I asked Yi what a New Year is, and learned that it’s ‘Sprouting’s Brightness Hidden’ – fertile creative potential, shrouded or maybe cocooned in darkness.
And specifically, a New Year is like,
‘Pursuing a stag with no forester,
Simply entering into the centre of the forest.
A noble one reads the subtle signs and sets this aside.
Going on: shame.’
and
‘Sprouting, your essence.
Small constancy, good fortune.
Great constancy, pitfall.’
Starting at line 3: at New Year we catch sight of our desires again and set out with renewed energy in pursuit. This would no doubt be fine if we and our stag were in an open plain – but as it is, fixating on the object of desire and forgetting the context wouldn’t work so well. The complexities of life can swallow up hunter and hunted. I imagine this is the kind of thing the Judgement means by ‘No use in having a direction to go.’
I find that tracing a pathway of related lines enriches my understanding of a line (and I can usually, at least, find my way out of the forest…). This is Sprouting Already Across (if you change this line alone, you reach hexagram 63): getting ahead of yourself; almost tasting the venison already and not noticing you’ve left the path. The corresponding line in Already Across, 63.3, and its paired line, 64.4, point to something larger-scale and longer-term behind the scenes:
‘The high ancestor subdues the Demon Country.
Three years go round, and he masters it.
Small people are of no use.’
‘Constancy, good fortune, regrets vanish.
The thunderer works to subdue the Demon Country.
Three years go round, and there are rewards in the great city.’
Noble ones don’t run after the first stag they see; small people are of no use in mastering the Demon Country. When I contemplate the bad habits I really need to subdue this year, this imagery seems fitting enough. It also belongs with the season: at Chinese New Year, red decorations and firecrackers frighten away Nian, a man-eating beast.
Desires leap to mind, we’re tempted to run off after them, but there’s deeper work to be done, tackling what really prevents us from having that harmonious life. 3.3’s paired line shows the plight of the myopic small person who ploughs on into the undergrowth regardless:
‘Confined ignoramus.
Shame.’
That’s ‘confined’ as in the name of Hexagram 47. There’s nothing shameful about being ignorant, in hexagram 4: the problem here is that the ignoramus has run herself into a trap, where no more understanding/light can reach her.
The second moving line, 3.5, offers a better way:
‘Sprouting, your essence.
Small constancy, good fortune.
Great constancy, pitfall.’
The ‘essence’ means (amongst other things) good fat meat. New Year richly nourishes our beginning-energy – it revitalises. What we need to work with this is constancy: loyalty to principle, steadiness in carrying it through.
(Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
Surely not.*)
What might ‘small constancy’ be like? Not just a limited amount of it, I think, but a flexible, adaptable kind: true to principles and intentions, open to new ways, and not losing the spirit of beginning. ‘Great constancy’ might be more inclined to set its sights on the vision and pursue it come what may (and to get lost in that forest, perhaps).
This line’s the inspiration for 4.2, which is full of small constancy:
‘Embracing the ignoramus, good fortune.
Involving the woman, good fortune.
The son governs the dwelling.’
The father, who knows how things work and how to govern, has nonetheless let the child take over. To me this suggests re-awakening something completely new in your own inner ‘rulership’, letting in fresh experience untrammelled by expectations.
The line pathway here travels through Returning and Stripping Away (24, 23): a time when old, ossified concepts, plans, frameworks and distinctions (23.2) shatter and fall away, but the new ones have yet to take clear form. The challenge seems to be to recognise the space that’s left without rushing to fill it.
(* My excuse for the doggerel-outbreak: I’ve been enjoying John McCall’s clerihews, including the I Ching ones. This has side-effects.)
Hexagram 3 is a great way to start a new year. There is somewhat of a link between hexagram 3 and hexagram 40 in that they both have something to do with untangling knots. In hexagram 40 we untangle the knots of karmic ties we have with others through nonforgiveness or other reasons. In hexagram 3 we untangle the knots in order to bring order out of chaos. What better time than the new year to have a new beginning. To discipline ourselves and to give our lives order. To let go of that that does not work for us, (like hexagram 23 or 59) and to recreate our reality, our world into a more orderly fashion.
Gene