It occurs to me that back in an agrarian society, every ordinary activity would have its ritual place in the bigger scheme of things. Ploughing, sowing, harvesting, storing and ripening – these things have so much latent meaning that we still use them as part of our daily language even now. (Projects ‘break new ground’, ideas ‘bear fruit’, and so on.) And at each stage you would know the names of the particular gods and spirits who participated in what you were doing. In other words, you knew what your activities meant.
Now… what is the god or spirit of setting up email filters, or redesigning a website, or installing a new program? I spend most of my waking hours working in this virtual world, and I felt the need to bring some ‘ritual significance’ to my daily activities.
So I thought of a new question to ask Yi – no, actually, I simply rephrased a very old question to ask Yi. ‘What is the ritual of doing this?’ Or, ‘What is its sacred significance?’
I asked this first about a project that’s taken much of my time and energy lately – moving the I Ching Community over to new and better software, and integrating it with some more general-purpose membership software at the same time. In practice this means time spent fiddling with templates, forging through thickets of menu options searching for the one I need, technical messages to forums, entreaties to helpdesks, and really nothing anyone else would ever want to hear about…
So what is the ritual, the sacred significance, of changing forum software?
Yi says it’s Hexagram 5, Waiting, changing to Hexagram 11, Flowing.
To Wait for – or on – something is to prepare for it, to invite it into being with activity and faith. The new software is Waiting for the renewed Flow of communication and creativity, and so am I. I’m preparing the ground for people to move in, inviting the ‘rain’ of participation (and purchases). I’m preparing food and drink (new features, new downloads for members) and laying them out, and also relishing them myself.
What I love about this answer, though, is how directly it responds to the thoughts behind my question. In the ideogram for Hexagram 5, someone is dancing under the falling rain. I’m not just editing templates and setting file permissions, I’m performing a rain dance.