The I Ching Is a Map, Of Every Position That Already (and Could) Ever Exist
What this means for the hexagrams
Every hexagram is a corner of that shape. I don’t mean this metaphorically. Yes the hexagrams are presented as symbols, but in reality, they not only take up space, they are space. A specific and unique position on a hypercubed map.
Each corner has exactly six neighbours. Those six neighbours are the six hexagrams you can reach by changing one line. One line changes and you have moved along a single edge to the immediately adjacent position. Two lines change and you are two edges away. Six lines change and you have crossed the entire diameter of the space, from one corner to the corner furthest from it.
What I Ching Divination Taught Me About Parenting Teens
Rachel Cusk wrote something I have returned to many times, about how children teach us to love and in doing so reveal, slowly, the full extent of what we ourselves were never given. I think about this often with Luca, and more so this spring, when the shape of our relationship is visibly changing and I am finding that what is being asked of me now requires something I was not taught either.
I’ve been sitting with the I Ching more than usual this spring, as I tend to do when I’m in a period that doesn’t have language yet. What keeps coming up is Hexagram 53, gradual progress, the image of geese crossing water, each one taking its place in sequence, as biology has directed them to do. The commentary says the student must come to the teacher, not the other way around. If we were to push the West’s hierarchical interpretation of student and teacher, I think about how much of my parenting has been the inverse of the hexagram, showing up unrequested with the thing I thought he needed, certain I knew what it was, and being met with the withering look that teenagers reserve for exactly this kind of blunder.