Every time I mentioned some new aspect of the Festival of Change to a certain friend and mentoring client, she’d tell me I really needed to talk to James about that. Looking at his various websites, I could see what she meant – lots of breadth there, signs of a… Read more »Introducing James Warlock
Each hexagram of the Yijing contains a nuclear hexagram at its core. And since the nuclear hexagram unfolds from lines 2-5, it’s the first and last lines, the ‘entrance and exit’ or ‘roots and shoots’ of the hexagram, that vary – so that four hexagrams can be formed around each… Read more »The family of 54
A thought about Hexagram 58, line 5… not yet completely confirmed by experience, just a thought… Hexagram 58 is Opening, Joy and Communicating: the human figure with the great mouth who seems to dance and sing. This post is about its fifth line – the peak and culmination of the… Read more »Trusting in stripping away
Every now and then, I open a book and the words leap out at me as hexagram commentary – and then ramblings like these result… Here’s Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, talking about faith. ‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘a trust in yourself, or another person, or in life itself,… Read more »Stirring the lake
It’s a worthwhile exercise to look through the Sequence of hexagrams and see how it occasionally uses trigrams to tell stories – not just in its larger landscapes, but on a small scale. I’ve written about this quite a few times before, but I just noticed one that I’d missed… Read more »A trigram sequence vignette
One of the trickier aspects of interpreting an I Ching reading has to be working out what scale the oracle’s using. By which I mean, if it says ‘good fortune’, is that a lottery win or a pot of jam in the raffle (for instance)? Does ‘misfortune’ mean mild inconvenience,… Read more »Grasping the scale of an I Ching reading
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.… Read more »Being the marrying maiden
