentric that he is.

For the first time in my adult life, I have felt held in a familial network of belonging.

Last week, Barbara died. I will miss her painfully, but what I am experiencing now is a sort of psychic vertigo, as if the furniture in my world is being moved. Subtly, but palpably, I am being pushed to the front of my ancestral line.

My son and I went to California in September to visit the family. I had seen them in March, shortly after Barbara was diagnosed with cancer. She was still robust then, and in high spirits. Six months later, it was a shock to see that she had grown old and frail, after a course of chemotherapy. The evening we arrived, my son whispered to me that he had grown up ten years in a few hours.

We spent two weeks with my family. I cut Barbara’s wispy, post-chemo hair; she looked very small, but radiantly beautiful: translucent, as if a light was shining through her.

What upset me just as much, if not more, than Barbie’s impending death, was that the family seemed to be fragmenting under the strain of her illness.

Suffering can bring a family together, or it can tear it apart.

We talked a lot on that visit, my son and I, about families – and specifically about how my Dad, who is in his late 80’s, and not in the best of health, would get on after Barbara’s death. I talked with my sister – who is also not in the best of health – about how we could support him emotionally and practically. We talked with my Dad about his financial resources, if he needs at some point to move into sheltered housing. We all talked and talked and talked, and that was a good thing in itself.

Now I am home again in the UK, Barbie has died, and I feel very far away from my father, who is essentially home alone.

I have friends, and many clients, who look after elderly parents. Some visit them daily, some a couple of times a week; some have them living with them. I would be more than happy for my father to come and live with me, but it makes no sense to anyone – least of all to him – for him to move halfway round the world to a house with a lot of stairs, in a strange country with a dodgy climate. I can’t move back to California – as if I would want to: my work is here, and my son, and my Sweetheart, and I love this green and pleasant land, even when it’s cold and damp.

I’ve been fretting about this. My Sweetheart pointed out that I made the decision, when I was 24, to move away from my family: that it was my choice.

But the context in which that decision was made has changed radically.

Hexagram 37 is all about Family. The name of the hexagram is JIA REN. REN means person or people. The character JIA is formed of a pig under a roof, which is an image of a home. JIA REN are the people at home: the family.

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

Home is the place where we first expect fairness and where we will first learn to trust. This can be a poor preparation for life in the world outside, but at least we might have a few years to pre-cover, in advance of those beatings that life in this world has to offer.

When I was a young child, home was that for me; and I feel responsible for this man who was responsible for me, when I was too young to be responsible for myself. If and when he becomes too old to be responsible for himself, I want to return the favour.

Hexagram 37 also speaks about roles; about all the necessary roles being held within a family, and how these roles interact. That feeling of being pushed toward the front of the line: it’s as if I’m standing behind my Dad, and looking over his shoulder, estimating the heft of the role of Head of the Family; it’s weighing me up as well. I can’t help feeling that I am not only geographically unsuited for the position, but unqualified, unready.

At the moment, my father is home alone, by choice. He seems to be getting on just fine, so I’m fretting less.

But I still wish I lived nearer.

Because it’s not just that I feel responsible for him. I want to make the most of the time left to us, to hang out together, to gather in and harvest the ancestral wisdom that is concentrated in him.

My father used to say that the only thing worse than getting old was the alternative. Black humour -- but it’s no joke. All of us who don’t die young will get old, and most of us will become infirm, in one way or another – and probably in more ways than one. Some of us will lose our minds; most of us will lose mobility; all of us will lose friends to the reaper.

The compensation for all these losses may or may not be wisdom, but we gain character. Like an old tree becoming gnarled and twisted, we become more ourselves.

I want to spend time with my father. He is very much himself, and is precious to me.

And I’m way too far away from my JIA REN.

www.ichingconsultation.com