The Yijing’s full of imagery. Even though the first impression when you open it is one of wall-to-wall text, it’s also a picture book. In last month’s ‘Connecting with Imagery’ workshop I put a reading on the screen and asked people to mark all the images they could see. They… Read more »Layer cake imagery (and Hexagram 53)
Marriage is one of the Yijing’s most-used recurring images – and in relationship readings, it’s one of the easiest to relate to. Hexagram 54, the Marrying Maiden, has told a lot of women, quite straightforwardly, that she’s not the most important thing to him. (Maybe another woman is, or maybe… Read more »Understanding marriage imagery
As I’ve probably mentioned from time to time, I’m working on an enlarged and improved version of the Words of Change Yijing glossary, to be included as part of the upcoming journal software. This gives me the perfect excuse for lots of completely engrossing research and exploration into Yi, while… Read more »Marriage and Mandate
This is a follow-up post from these two, about a reading. (And there will be more to come: a single post covering three lines, change patterns and speculations about trigram changes would have been ridiculously long.) Thought in passing… Talking to people in the comments on those posts about personal… Read more »The basic human need Yi answers, part 3: the change
‘Gradual advance. The woman marries. Good fortune. Constancy bears fruit.’ Hexagrams 53 and 54, Gradual Advance and the Marrying Maiden, are what Stephen Karcher calls ‘The Great Marriages’. So what does ‘marriage’ mean? To a large extent, that depends on your perspective: in old China, marriage for the man means… Read more »Hexagram 53 musings
Following on from a post on hexagram 53, line 1… ‘Wild geese gradually advance to the shore. The small child, danger, There are words, No mistake.’ The obvious question about this line – and I always like to ask the most obvious question – is ‘Why is the small child… Read more »Wild geese and small child
There’s a lot going on in the first line of Hexagram 53: ‘Wild geese gradually advance to the shore. The small child, danger, There are words, No mistake.’ This is the first stage in the journey of the wild geese as they gradually draw close to their natural home. Now… Read more »The wild geese at the shore
