Yes, dear

"Consideration"
Photo by Rosa Yoskovsky

Hexagram 14 is formed of Fire over Heaven. Its name is DA YOU. Da, of course, means big, expansive, full. There is nothing bigger than Heaven.

In modern Chinese, you means ‘have’. The character was originally formed of a hand: to have, to be, there is, to be rich, offer. In ancient times you also meant a good harvest, and da you referred to a 'best year' or 'best harvest'.

Da you is ‘Big Having’: the harvest, when you can reap what you’ve planted. It implies material possessions: abundance, prosperity, loadsa money. But a key question is whether you possess a lot, or possess what is great.

In the Rogue Commentary, Bradford points out that value, appreciation and interest, prize or endowment, although regarded as tangible ‘things’, were all once verbs:

"We forget that to be able to treasure is as good as treasure itself."

When my son was in his teens, he had several friends whose parents gave them every new mobile phone, computer and widescreen television going. My son, being the child of parents who struggled to simply keep a roof over their heads, got a modest allowance, which he carefully hoarded, along with birthday and Christmas money. After saving up for two years, and researching every sound system on the market, he bought himself a stereo system – which is still going strong, more than ten years later. He once said to me that although his friends had better ‘toys’ than he did, he got more pleasure out of his, because he appreciated them more.

That’s the real Midas touch: not the ability to acquire, but to value what you have. Our greatest wealth consists of things like knowing and living out your purpose; or just being in the same world, at the same time, as people you love; or having a sense of the unity and sacredness of life as it unfolds. It’s the capacity to see beauty, to be touched by the ongoing miracle of this world, to experience life as deeply satisfying.

This is embedded in our language:

dear, adj.

• Loved and cherished: my dearest friend.
• Greatly valued; precious: lost everything dear to them.
• High-priced; expensive.
• Charging high prices.

From O.E. deore "precious, valuable, costly, loved".

We place value on what we cherish; we cherish what we love. If this sounds like a tautology, consider the question:

“How can we learn to better appreciate the riches of the world in which we live?”

Fellowship

"The Beekeepers"
Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

Hexagram 13 is TONG REN. Ren means human. Tong means the same, or similar, as in these compound terms:
Tong + to be = both
Tong + appear = coincidence
Tong + step = synchronous
Tong + nature = identity
Tong + emotion = to sympathise
Tong + heart = to be of one heart

How do we recognise the resonance that signals tong ren – fellowship?

The da xiang tells us:
The noble young one, according to kind and family,
Distinguishes the beings

Generally, the first thing we tend to distinguish is between “our kind” and “the others”. Every human society that has ever been have called themselves “human”. Some human cultures have not imagined themselves elevated above the rest of the natural world, but have sought to understand their place in it. Others ride roughshod over anything perceived as “other”.

LiSe points out that “among your own kind, you are what you are not”. Within those collectives of sameness, we have differences.

One way to consider similarity is in terms of holons. A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The term was coined by Arthur Koestler, who observed that wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist; rather the terms rely upon the level at which we observe: every ‘thing’, from a sub-atomic particle to a human society, is simultaneously a self-contained whole in relation to its subordinate parts, and a part of a greater whole.

Holons exist in nested hierarchies: individual holons are autonomous, self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence; they are at the same time subject to control within the context of a larger whole. Those larger wholes have a degree of autonomy, but are subject to the organising influence of still larger wholes. And so on and so on.

Take bees as an example. If you look inside a beehive, there are workers, drones and queens, all doing a hundred complex tasks in exquisitely orchestrated coordination, like the systems of a living body, which is precisely what a beehive is. A beehive is a terrific example of a society in which everyone knows his place and function; individual needs are completely subsumed into the needs of the whole. The whole thing runs at maximum efficiency, even down to details like the most dangerous tasks being taken on by the oldest workers; if they perish in the line of duty, their loss will make the smallest impact on the hive as a whole. This makes sense, since individual bees depend utterly on the hive for their very existence.

Edward O. Wilson, referring to ants (another species that operates as a superorganism), once said that "Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species".

