A rather interesting image for today's hexagram casting: A tree by an exhausted lake, a man sits under the tree but cannot move (47 becoming 58)

BLOT: (12 Aug 2015 - 06:32:58 PM)

A rather interesting image for today's hexagram casting: A tree by an exhausted lake, a man sits under the tree but cannot move (47 becoming 58)

I have been once again studying The I Ching because back when I was into most forms of divination—tarot and tea leaves and palm reading and candle dripping and so forth—it was the I Ching that felt most like something you could use in life. They were not so much fortunes, though they are also that, as states of being and a meditations on the changing forces in life. Sure, it is a bit tied up into a certain era of Chinese society, but I truly like it.

As part of my study of it, I am trying to now cast a broad "What's the mood of the day?" hexagram, which is point of study and something like a meditation image for the day and also a writing prompt [though the intensity of doing that, poorly, yesterday may have pre-emptively spoiled this lattermost enterprise]. Yesterday's was an image of clouds covering a blue sky, and how actions are prone to destructive reaction, so no-action is required. Today's, though, man...it hit right in the belt.

The image of this one is a lake whose water has dried up. There is a trickle of water in the bottom, but the ground water and the filling streams are not flowing into the lake. Alongside the lake is a dead tree, and under it is a man. He sits under the tree because any action will increase his exhaustion. Since he cannot act, he can only inwardly prepare. The lake will refill, and when it does it will have a quantity of water above and below, so that the lower lake flowing upwards fills the one above, and the lake flowing downward fills the one below, and they maintain one another, representing something like people and situations feeding each other for the better. For now, though, it is necessary for the man under the tree to wait and to not move outwardly, but he must move inwardly, learning himself before the water returns.

Considering that the number one way I would describe my mood lately is as "exhausted", there you go. It's me, so in my mental image of the man by the lake, I picture him smiling and staring into the waste. Of course, even a dry lake bed is a monumental thing. And hey, let's focus on the waiting and resting until the better times show up.

Anyone reading it, feel free to take it as a writing prompt and run with it.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2015