No mud, no
lotus.
It is
an unavoidable fact
of life that inferior influences
sometimes prevail: improperly motivated
people ascend to power, there is injustice and conflict
and poverty, and spiritual life in general descends into darkness
and decay. While these difficult times are inevitable — and the arrival
of this hexagram indicates that this is such a time — this does
not mean that we have to stagnate personally as well.
By turning inward and realigning ourselves
with proper principles, we initiate
the return to light, truth
and progress.
The image
of P’i is of heaven
moving away from the earth.
When this happens, the inferior qualities
in ourselves and in others come to the surface and
seek expression. It is unlikely now that you can affect what
others do and say or that your activities will bear much fruit. While
it is natural to feel anxious and disappointed about this state of
affairs, it is essential to disengage from these inferior
emotions now. To indulge in them is to
abandon your superior self and
plunge into a state of
disintegration.
What is
wise now is to accept
that external progress is unlikely.
Turn your attention inward and examine your
own thoughts and attitudes for inferior influences
and departures from the principles of the Sage.
By withdrawing into solitude and refining
your higher nature, you continue
to grow while all else around
you stagnates.
from The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Hexagram 12, P’i Standstill (Stagnation)
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I have studied
and become intimate with
the speed of darkness. It’s so fast it’s
always here. When the light withdraws
the dark comes from no place. It always lives
with us. Your heart and brain are black.
They never see the true light except in violence
or autopsy. Of course the brain can cast
its own blinding light that we wait for in a poem,
at least blinding to us. In our trances the loves
of long ago enter the room unescorted, silent
perhaps from the black bottom of the ocean
where we all die in perfect darkness, a sense
of whirling that recedes back to the time
the ocean swallowed the smallest stars
then heated us into our early life.
Darkness is always there,
it only stands
revealed.
If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.
In
a life properly lived,
you’re a river. You touch things lightly
or deeply; you move along because life herself moves,
and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan
applicable to all situations; you just have to go
with the “beingness” of life,
as Rilke would
have it.