A few weeks ago, I went to stay with Mum for a while, helping her out after a stay in hospital. First thing after we arrived, I asked Yi for advice for the next week or so, and received Hexagram 16, Enthusiasm, changing at the fourth line to Hexagram 2. I discovered what it meant to be the ‘source of motivation’ and to ‘gather friends together as a hair-clasp gathers hair’ – and it most definitely had its foundation in the paired line, 15.3, which is about hard work. The feeling I get from these two lines now is that there’s a mysterious realising force that is somehow invoked by simple, authentic work. It seems to create inner change that sends out a ‘ripple effect’, travelling through something other than the ordinary lines of communication.
Anyway… thinking of Hexagram 16 – enthusiasm, motivation, the inspiration of big images, the power of the elephant… – I naturally also thought about Hexagram 15 as its secure foundation. Before you can weave elephant-power into life, it helps to have met the ‘uniting rodent’, the grey rat (OK, strictly speaking it’s a giant hamster, but it does look exactly like a rat), so you don’t develop an inflated self-image. And as we crossed the threshold, I saw Mum at once as an image of myself.
Oddly enough, this had never quite sunk in before – no matter how many people mistook me for Mum over the ‘phone. But now the reading had woken me up a little, I could see myself in her as if in a mirror. Some enforced self-awareness followed.
Apparently Someone wanted to be sure I didn’t miss the point, though. Walking into Mum’s room, the first thing I saw looking out at me from her dresser – woolly-whiskered, orange-eyed – was a home-made, stuffed toy, grey rat.