#8 Pi䷇ (Holding Together) and #9 Hsiao Ch’u䷈ (The Taming Power of the Small)

As you are no doubt experiencing, plans are changing all the time due to COVID-19. After the winter weather and a bacterial infection in my toe, then more winter weather, my first doctor’s appointment in two years was rescheduled. I’d wanted to start walking on Monday, but was waiting for a Tuesday appointment. I called on Monday to confirm. The appointment was shifted to late July. What? They failed to send a notice. The disappointment hit me after a lapse of two weeks healing my toes, busying myself fermenting things, making a meditation cushion, studying the I Ching. I was losing my motivation. It is easier to work up the energy to go out once for a big walk then to work your energy again every week. A comfortable spot is hard to leave and gravity hard to break.

Fermenting things had become my mantra. The I Ching. Change. Before I got out for hexagram 8 and 9, my toenail fell off. That made my toe useful and happy in shoes again. How is it that we resist change and yet change all the time. Is this not suffering?


8. Pi䷇ (Holding Together)
Thursday I walked Holding Together. Water☵ over Earth☷. The waters on the surface of the earth flow together, as rivers to the ocean. All the lines of the hexagram except the 5th, the place of the ruler, are yielding (broken). The yielding lines hold together because they are influenced by this strong-willed person, the one who acts as their center of union. This guiding personality holds with the others, finding in them the complement of their own nature. (Richard Wilhelm)

Holding together plays out in the way we pursue and are pursued by others and how we find a sense of Union within. Where Hexagram #7 (An Army) was about organizing the will around the collective, Hexagram #8 (Union) is about uniting the diverse aspects of an individual and unifying that individual with others. It calls a person to be unified with life and to be unified with all aspects of who they are, to observe how current events are mirroring the condition of their inner world. (Café au Soul)

An artist/videographer joined me on this outing to document “Mountain Tea.” Humberto is a runner, not a hiker. We split a full meditation day into two to make a more pleasant walk and to allow time to film. For me, a gentler two-day walk would make a nice re-entry as I’d lost my conditioning from the weeks of waiting.

I advised we dress warm and leave the bug spray at home, but everything had changed from when I'd last been out. The snow and ice were gone. It was too warm and humid. The water on the trail had disappeared into green shoots and the bugs had arrived with fervor.

9. Hsiao Ch’u䷈  (The Taming Power of the Small)
The Gentle over The Creative. Dense clouds, no rain. Wind☴ over Sky☰. “Because of one weak Yin line holding the 4th place among five strong Yang lines, we see how something small can tame the powerful. Yin is the gentle influence operating in Tao that magnetizes the powerful Yang… Opposition, the hidden influence of how we meet our Shadow, the repressed qualities of ourselves in another. We think someone is the enemy when they have come to set us free from self-imposed restrictions” (Café au Soul).

Two weeks ago there were bare gray slim trunks standing amid bleached forest floors. The scenery is now a soft young palette, green and mottled with life. The wet paths are dry, the small puddles, olive green depressions and the large puddles, small. The gnats and black flies have been born with impertinence and hurtle themselves into your ears, brow, glasses and windpipe. The night was warm and quiet save for one barred owl and one thrush and the slow wind waving at the treetops. A few hours of light rain put me to sleep again.

I stole two cheap wooden posts from the trail and removed their plastic signs to set my tarp. With a flat-ish rock, I hammered them in. Though they were much too tall and made an imperfect shelter, sagging in places, but it kept the gear dry, and my hobo stove smoked away the bugs and purified the river water for miso soup.

I ate potato chips in the night them dreamed someone was coming to steal my food. I made a groaning noise to scare them off and woke myself up and laughed about it.

In the morning, we walked by two the old cemeteries and the big beaver pond and out of in Pisgah State Park into the mean old clear cuts in Swanzey and back into the wildlife safety zones and second growth forests of Horatio Colony Preserve. All that consistent gray is now consistent green, seemingly friendlier. Frogs in the ponds, woodpeckers in the trees, a few storybook chipmunks on their storybook logs, a brief blue moth. Save for one older couple out walking their shepherd, there was no one in the way. A few days ago it was snowing. Today was too warm to be hiking hard. I poured stream water over my head. For one mile, the trail was populated with Eastern/Red-spotted Newts, cute little salamanders that command a big presence.