Dobro – “she put a lot of energy into carrying out a lead that was provided to her” is absolutely spot on. No sainthood, though.

If you’re asking about her as the person who birthed you, then Hex 2′s pretty appropriate – it’s the archetypal mother energy. If you’re asking about her power as an individual, then the response is along the lines of: “She didn’t initiate, but she put a lot of energy into carrying out a lead that was provided to her”. Hex 2 talks about somebody who looks for direction and then finds somebody or a guiding principle to follow. Hex 2 is a very Christian approach, Christian in the sense of how a Christian typically relates to God. Saints do it best, and a real saint is a very powerful person. When you put a lot of energy into something but you’re zeroing the ego all the while, the result is very powerful. I don’t know how much power your mum had, but the Yi seems to be saying that whatever she did have was characterized by that kind of power.

And that’s precisely the reason I don’t consult the Yi as often as most people. In the past the Yi has made me feel specially targeted for answers to questions I wasn’t asking but were, in the end, very present issues. Sometimes, one prefers to remain ignorant…

L

My Dad died a few years ago, completely unexpectedly. A day or so before, I’d received an answer that was obviously unrelated to my question, and I didn’t know what to make of it until I heard about the death. It was 1, unchanging.

BTW, the C of E does have women priests.

That brought tears to my eyes. Your mother should have been an Anglican priest, except that females could not hold that position. Maybe women “readers” were priestesses in a sense.
She fulfilled the motherly role with integrity, as can clearly be felt in the tone of your words. It touched me by the contrast with my own mother. My mother embodied the motherly role in places, but her conflicted life did not leave such a graceful testament. Maybe that’s why I keep turning the Kun hexagram over in my mind: to expand the image of motherliness and appreciate what she tried to be.
I’ll share a story of an uncanny divination regarding Kun. (There have been several.) I was sharing house-sitting duties at a remote house with my friend Roger. Our conversations at dinner unfolded like a tapestry. He told me about leaving Mexico and travelling the world in his youth. (He left because friends of his had been killed by police in a demonstration.)
It took a couple of months before the subject came around to his mother. She had little education, and she had to keep the family going during her husband’s long absences. She found endless solace doing divination with a simple pack of ordinary cards, but she could never communicate to her precocious, bookish son what fascination she found in those deck of cards. Roger believes that her predisposition must have carried over to him, which is why he found fascination in the I CHING for many years.
We did a divination, after an afternoon of sharing stories about his mother. It was the first divination we did in our conversations. The answer came up Kun with no changing lines.