In the pot

Well… Bradford came over to the UK from the States to see Cesca, and while he was here we got together and went over to Holland to see LiSe (and connect up with Harmen, too). And this was brilliant in many, many ways. I want to share the reading I did for the trip, as a) it’s a lovely reading and b) it shows how understanding of hexagrams and lines keeps on changing in the context of new experiences.

I didn’t ask a complicated question, just ‘advice and comment for the trip…?’ – I simply wanted something to hold in mind and help me not to miss anything while I was there. Yi came back with Hexagram 38, Opposing, changing at lines 1 and 3 to 50, the Vessel. So we have a bunch of wildly irreconcilably different ways of seeing, all contained and cooking together in one Vessel.

And that is exactly – exactly – what happened.

I’ve got to admit that the moving lines, though, are taking their sweet time in making sense to me. Here they are:
‘Regrets vanish.
Lost horse: don’t pursue it, it returns of itself.
See hateful people,
No mistake.’
‘Seeing the cart dragged back,
The oxen stopped,
Your men branded and their noses cut off.
With no beginning, there is an end.’

I haven’t seen any hateful people; I generally don’t. I’m starting to wonder, in fact, whether ‘fierce people’ might be a more useful reading of this – something else you don’t need to react to, like the lost horse. (Anyone have any defining experiences to share?) And despite my apprehension after looking at line 3, all my trains ran perfectly and I reached Folkestone in plenty of time to meet up with Cesca and Brad.

One thing the lines are certainly doing, though, is providing plenty of wry commentary on the way we found our way about.
‘Seeing your road signs indecipherable,
Your ferries going in unexpected directions,
And your return bus disappearing mysteriously.’
– that kind of thing. But Brad has a sense of direction, LiSe translates from the Dutch tomtom, Cesca has remarkable patience and an unerring instinct for picking the right direction to turn in out of the two or three being called out to her at once as she drives, and the horse keeps on finding its way home somehow – through ‘the average of our errors,’ as Brad put it. We weren’t lost, just arriving differently.

Or as Yi put it,
‘With no beginning, there is an end.’
After our time in (and around) Amsterdam, I have a new understanding of that one: there are no patterns predefined, nothing clear-cut (the word for ‘beginning’ is the one with roots in ‘cutting out the cloth’); nothing, in fact, that looks remotely likely to lead anywhere specific. And yet somehow we kept arriving somewhere, and in one piece. (‘Fuzzy logic,’ Brad says.)

My previous take on this was that the Great Possession of Opposing (38.3 changes to 14) lay in having people taking a different view of your possessions, your cart and oxen, with unpleasant results. That might be present – maybe it’s more that it’s hard for diverse people always to keep track of exactly what gifts each one of them has to offer – but what struck me most was the emergent 14. With no beginning, somehow you still end up with a Great Possession more than the sum of its parts.

We saw plenty of lovely, clear illustrations of that. There was the navigation thing, and there was the day we spent in Amsterdam with not much idea where we were going, but generally assuming we’d know it when we found it. And then there were our Yi discussions: Cesca was brave enough to share her annual reading, first with Brad, who looked at transitional hexagrams, then LiSe and I, who looked at the lines in the original hexagram, then with Harmen, who did startlingly succinct and fluent things with trigrams. Inspired by her example, I offered up my annual reading, and that became the subject of Brad and Cesca’s first joint interpretation. (Recommended!)

Possibly my favourite example was a bit more literal. Before Brad and Cesca came round one morning, LiSe (who gets up unspeakably early) thought to cook some squash so we’d have something to eat in the evening. When we got back, we started thinking about what to put with it… there’s some broccoli, Cesca suggests steaming it before adding, LiSe wants to know if we’re happy with our onions fried with soy sauce, I suggest adding some grated cheese, LiSe finds pecorino… and somehow all this Diversity goes together splendidly in one large Vessel, and we ate our reading.

*****

Afterword…

I forwarded this post to Brad, Cesca and LiSe before publishing it. Let me just add their comments to the pot:

Brad says:

“* I don’t see the these particular ways of seeing as irreconcilable – they simply can’t be added together without having the picture evolve and deepen. But it’s true that I can’t reconcile something like bunched fat meats or cleaved ewe shins or twitching captives with my own understanding.

* “hateful people” – I read “(on)  seeing the worst (or wrongness) in others”, but for me it means simply that we need to start by seeing others for who they really are and respond accordingly.”

(See how he says he sees hexagram 38 differently? A few decades of working with Yi have left the man with a pretty nicely developed sense of irony, so I expect he sees what he’s done there… 😉 )

Cesca says:

“The only thing I can add is that I tend to think of 38 as “Strange” … and LiSe’s house was itself like a character in a strange dream  🙂   (My dreams almost always include the environment in which they take place as a sort of character, and that house is quite a character!)”

Very, very true. Even the spiders in the Heyboer house make art.

And LiSe says:

“I love it! But you forgot the bus driver who had to ask the passengers for directions. She had never before been there, and when the road seemed blocked by the big whateveritwas (a JCB?) she thought she had lost the right road.”

That was when we were on our way in for the day’s meandering in Amsterdam. Definitely ‘no beginning’ whatsoever.

She also points out that you add the soy sauce after frying the onions, which is good to know.