As we go up the holarchy, however, the holons become more complex, and hence less predictable. Down near the bottom of the scale, an atom of copper is a holon; it has certain properties that determine how it behaves in any set of circumstances, and it always behaves in that way. Bees have more choice about their actions, as long as those actions fall strictly within their job description, in service to the hive. Mammals stretch the envelope of conformity-to-the-needs-of-the-whole, with many more unpredictable behaviours. By the time we get to the human level, things start to get really interesting, which is to say, pretty damned random.

E. O. Wilson also said that humans enjoy their maximum level of Darwinian fitness only when they look after themselves and their families, while finding innovative ways to use the societies they live in for their own benefit.

But there’s a balance to be struck here. As human beings, we have the capacity to choose whether to behave in ways such that the viability of greater wholes – human society, for example, or the biosphere, on which we depend utterly for our very existence – is compromised rather than enhanced.

Like everything else in this universe, we do not have the power to be other than what we are. But this is what we are: we are holons with choice.

So, if we ask the question: “What is Tong Ren?”, i.e. “What is human similarity?”, we are asking a question about what it is to be human. And one of the many answers to that question is “We can choose”.

The choices that define us as individuals – from the sublime, through miles of the ridiculous, right down to the downright ugly – also define us as human.

And that begs and begets a further question: “How different can we be, and still recognise each other as tong ren, as “our own kind”?

Sometimes it's a stretch. Perhaps that’s why the gua ci reads:
Worthwhile to cross the great stream.
And worth the noble young one’s persistence.

Belonging

Photograph by Rosa Yoskovsky

In the Study Group last week, we looked at Hexagram 8, Bi, Union or Belonging. It is composed of Water over Earth – five yin lines and just one yang line, but where it counts the most: in the position of the Emperor, or the Heart. The Heart, in the Chinese model of the human person, is the residence of the shen.

The shen are the “messengers of Heaven, the principle of life, that which transforms an assemblage of matter into a living being” (Larre and Rochat 1992). They are spirits, but not 'individual' spirits; they are indestructible and immutable; they transcend yin and yang. The shen are what make you a conscious being. They order and organize our lives and our destinies, but not through any mechanical or deliberate action. Rather, they 'radiate virtue', which 'diffuses of its own accord', exerting their influence like a magnetic field or a temple bell, through resonance.

Whereas Hexagram 7, The Militia, is about getting people together for a purpose, Hexagram 8 describes an association not based on a task, but on mutual affinity: a resonance, or least a common interest. When the militia is retired, and things get back to normal, there is still something that holds people together. What is that? Who and what do we resonate with? Who and what do we choose to resonate with?

Last night I watched one of my favourite films, Neve Campbell's “The Company”, directed by Robert Altman. The film is about the Joffrey Ballet Company; it bears witness to the sacrifices made by dancers: their talents, their creativity, literally their blood, sweat and tears are channeled into the company. And why? They do it so they can dance: so they can realize and manifest their own personal nature, their own extraordinary gifts. They sacrifice some degree of individuality in order to become part of something which allows them to be who they truly are.

This paradox, this seeming contradiction, is only possible when there is such resonance. At its root, the word sacrifice means 'to make sacred'. It is an extraordinary gift to find relationships, communities, places and circumstances, that are so aligned with our own character, that by sacrificing our smallness we find our greater, our deeper and truer, selves.

In the film, the director of the company speaks to the dancers in rehearsal: “Why do you do always do this, babies? You always get phony on me. I don't know why you do that.... It's not the steps, babies. It's what's inside that really counts. That's when you really begin to soar. You see, thinking the movement is not becoming the movement.”

Thinking like others is not becoming like them. Commonality of belief does not a community make – ask anyone who has ever tried to create an 'intentional community' based on a belief system or credo.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Text reads in part:

Belonging is drawn by attraction; it’s not a thing to be pushed. Holding the people together is not a thing that you think, plan, then jump up and do. It is something you make yourself ready for, or worthy of, or appropriate to. The spontaneous ones arrive first, feeling their way in, finding their place, the preliminaries done in accord with their natures, not in accordance with judgement and logic...

Sometimes we feel such a need to be part of something that we make compromises. If 'sacrifice' means 'to make sacred', 'compromise' means 'a settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions'; it also means 'to impair by disease or injury'.

This is word-play, but there is a real difference between sacrificing something relatively insignificant (like fame or fortune or a belief system), and compromising your life and destiny.

