I need help with my missing cat!

[emiliana2010]

Hello everybody,

Robin, my beloved cat, is missing since the morning. We live in a flat, so whenever he asks for it (a couple of times a day) I bring him downstairs and let him out. After a couple of hours or so I call him and he comes, eager to go back upstairs.
Today it didn't go this way. Now it's evening and I am chocked with anxiety.

I asked the I Ching:
What's his actual situation? 55.4>36
What should I do to find him? 48.3.5>7
Where can I find him? 27.3>22
Will he be back home? 31.3.6>12

I am so tense that I don't manage to make head or tail of these answers.

Please, does anybody understand what is the I saying?

 

[Tim K]

I think he has found some temporary shelter/home (55.4).
Don't look for him, waste of time (27.3)

To find him - keep the door open so to say, put some fresh water outside? (48.5)

He will come (31.3) he still follows you, when he is hungry (31.6).

 

[emiliana2010]

Hi Tim,
thanks for taking your time to help me.
It didn't occur to me to leave some water outside for Robin, so thank you for the input. I've placed a bowl of water by the side of the garden fence in a spot where I know he has a secret passage.

In the past he's been locked in a garage a few times, and I imagine the same has happened now. It seems that all I can do is wait...uch:

 

[emiliana2010]

Outcome

Several times during the day I went rounding in the neighborhood calling him, but the result was zero. Around 01:00 at night the summer frenzy subsided (I live in a touristic seaside place) and slowly things felt kind of peaceful. From time to time I kept calling him up from the balcony, and when I did it at 01:45, there I see him running toward the entry door! Dirty, thirsty, hungry. Now he's grooming himself on the bed.

Yes, actively looking for him was useless, but it made me feel okay with myself and helped me reduce the anxiety . I can tell he's been somewhere wet and muddy, and his underbelly is full with spiky rounded seeds.

Thanks again Tim K!

 

[Liselle]

Thank goodness he's home safely!! (and relatively quickly - he wasn't lost for days on end) Poor dear.

Now that this is over, it might be useful not to just drop your readings in relief. It might be a good opportunity to learn some things about the I Ching.

For example, 31.6 - "Influence in your jaws, cheeks and tongue" - sometimes this means "it's all just talk, when what you need is action." I have personal experience of it that way - "you can't just do readings about how to fix something, Lisa, you have to actually work on it."

In this example, though - I'm noticing Yi doesn't actually say whether this is good or bad. There's no omen word in the line. So it might have referred to you calling him. Maybe going around the neighborhood earlier in the day was a good thing to do. It didn't produce immediate results, but maybe he heard you, and maybe it comforted him and kept a connection alive. The zhi gua for 31.6 is 33, Retreat (the zhi gua of a line is the hexagram that would be relating if only that line changed - 31 with line 6 changing moves to 33). 33 probably described Robin - he had retreated somewhere.

And then of course when you called him at a quieter time he ran towards you.

55.4 - "Feng is screened off At midday, seeing the Dipper. Meeting your hidden lord, Good fortune" - this is a description of a solar eclipse (although I believe it's been proven to have actually been sunspots - I think this is the blog post where Hilary shared that with us). But regardless, such things must have been frightening to people 3000 years ago who didn't understand what was going on. 55 is also a hexagram of feeling overwhelmed, but still marching out rather than hiding. So in Robin's case it might mean that something scared him and caused him to hide. "Meeting" that, "good fortune" might have meant that if he had come out earlier in the day, he would have found the frightening thing was gone and he could have come home as usual.

That might tie into 48.3 - "Well is dredged, no drinking. This makes my heart ache. It can be used to draw water, With the king’s clear vision, People together accept its blessing" - whatever frightened him was gone, and he could have come out, but he didn't, which made both you and him sad (perhaps needlessly).

(But, I mean, he's a cat - I'm certainly not blaming the poor thing for being scared and hiding. He came out when he felt it was safe, and when he heard your voice. But I think part of what Yi's doing here is just stating the impartial facts - it would have been safe for Robin to come out earlier.)

Here are all your lines, for reference (I find it helps to have everything in front of me). It might be helpful to see them as a single unit of conversation. Yi can do different things in a series of readings. It might stop answering the questions directly, and start addressing you and your state of mind. It might expand on or reinforce something it said earlier. It might give additional facts or information. (Or not - it might just answer the questions. But you should allow for different things, and try to spot them if they're there.)

Also don't ignore the Oracle and Image texts of the primary and relating hexagrams. I didn't paste them here (to keep this post from being even longer), but you could add them. Looking at the hexagrams by themselves helps you see the general overview, and then the lines are specifics within that. For example, 55 > 36 - Robin is "overwhelmed" and "hiding his brightness."

55.4
"Feng is screened off At midday, seeing the Dipper. Meeting your hidden lord, Good fortune."

48.3
"Well is dredged, no drinking. This makes my heart ache. It can be used to draw water, With the king’s clear vision, People together accept its blessing."

48.5
"The well: clear, cold spring water to drink."

27.3
"Rejecting nourishment. Constancy, pitfall. For ten years, don’t act. No direction bears fruit."

31.3
"Influence in your thighs, Holding on to your following Going on, shame."

31.6
"Influence in your jaws, cheeks and tongue."


