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27

A sage bush

Dispersing Nourishment

This is an embarrassingly ‘first world problems’ kind of reading, but happily Yi doesn’t judge – and it was tremendously helpful at the time, so I thought it would be a good one to share. The background How were things for you in March 2020? Round here, they were just… Read more »Dispersing Nourishment

Mountain above: hexagrams 26 and 27

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Mountain above

Two more hexagrams with mountains on top, two more intriguing trigram pictures… Hexagram 26, Great Taming Hexagram 26 is ‘Great Taming’; ‘taming’, chu, originally means simply to rear domestic animals. Great Taming – rearing big animals, like the horse, bullock and boar in the moving line texts. By extension, it… Read more »Mountain above: hexagrams 26 and 27

empty speech bubbles suspended in blue space

When Yi says ‘me’

By and large, we know what sort of thing we expect Yi to say (though not, heaven knows, what it will say): ‘Here’s what you’re doing’ or ‘here’s what would happen’ or ‘here’s how to cope with that’ – something along those lines, describing or advising. Only every now and then… Read more »When Yi says ‘me’

Hexagram 27, Nourishment

Name and Nature The name of Hexagram 27 translates literally not as ‘Nourishment’ but as ‘Jaws’ – not something we call it, because shark. But it does help to remember that it’s not specifically about nourishment (of whatever kind), but rather about the framework that makes nourishment possible. Just looking… Read more »Hexagram 27, Nourishment

A baton being passed from one hand to the next

Book of stories: what follows

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Book of Stories

A few posts ago, I tried to list all Yi’s ways of telling stories:

  • those little one-line vignettes
  • allusions to the culture’s big stories – both history and myth
  • the individual steps of the Sequence of Hexagrams (‘Here’s how you reach this place.’)
  • the huge narrative arcs of the Sequence – ‘you are here’ on the grand scale
  • multiple moving line readings that unfold one line at a time
  • the ‘nuclear story’ within each hexagram
  • the stories told through the connections between readings

So I’ve written about the vignettes and the mythical allusions, and now we come to individual steps through the Sequence.