As you may know, I consult Yi once a week without a specific question – just to touch base and remagnetise the inner compass. The way these readings help changes from week to week: sometimes I’ll find I’ve been given very specific advice for a situation that arises days later; sometimes it’s a message that will subsequently come at me from all sides in the course of the week until I ‘get it’; sometimes it simply orients me, shows me the mindset or stance that will carry me through.
This last week (I do each week’s reading on Sunday) has been all about Hexagram 54, line 1. Hexagram 54 is the Marrying Maiden, or maybe we should say ‘the maiden being married’. She’s the girl who is married into a new home as second wife – no experience, no control, no status, yet suddenly plunked into the middle of a bigger world, where the possibilities are on a different scale to what she’s known before.
Moving into Hexagram 54 always comes as a jolt. 53 is Gradual Development, a steady evolution into greater union, inner and outer. Gradual Development seems to me to be led and guided by inner change, that gradually finds or creates its right place outwardly. The geese find their way home, the tree on the mountain puts down roots and creates its own small ecosystem.
Hexagram 54 is literally the opposite of all this – that is, it’s the result of changing every line of 53 to its opposite. But it’s also just another way of looking at the same landscape – that is, if you turn hexagram 53 upside down (or imagine walking round to look at it from the other end), you find 54. Perhaps, no matter how gradual and measured our journey home, there is always going to be a moment of finding the world is bigger than we are, and we’re out of our depth.
I’ve actually come to associate 54 with the death of parents. No relationship now is a ‘given’ in quite the same way, and there’s no one else to be ‘the grown up’ – so you must be it. Welcome to the big people’s world.
So what’s a 54.1 week all about?
It’s about being in a situation I didn’t exactly choose, not being able to control things around me (from the paperwork required after a death to the assorted technical palaver involved in preparing a certain sale for Friends). But also it is 54’s 40, the Marrying Maiden’s Release:
‘Maiden marries as a younger sister.
Limping, can still walk.
Setting out to bring order: good fortune.’
The Release comes from setting out to do what is possible, and not tying myself in knots with what isn’t. I love this line! It’s an antidote to my usual perfectionism: you can get moving even when you’re not the embodiment of grace.
This week has been one of ‘two steps forward, one and a half back’. I find that program b is designed to integrate with program a, so I don’t need to work out how to do it from scratch after all. Then I find out that this integration doesn’t work. Then the helpful people at program a fix it for me. Then I find out that their fix doesn’t work. I have an email from them now saying they’ve solved the problem, and need to go check whether this time, they have. And so on – I won’t waste electrons with more of this.
The pattern of 54.1 seems to be ‘think you’ve made a breakthrough – find you haven’t – start again…’. And something similar is happening on an emotional level, though with fewer support tickets involved. But the end result, after all the to and fro and frustration, is that I find myself a good few steps further along.