The desire for connection comes in lots of disguises, and various more-or-less-useful sublimations, but I think a whole lot of us are looking for ways to feel connected – coherent – at one with our lives. We need the way we spend our days to connect with who we are. We need our experiences to hang together and mean something. At a deep, personal level, it’s not enough for stuff to ‘just happen’ to us: there need to be reasons why it happens, reasons that connect with our inner world.
Our language and our science conspire to obscure what’s missing. With wonderful precision, science will tell us how things happen – the cause for any effect – but this isn’t meaning; it’s not a reason why. Yet our language disguises it as the same thing:
- he’s handicapped ‘because of’ a genetic defect
- the wild rose has this scent ‘because of’ the chemical structure of certain essential oils
- it moves you as it does ‘because of’ certain receptors on your cells
- she had a near-death experience where she met her loved ones in a tunnel of light ‘because of’ the documented effects of a lack of oxygen to the brain.
These are not reasons why – and consciously or unconsciously, we know there is more.
Some of us look for that ‘more’ on a large scale, searching for ‘life purpose’ or ‘destiny’ that will make all the major events of our life into acts of a great, coherent drama. (Some want to write the play; some want to feel it’s written for them.) Then we can say, ‘this happened to me so that I could…’ – learn, or connect, or move on, whatever the greater story called for.
But I think we also need to keep the connection alive on a small, day-to-day scale. We need to stay in touch – keep the channels for communication open. Without this, ‘life purpose’ will be wrapped in a shiny box all its own, kept on the top shelf, out of the reach of the messy housework, emails, cooking, meetings, gathering a layer of fine dust.
And here Yi comes into its own. A single, simple reading – about the week ahead, about a new intention – opens those channels for awareness of meaning to flood through. Here, says Yi, is what your experiences are about, right now. Look, here is the story you’re unfolding, here are the doors opening.
When Yi opens a channel, it tends to stay opened. In endless small (and not-so-small) ways, daily experience comes alive with messages that connect with a reading’s symbols. Emails, images, snatches of conversation or radio programmes, birds, cloud-patterns – the world is your warp thread.
One other thought, before I pick up the beads and cast my weekly reading (I think of weeks as beginning on Sunday). Who do you know who is searching for connection, hungry for reasons why – and has no idea of what Yi could offer? Can you help?
“Who do you know who is searching for connection, hungry for reasons why – and has no idea of what Yi could offer?”
Me – and how sad is it that I’ve remained so unaware of that for so long?
I tend to be hungry for higher purpose – especially when things go crashingly wrong. The sudden arrival of kids in my life has changed that somewhat; I am still looking, but for the first time I’m considering that I might not even live to see the fruits of whatever purpose I have – and that’s all right.
I turn to the I Ching in crisis times, and while it’s a great help then, I should know better than to limit it to that. You may have just given me a long-overdue poke with a stick (or a yarrow stalk!).
It could be worse! Before I got my yarrow stalks, I used to use a set of 50 bamboo skewers, with nice pointy ends…
Some people do choose to limit Yi only to crisis questions and huge decisions. I believe that’s a more traditional approach – but I find it helps me a great deal with ‘keeping in touch’ more constantly.
Pointy ends: A guaranteed wake-up call. 🙂
I don’t know if crisis use has been a consicious choice for me so much as something that just happens. Life-go-boom for good or ill, and I go running for the stalks to get perspective on how to pick up the pieces (or whether I should let them stay scattered on the ground). I even have a lovely deck to make short-form answers quick to generate. It’s like it’s been patiently waiting for me to start a more intimate conversation all along.
“We need the way we spend our days to connect with who we are. We need our experiences to hang together and mean something. ”
On the other hand, some (eg Chris) say we we don’t need that. Everyone wants him to “prove it”. Everyone asks what is a need. No one asks that this “accepted” point of view to be proven.
People are funny. 🙂