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

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

The Ritual Cauldron

Buddhist temple, Saigon

Last weekend I participated, along with fourteen other women, in a ceremony to celebrate the passage of a dear friend into mid-life. In a four-hour ritual of our own design, we made a container in which our friend could undergo an initiation into the next phase of her life, leaving behind old wounds, and embracing a life more faithful to her true nature.

I had a similar ceremony on my 50th birthday; my closest friends gathered, invoked the spirits of fire, water, earth and air; they washed and anointed me, accompanied me through a life review, mirrored back what they saw in me. They witnessed the burning of fears that had far exceeded their ‘best before’ date, wrote wishes for my future, and wove them into a six-foot dreamcatcher.

Ceremonies like these tend and feed the fire of transformation in our lives.

Hexagram 50 describes something like this. It is formed of Li (Fire) over Sun (which in this case represents Wood). This is a fire under a ritual cauldron. Fire has two purposes: to burn and to cook; here it is clearly to cook, implying an alchemical transformation into a new state.

The name of the hexagram is Ding. A ding was a specific kind of bronze cauldron used in connection with the founding of a new dynasty. It was a ritual vessel for offerings to the spirits: a means of connection with the ancestors, and specifically the ancestral line of the Emperor. The emperor would have nine dings cast at the founding of a dynasty, to maintain a supportive and beneficial connection with the ancestors, and celebrate the initiation of the new dynasty with their blessing.

By extension, ding means to found a new dynasty, but with the implication that it is properly aligned with one's spiritual lineage. Huang calls this hexagram ‘Establishing the New’.

Ding is the only manmade artifact in the I Ching. It’s about personal, human power: your true path, and how you express it. On a personal level, it is a crucible in which

"the alchemy serves higher purpose and powers, the leadenness of our being turns into gold, into a life to which we give value…To sacrifice does not mean to lose things: it means to make them sacred. Thus the past is made sacred here, redeemed for a higher value”. (Brad Hatcher)

The Great Image says “The jun zi rectifies his position to manifest higher purpose”.

It's good to do that every once in a while: to reconsecrate your life. And it's a great privilege to participate in such a ritual for someone dear to you.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

Imagination

Morro Bay, California

Following on from last week’s blog on Hexagram 15….

I had a conversation with my Sweetheart recently about different kinds of photography. There’s prosaic documentary photography, like holiday snapshots; and there’s ‘art photography’, such as the work of Andy Goldsworthy or Robert Mapplethorpe, in which the artist creates a tableau and photographs it, much as a painter composes and executes a painting.

And then there are the photographers who manage to do both in the same stroke, like Ansel Adams, or Dorothea Lange, or Long Thanh, or any of the fabulous photographers whose work is collected in Edward Steichen’s timeless and exquisite classic ‘The Family of Man’. They take the world as they find it, and deliver an image rich with meaning.

Several years ago, I spent four weeks in Viet Nam. I completely fell in love with the country – its lush jungle (humming like high power wires), its richly cultured cities, gorgeous food, and above all, its people, who are for the most part living examples of Buddhism in action.

I took hundreds of photographs, which I showed to my father on my next visit to him, the following year. “This is a hill tribe village…this is a water buffalo…this is a fruit seller…”

My father, who in a previous life was an accomplished photographer himself, launched into me. “A good photograph shouldn’t have to be explained.”

It was true. I had been trying to capture not only an image, but the beauty, or poignancy, or sheer strangeness that had touched me deeply and changed the way I saw the world. And in almost all of those photographs, I had fallen short.

And maybe that’s the clue to the difference between an ordinary ‘documentary’ photograph and the work of an Edward Steichen or Dorothea Lange. An image by a great photographer tells you more than the facts; it hints (or hollers) about what it might mean. It never tells you “in so many words”, but involves your soul in a conversation about the complex possibilities of what it could mean.

A merely documentary image tells us too little; an explicit explanation tells us too much. As James Hillman says, the image is always more inclusive, more complex than the concept.

The same is true of writing. There is writing that documents facts (even if those facts are fictional), and there is writing that evokes meaning. At the moment, I’m reading a sensational book by Michael Ventura called ‘Shadow Dancing in the USA’. It’s one of those books that ignites a bubbling cauldron of ideas: the kind of ideas that make me look at the world with new eyes and fresh vision.

Bradford Hatcher has produced a rendering of the I Ching that does both. His Yi Jing (http://www.hermetica.info/) is both rigorous in its translation – perhaps the most rigorous translation that exists in the English language – and includes his own commentary, which is original, but grounded in a deep and wide knowledge of not only the I Ching and Chinese history, but several other wisdom traditions.

Brad’s Rogue River Commentaries are true commentaries, not an interpretation of other commentaries or traditions. They are based on an intimate knowledge of the I Ching, but consist of his own personal elaboration on the images. In the Introduction, he makes it clear that is what he is doing:

“Before anything else I should be clear that this effort does not in any way attempt to explain the texts of the Book of Changes. It is not an attempt to do any of your thinking for you or to make your task of understanding any easier…I tried to put on the original text and walk around in it some more, stretching it further, exploring some of its tangents and implications and, in the process, try to drop as many clues and hints as possible to some of the layers of meaning in the original.”

And that’s what raises his work to the level of soul as well as scholarship: he serves up images, in poetic language that presents possibilities: a cauldron of ideas that makes you look with new eyes and fresh vision.

In his Yi Jing, he has managed to do what I couldn’t do in most of my photographs of Viet Nam: faithfully documented what he found, and conveyed how it touched him and informed the way he saw the world.

I’m in awe of his work. And grateful.

http://www.ichingconsultation.com/

http://www.daoistpsychotherapy.com/