Staking out New Ground (I Ching, 3 — zhun)

3. zhun — water/thunder
XIX/XXI

DIFFICULTY-HESITATION-HOARDING-SPROUTING-GARRISON

The original meaning of zhun is of a sprouting seedling, but it is also associated with gathering, either of grain or of men. Its earliest meaning might be military - an army encampment or garrison. For more, see here.
http://www.yijing.nl/i_ching/hex_1-16/03-04.htm

Difficulty. The risks are high, but the omens are good. Do not act. You do not have a direction. Appoint noble princes.

   1.    Stone pillars. Favourable sign for a dwelling. Appoint noble princes.

   2.    As if stuck, as if blocked, if chariots and horses come teeming like bandits trying to steal a marriage match, let them hear the female fortune: she will not marry, for ten years she will not bear children.

    3.    If you stalk deer without vigilance, you end up straying into the centre of the forest. The noble person is subtle. He returns home, not letting on that he is lost. Going on will bring bad luck.

    4.    If chariots and horses come teeming, seeking a marriage match, then auspicious that you should go. Nothing unfavourable will come of it.

    5.    Saving the deer fat, if there is little, the omens are good; but hoarding much, the omens are bad.

    6.    If chariots and horses come teeming, shedding floods of tears, then the blood of the relatives has flowed.

Commentary: Staking out new territory, it is often better not to have a pre-conceived purpose because you are not in a position to have one, just as a plant sends out roots in all directions. When French settlers colonized America, they came with big projects, the British with none. The French settlements quickly collapsed, the British thrived, adapting better to the conditions around them. The meaning of this hexagram is perseverance in non-action while staking out new territory.

Both translation and commentary are my interpretation from various sources, and probably my last post on the I Ching. I wish you all good luck in your new encampments!

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Painting: by Adèle Aldridge from ichingmeditations.com
Video: 'Any Road' by George Harrison. Lyrics here.

Enthusiasm, Excess, Happiness (I Ching, 16 — yù)

 16. yù — thunder/earth
XXI/XXX

 ENTHUSIASM-EXCESS-HAPPINESS


When we are enthused, when we are happy, when we have a surplus, it is worthwhile to get organized, appoint helpers and venture out on worthwhile projects. 

 

1. Trumpeting out our enthusiasm does no good. It wastes the energy that should be reserved for action.

2. Our certainty is as solid as a rock, but by the end of the day, we are spent. This bodes well! Just observe the rising of negative thoughts, and cut them at the root.

3. If we depend on others to reinforce our enthusiasm, and for self-verification, then we will regret it. Any delay will bring regret. Do good without thought, quickly! For if you are slow, doubt will overcome you.

4. Become acquainted with the well-spring of your enthusiasm. If it is great, then it will bring fortune and success. Have no doubt that if you persist in your truth, friends will stand by you as in a hairpin to assist in your venture.

5. Know the sources of enthusiasm that bode ill and will cause you suffering. Ultimately, they will not kill you, but be sure to learn from them. Observing your feelings with a friendly detachment, you allow life to become your teacher. As you grow out of the shell of your conditioning, you begin to write your own destiny.

6. If enthusiasm arises from dark motives, then you may succeed at first, but it will be a pyrrhic victory. That’s life! Change course to what is balanced and correct to align with your inner truth. This will always serve you best in the long run.
 

 
Image Explanation by Margaret Pearson: Thunder over Earth. Early Chinese envisaged earthquakes as thunder breaking out of the earth. Having excess is likened to such an upheaval. This image reminds us that having much can be dangerous if it is not shared in appropriate ways. With increased wealth or power come responsibilities too great for one person to control alone. Having too much can end up being upsetting as earthquakes upset the earth. New forms must be created to delegate, to recognize the good in others and to celebrate in sacred rites and song the joy that comes from abundance. Some of the excess must be sacrificed to the Highest Power, and then shared among those whom we can trust to take care of our community. Only in this way can we be worthy of those who have contributed to the fortune of our present situation. (based on "The Original I Ching", Margaret Pearson)

The version in green is my own, from various sources.

Another good link:
http://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/learn/gua/hexagrams/hexagram16.php


Paintings: by Adèle Aldridge from ichingmeditations.com
Photo: by Diana Paola from dianapaola8.tumblr.com

The Magic of the Crossroads

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind? 

