Going With The Flow
Tai - Peace - Hexagram 11
A peace must be made with this rain.
The earth is steaming,
rising up,
in the politics of Spring.
New life and old
are mixing irrevocably,
the dry limbs waiting to be caught
carried downstream,
stark calls from hungry baby birds,
waiting for the carrion to come to them.
a turtle carcass on the drive.
Heaven rains down,
forcing a reckoning with all the old ways.
Earth comes heavy to the new,
but we can sit content,
to be wet
with all we know,
each body a conduit,
a flow,
a mix of conscious and unconscious
of dirt and air and light,
upright
just right.
The Tiger and The Butterfly
Balance is a tricky thing. Keeping your balance in life seems like a great idea, yet the reality of balance is that it is a moving target. What is balance today might not be balance tomorrow. In fact, what is balance changes moment to moment. You might think that keeping your balance is a matter of finding out what you need and then doing that same thing day after day. One day, though, you might wake up and find out that things have changed and what you did yesterday is not working today. Now you will need to tread lightly, with care, to discover what kind of action will restore balance.
Yesterday, I discovered this delicate being balancing ever so gently but ever so tenaciously to a leaf in the stream. Fluttering in the current and yet remaining almost stationary on the top of the water doing I don’t know what. S/he inspired me greatly with both her/his beauty and with her determination to stay balanced just so in a moving flow of water. Hexagram 10 - Lü – Treading, is not actually about treading water, but this image still brings this hexagram’s meaning to my mind.
Hexagram 10- Lü is about a situation where the balance of power is critical and delicate. And it is about how you might restore balance through a very certain kind of approach. The image is of a person potentially treading on a tiger’s tail. The Tiger in Chinese culture is an animal associated with great power, great energy and treading on the tiger’s tail is the idea of working with great power.
The moment, however, is delicate; you are feeling your own power matched with the power of the world or another being and you are feeling the inherent risk of action at a time of when such energy is present. Risk coupled with intuition, with knowing can be a vulnerable feeling, a true moment of needing to maintain some kind of balance. Can you hold your own feeling and your own knowing in the presence of risk, power and adventure?
The situation where you need to tread lightly, heeding the power within and the power without, is not unusual. A place where this situation develops frequently is in the doctor’s office. Here, in the doctor’s office, you cannot miss the aura of power, the power of modern medicine. Yet, it is also here, in the place of that kind of power, where your own power is critical. Here in the room with a doctor of any sort, someone with lots of power from some point of view, it is critical that you bring your own power, the power of your own knowing, the power grown from your own investigation of your body and your life. And it is a situation where you would most like to keep your balance, keep your place so that you can gain access to whatever is necessary to move you forward in your life.
The power of your own knowing comes directly from the power of choice, from being aware of your choices. And balance, this kind of dialogue between inner and outer power, comes from willingness to receive and exchange both information and experience. You have to offer yourself, your symptoms and experience of your body in the case of the doctor’s office, and you have to be willing to receive whatever information or examination the doctor is offering.
The time of growth in the world or growth and change in the body can be both profuse and inspiring, and it might cause you to feel vulnerable. You might feel vulnerable even weak, and yet you might also feel a kind of power and inspiration that arises from the direct encounter with body truth. This is, then, a moment to take risks, to experiment and test the reins of your own power. To do this with any efficacy, that is, without losing your balance, though, two things are required; fearlessness and gentleness.
Your gentleness has to come from being willing to see why you might be afraid, from being willing to acknowledge exactly what you are dealing with, whether it be emotional, mental or physical. By acknowledging the source of power, the elements that are in play for you, you gain a “tread”, a foothold on the journey and you become fearless. Fearlessness here is not an absence of fear, but rather your own presence, your own willingness to BE in the situation, to feel your fear and yet continue to tread lightly. Afraid you might be, but, in fact, you are here, you are aware. You are choosing to engage this delicate situation.
Your fearlessness, coupled with your gentleness, creates that delicate balance of power that allows you to “fly”, to “leap”, to “pounce” or even to walk on water if need be. By knowing the moment, both its power and risk, its delicacy and its potential, something you can only know by being fully immersed, fully with the moment itself, you become powerful like the tiger and delicate like the butterfly. Keeping the wings of fearlessness and gentleness, your risk will be right, not too much and not too little, but enough to keep you going, treading the tiger’s tail, agile, delicate but strong in the flow of life.
Nurturing the Smallest Possible Thing
This week is the moment of growth where all you can do is stand and witness. Things are exploding. Each and every living thing is singing, dancing, stretching, greening, waving, waking. You want this movement, this growth and yet it can be overwhelming.
You acknowledge that what is growing is still small, still fragile, still, as yet, not completely formed. Whether it is an idea, an animal, a plant or a person, this stage of growth is often not well-ordered or well-mannered. You realize in your watchful way that this dis-order is not, in fact, dis-ease. This dis-order is creativity, growth. When you witness patiently such growth in its dis-order, the creative has room to find full expression, room to bring in unexpected yet welcome innovation.
In nature, you will see this kind of energy in the way grass (and dandelions) will grow wherever they can, in the way birds will nest in the most unlikely of places (like the bathroom vent or the gutter), or in yourself as you move to order your world and fall in love all over again with your oldest pair of shoes. As you tend and witness this stage of growth in people, too, you will often see great bouts of ideas, inspirations, creative projects beginning to take shape.
Try this; sit and take in a whole tree. Sit and see if you can see each and every leaf, each and every blossom, each and every shaking limb even for just a moment. Can you relax your eyes, your senses and see every little thing? Can you bear witness to things and energy without claiming any for your own? Witnessing like this is, for me, like holding a chicken. I never really wanted to hold a chicken, they seem so nervous, so senseless to me. Yet holding that living breathing, mostly crazy being, I felt such incredible softness with such a rapid delicate heart I could have cried with love. What you witness is not yours and yet it becomes an experience in your world.
This is Xiao Chu - Hexagram 9 - Small Accumulates. It doesn’t sound like much and yet this is the power of caring for each and every thing in your world. Each relationship, each plant, each item of clothing or each book. In your care you gather the energy without owning any of it. You appreciate, take in, give of your attention, but you don’t try to own or squirrel such a thing away. You allow it to keep growing. This is the essence of our gentle care, the result our sensitive witnessing; the room to grow.