All of that is Hilary's translation, from her book.

 

[emiliana2010]

Hi Lisa,

yes, I treasure this experience as a learning opportunity to better understand the Yi. Now I can understand some of the Yi lines in what happened yesterday in a way that was impossible before, like 31.6. While rounding the neighborhood, my calling out for Robin took some people's attention. They wanted to know the what and the when and the who and what color and what size and talk and talk and talk about what happened to their cats and to the cats of their friends, while I just wanted to tell them that my cat was missing, please let me know if you get a glimpse of him, and get on with my search. Also the meaning of the Zhi Gua is clear now, I definitely felt like retreating from that endless talking. But yesterday I couldn’t make any sense out of 31.6!

31.3 "Influence in your thighs, Holding on to your following Going on, shame.” Yes, all my searching did not produce any result there and then, and the "shame" caused by it very likely were the fears and the scary thoughts I was facing.

The baffling thing is that my question was: “Will Robin be back home?” The changing lines I received describe situations and feelings that I lived and felt, furthermore 12 as a relating hex was igniting all my fears more then describing Robin’s coming back. So, I’m a bit puzzled about this.

“What’s his actual situation?” 55.4>36 Seeing the way Robin was caked with mud and whatever else makes me guess that he must have been hiding at the river, probably in a large pipe that runs under the bridge and that is - to a cat - easily accessible from the condo garden. It could very well have happened that some hostile cats (Robin is the new kid on the block!) controlled the exit of the pipe, forcing him to stay there hours on end. This scenario would fit with the dark place even at midday.

48.3.5>7 is hinting at water (the river?). My question was: “What should I do to find him?”, so, if Robin was indeed in the pipe, the Yi was suggesting me to go there, since drinking water runs in pipes… Too farfetched?

27.3>22 “Where can I find him?” This reading is still quite vague to me. I gather that I was off the path with the where and the how I was looking for him. But yesterday it felt that calling out to him was all that I could do…

Thanks again Lisa, you prompted me to an exercise that is precious and very very enlightening!

Hugs and all the best!

 

[Liselle]

31.6 as overly-talkative neighbors - could be. 48 meaning the pipe also sounds reasonable. Most of us don't have actual wells anymore, pipes are the source of water. As you're saying it could fit with Robin being caked in mud (poor cat ).

31 > 12 for "will he be back home" - might describe how to have influence at a time of being blocked? Maybe it's presenting two alternatives for having influence - "influence in your thighs" (walking around looking for him) won't work, "influence in your jaws..." (you calling him, if it wasn't describing the chatty neighbors) is presented with no omen. If you'd been walking around looking you wouldn't have been home to open the door, you wouldn't have seen him running towards the building...

I agree the last two readings sound like bad news, but it might be important that they were last, and before that you'd gotten two encouraging readings. So maybe by the time you got to 27>22 and 31>12, Yi was talking to you rather than about Robin. Don't act, don't pursue a "direction," don't use your thighs...

I wouldn't have understood these either, as it was happening. So maybe something else to learn is the general overview. "Bad-sounding" readings which follow "good-sounding" readings don't necessarily mean the situation has suddenly become doomed...

Another thought, trying to tie the 48 > 7 reading to your actual question, which was "what should I do to find him" - maybe it was saying you should be like a well?

Hilary's translation of 48's Oracle -

"The Well.
Moving the city, not moving the well.
Without loss, without gain,
They come and go, the well wells..."

Your natural inclination was to mount a campaign, to do something (relating hexagram 7). But the relating hexagram is not "the answer" - how it actually turned out was that Robin came home to you. He's the one who "came and went" - you stayed in one place and simply "welled." (And opened the door for him.)

Having said that - if I had a missing cat I would absolutely walk around looking for him and calling him - maybe unless I got 52 ("stilling") or 5 ("waiting") when asking what to do. You didn't get anything that clear cut.

So maybe it's more subtle? 27.3 > 22 was your third reading - the first one that sounded somewhat negative, after two that were encouraging.

"Rejecting nourishment"

- maybe referring back to the earlier readings, saying you hadn't quite gotten the message from them?

"Constancy, pitfall
For ten years, don’t act.

- don't keep asking questions? Or, remembering hexagram 7 as "mounting a campaign" - maybe it was saying it's fine to go out looking for Robin for a little while, but don't remain "constant" to that, don't walk around for "ten years." At some point go home and be stationary like a well? (The actual ending was Robin came home to you, and needed the door opened.)

"No direction bears fruit"

- having no direction bears fruit? There was success when you had less directed effort?

You might never pin this down to the nth degree. Trojina sometimes fusses at me when I try to pin things down to the nth degree, and she definitely makes a good point. Looking at these readings loosely and fuzzily, as a single conversation, prevents thinking the last couple were predicting doom, which would have been wrong.

Maybe there's also some specific nuggets, though - how "constancy" could be a pitfall, what Yi might have meant by "ten years" - things like that.

This is not the most transparent set of readings in all the world, even in hindsight...

 

[emiliana2010]

Lisa,
again thank you so much! This way of looking at the Yi answers helps me putting readings into perspective in a way I've never done by myself. And I'm sure that if I keep delving into these readings more glimpses of understanding will come!

Grazie and !