— W. B. Yeats

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath is enlarging space.
Among the rafters of dark belfries
let yourself ring. What preys on you will

strengthen from such nourishment.
Come and go with metamorphosis.
What’s your most painful experience?
If the drinking is bitter, turn to wine.

In this huge night, become
the magic at the crossways of your senses.
Be what their strange encounter means

And if the earthly forgets you,
say to the quiet earth: I flow.
Speak to the rushing water — say: I am.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Songs of Orpheus, trans. David Young

“There are said to be certain Mexican shamans whose magic is based on a performance of the crossroads, wherein the act of situating themselves in a crisis of choice between multiple, indeterminate directional possibilities summons an intense cosmic energy with which they can change their identity at will. Personal transformation is brought on through agonistic self-splitting and animistic metamorphosis. Ohmaxac - at the crossroads.”

— Edgar Garcia, Review: Poetry’s Fork

“In the early Christian era, many Celtic Christians embarked on a kind of pilgrimage called a peregrinatio. Unlike the pilgrimages to the Holy Land undertaken by Christians in the Middle Ages, a peregrinatio proposes no specific relic to see, shrine to visit, or icon to venerate.  Nothing allows the pilgrim to return home with a sense of ‘I’ve been there and done that.’  Instead, a peregrinatio is a wandering into the unknown, inaugurated by the pilgrim’s inner conviction of fate and fortune.  Essentially a peregrinatio represents travel for the sake of Love, initiated and sustained by the love of God.  It calls the traveler to leave all that is familiar, to let go of security and any goals or desires for life except one; to find the place of one’s own resurrection.”

—Karla Kincannon, Creativity and Divine Surprise

“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”

—Hermann Hesse, Demian

Karol said: I love Hermann Hesse, and writings like the above is the reason why. I don't know where or when I came to that place when I stopped seeking in the stars or in books, but I have. I now experience the same sense of bewilderment... " like the
life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves." Maybe this happens to all people with age.. I wonder.
Great quote. Great book. Thanks Okei

Thanks Karol! you are the first Disqus commenter on Karmice Tumblr. :) Kudos to you... and I'm obviously not at that stage, because I just got the book! lol

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”

— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil 

Paintings: 'Rapunzel' by Emma Florence Harris (1914), 'Night' (1870) & 'The Heart of the Lotus' by Edward Burne-Jones
Photo:  Peregrine Falcon in flight (Morro Bay, California) by Kevin Cole

Nightly Meditations

Myōe (Japanese Zen priest, writing in 1224): 

The winter moon comes from the clouds to keep me company.
The wind is piercing, the snow is cold.

Myoe gives an unusually detailed account of its origins: “On the night of the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year 1224, the moon was behind clouds. I sat in Zen meditation in the Kakyu Hall. When the hour of the midnight vigil came, I ceased meditation and descended from the hall on the peak to the lower quarters, and as I did so the moon came from the clouds and set the snow aglow. The moon was my companion, and not even the wolf howling in the valley brought fear. When, presently, I came out of the lower quarters again, the moon was again behind clouds. As the bell was signalling the late-night vigil, I made my way once more to the peak, and the moon saw me on the way. I entered the meditation hall, and the moon, chasing the clouds, was about to sink behind the peak beyond, and it seemed to me that it was keeping me secret company.” He then went on to compose a second poem:

I shall go behind the mountain. Go there too, O moon.
Night after night we shall keep each other company.

After spending the rest of the night in the meditation hall, he opens his eyes to see the moon in the dawn, lighting up the window. “In a dark place myself, I felt as if my own heart were glowing with light which seemed to be that of the moon.” There follows a third poem:

My heart shines, a pure expanse of light;
And no doubt the moon will think the light its own.

Excerpted from the Nobel prize lecture of Yasunari Kawabata (1968)
Painting: Arthur Beecher Carles, Silence (1908)
Video: Bell ringing in the dawn at Deer Park Monastery, California

A Baby Crying

What lovely singing,
Muffled and afar, became
A baby crying.

For but an instant,
Thick walls glued with books played out
Their dark melody.

—okei

Image: ‘Eithlinn in the tower’ by P. J. Lynch

The Mirror (Rumi)

Ingredients:

Rumi trans. Coleman Barks & John Moyne

Photo: Sunrise over Lake Louise, Banff National Park, Alberta by Kevin McNeal.

Directions:

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.
We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

I want to hold you close like a lute,
so we can cry out with loving.

