Being the marrying maiden

Recent readings have given me a new application for Hexagram 54: the experience of relying on other people to work for me. The Marrying Maiden, poor little thing, moves into a world that’s several sizes too big for her, and has to feel her way into its relationships and possibilities.

There’s working with my webdesigner, a relationship that Yi had promised me would be characterised by 54.1:

‘Maiden marries as a younger sister.
Limping, can still walk.
Setting out to bring order: good fortune.’

And so it is. I’m ‘younger sister’, the junior in the relationship. I chose this position for myself when I chose to pay an expert rather than learning how to do things myself – which means that I have to describe the effect I’m looking for, wait a few days for his response, and then see whether I described it well enough. (And start over if I didn’t.) It makes for a very ‘limping’ kind of progress, though progress nonetheless.

And there’s trying to fix the database errors in my autoresponder. This is an area where I really have no clue at all – if the program goes wrong, I’m adrift. I paid for some support, got an initial diagnosis of the problem, and an alarmingly high quote to do a further procedure that wasn’t in any way guaranteed to fix it!

So I tried to use the diagnosis to fix things myself. I spent half a day on it, made no difference to anything at all apart from my blood pressure, and started contemplating options. Do something more radical myself? Try to find alternative support? Bite the bullet and pay for that pricey hopefully-maybe-fix?

How to approach this?

54, unchanging.

‘Marrying maiden. Setting out to bring order – pitfall.
No direction brings harvest.’

LOL. I heartily wished I’d asked this half a day earlier, put my ideas for more radical intervention on hold, and started thinking about their consequences –

‘Above the lake, there is thunder. Marrying maiden.
The noble one perpetually flows through endings
To know what is flawed.’

This Image has many meanings, but one is undoubtedly to be sensitive to far-distant ramifications of present choices. Marrying maiden has little control over the direction things flow in, so she’d better develop her understanding of their dynamics.

I sent an enquiry to paid support man about one way it might be possible to fix things.

And I also sent out an email to another possible source of support, the product creator – though considering my position as ‘second wife’, I wondered whether his solidarity with the paid support man might outweigh his desire to help me out.

And I very deliberately took no decisions, made no plans, and generally did my best not to think about the whole thing. I was hopeful that having no direction might in fact bring harvest – a secondary meaning for ‘no direction brings harvest’, but one that can make lots of sense.

Sure enough, by the end of today the choice has made itself. Paid support man responds to my email: yes, he can do it this way, and it’ll be much cheaper. The product creator offered to help at first, but when I told him I had this new and better option, he decided he’d really prefer for me to work with paid support man, so he (creator) wouldn’t be stealing his (support’s) business.

So instead of choosing a direction and setting out to create order, I’ve allowed the direction to come to me, and I’m optimistic that the (working) order will follow. In a world she knows nothing about, marrying maiden is better served by gentle and far-reaching enquiry, rather than decisiveness and clarity.

(And I know I’ve said this before, but this is one of the things I love about working with Yi. There’s no ‘here are the rules for living’, no global ‘take charge of your life’ or ‘let it be’. The way to move into harmony with the situation – or to be effective within it, if you prefer – depends on the nature of the situation. What could be simpler?)