In my own life, the moves I had to negotiate with myself usually led to something small. The big moves toward fulfilment came as a spontaneous knowing. My decision to study Chinese medicine came out of the blue, or out of my Heart; the same was true of teaching, and emigrating to the UK, and getting married. Sometimes we outgrow a particular form of expression, but growth is always in the direction of a truer expression of an unchanging essence. Like a figure taking shape under the hands of a sculptor, or a photographic image appearing in a developing bath, we emerge, even to ourselves, coming to recognize our own character: in the words of James Hillman,

that specific composition of traits, foibles, delights, and commitments, that identifiable figure bearing our name, our history, and a face that mirrors a “me”.

It's a piece of wisdom to be able to distinguish between the influences that shape us in our own image, and those that compromise us.

Multitude

Photo by Rosa Yoskovsky

In our Yi Jing study group last week, we looked at Hexagram 7, SHI, which Huang translates as 'Multitude', and Bradford as “The Militia”. The hexagram is composed of five yin lines, led by one yang, in the second place, the position of an Ambassador (in peacetime) or the General of the Army (in time of war).

It's about leadership, when and how to mobilize group energy, and the difficulties of leading it: will it be a mob or a movement? Not least, it describes the importance of a return to normalcy when the task has been accomplished.

The Rogue River Commentary on the Judgement reads:

“To the extent that life is good it may need to be defended, safe in its many scenarios, with resources, means and wherewithal arranged for multiple uses, ready to adapt, with both strength and wealth secured by a healthy diversity. But all of this attention paid to being secure is best if gone when not needed, leaving only a small contingent of vigilant ones to watch the gates and horizons, set to emerge in emergencies only, and not just standing by, rattling swords....Would that all states were ad hoc like this, and sunset all laws when done and go home. This can refer to one person as well, a mature one taken as model, a pool of resources, a population of selves, the readiness of one’s reserves to meet the time’s conditions....”

We are all, as Brad says, a population of selves, each of us a multitude. Most of the time, when people come to me for psychotherapy, they are grappling with parts of themselves that were mobilized at a particular time for a particular purpose, and have stayed with that agenda long after the moment has passed. Like the Japanese soldiers who hid out in the jungle for forty years, unaware the war had ended, or the old woman in the village who keeps her curtains drawn for fear of violating blackout laws, they are stuck in a time warp, responding to situations that no longer exist.

Parts of ourselves can become renegades, like the Ronin, the Samurai who were not in the service of a feudal lord. Samurai were professional warriors who were bound by strict codes of honour to a Daimyo (feudal lord). At various times in Japanese history, these codes were so rigid that if the Daimyo died, or was disenfranchised or dishonoured, his Samurai were expected to commit ritual suicide. Those who did not became social exiles, reduced to finding work as mercenaries, or becoming thieves or revolutionaries.

We all carry parts of ourselves that are holdovers from former, younger, lives: frightened children, indignant adolescents, disillusioned idealists, naïve lovers. They are often exiled to the periphery of our consciousness because the feelings they carry are painful, and sometimes dangerous to the lives we want to lead. Who wants the frightened child inside them coming forward at that board meeting, or a stroppy teenager taking centre stage when you first meet your future in-laws? So there is another army of policing parts that keep these exiles under control, trying, with varying degrees of success, to maintain our private public order, usually by threatening, cajoling, and shaming the exiles into a skittish silence. Other parts dictate behaviour intended to protect the most vulnerable parts from danger, but like the others, running a human life from an old script sometimes has tragi-comic consequences.

This well-intentioned ragtag crew rides along with us like a busload of Keystone Cops and squalling children, shaping our personalities and skewing our lives.

How do we disband these armies, rehabilitate our Ronin, and return them to useful service?

Ultimately, we need to listen, hear their stories, bring them up to speed on our lives, offer them leadership. And in order to do that we have to recognize that we are not just a collection of parts, a catalog of experiences.

Huang's etymology for SHI has the lefthand part of the character signifying a multitude, and the righthand part denoting a circle or the action of 'going around'. He takes its meaning as a mass of people circling a pivot; thus, by extension, a master or teacher who deserves respect from society.

We are the pivot our parts circle around: an organizing principle, an essence that is 'not this, not that', not separate, but a face of the Divine as it manifests in and through us.

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/