You would rather throw stones at a mirror?
I am your mirror, and here are the stones.

Check out my beautiful new website here: http://karmice.tumblr.com

As if in Dreams...

As if in Dreams…

As if in dreams,
I held your hand
And followed you
To wonderland,
Back to the spring
In mountains grand
Where sages taught
And emperors planned
And artists wrought
Their signs in sand.

Your love touched me
With words unplanned
And now I ache
My heart expand
To fill the space
Between us spanned,
Inspired by breath
The bodhi fanned

To wake from dreams

And understand.

—okei 

This poem went through so many revisions. Thanks to Karol & Arjuna for bearing with me through them all, and giving generous feedback. I only hope this version is at least as good as the previous ones.

Painting: “La Dame A La Licorne” by Armand Point

Rainbow of Enchantment

Rainbow of Enchantment

BLACK: I want to dream inside your darkness.

VIOLET: I want to share your joy and your pain.

BLUE: I want to see the world in your eyes.

GREEN: I want to dance on your hidden shore.

YELLOW: I want to make love to you slowly.

ORANGE: I want to sense your pregnant spirit.

RED: I want to know your secret heaven.

PINK: I want to give you tears of happiness.

———WHITE: I want to be your eternal truth.———

Postscript:

GREY: I want nothing to do with your shades!

Give me music, laughter, sorrow, play

Come as child, mother, sorceress, fey,

Day or night, whatever whisperers say,

You are the sky that clouds conceal, so pray

Be shadow, dancer, rainbow, but nay!

Never, dear friend!, let desire turn grey.

—okei

In thyself, I know, you’ll find your way.

The image is something random I came across on Tumblr, and following back to the source, I found it's a vintage clothing company from Taiwan! Who'd have guessed?

http://iwes.taobao.com via http://cafeine-toism.deviantart.com/art/escape-185166564 

Unmarked Boxes (Rumi)

Grieve not, all that’s gone
will come again in other forms –
Have no doubt of this!

Did not child find joy
In its nursing and its milk?
Now sucks honeyed wine!

Joy unconditioned
Entering, moves from box to box,
From water to clay.

From the sky it pours
Its grace into the rosebed,
And earth lifts its head.

Now water, now bread,
Now beauty, now horse well-bred,
What if it’s unveiled?

It peeps and shatters
All the idols, that or this.
Isn’t it like dreams?

While the body sleeps,
The soul moves in other forms
And you say, “I dreamt!

I was a cypress,
A bed of tulips, blossoms
Of rose and jasmine.”

Then the soul returns,
To its abode, cypress gone!
Let that forewarn you!

I don’t mean trouble,
What I speak, God speaks fairer
Don’t relinquish faith!

With mantic fervour,
All speak of bread of heaven
But none dare taste it.

Gaze, O soul, upon
My starry heart to see Him
In pale reflection.

Painting: Psyche Opening the Door into Cupid's Garden by John William Waterhouse.

Psyche represents the human spirit or soul, and in mythology she was represented as a princess so beautiful that people adored her instead of Venus. To put an end to this sacrilege, Venus sent her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest creature he could find. but when Cupid saw her he fell in love and forgot his mother's command. They became lovers, though Cupid forbade Psyche ever to look upon him. When at last she did, he fled in fear of what Venus would do to him in revenge. Psyche roamed the earth in search of her lover, facing obstacles thrown in her way by Venus to prove that she was worthy of her son. One of these tasks involved a golden box which she was forbidden from opening. When she did open it, she fell into a deep sleep of death. Eventually, however, Jupiter agreed that the lovers could be united for eternity. The couple's daughter was named Voluptas ("pleasure"). In Greek mythology, Venus is represented by Aphrodite, Cupid by Eros and Jupiter by Zeus.
Source: Classical Mythology: the Ancient Myths and Legends of Greece and Rome.

 
I don't see an immediate connection between the poem of Rumi and the myth of Psyche, but perhaps one will dawn on me. They are both concerned with beauty. Perhaps another myth is relevant, the opening of Pandora's Box. Is the rending of the veils a point of both crisis and revelation, when we see beneath the many forms of beauty to the thing itself? It is a quest... of curiosity...

Additional thoughts on the connection... maybe first to seek beauty as St John of the Cross says, for the desires of the heart which come in different forms are idols for this one desire, to know beauty. As Rumi says, not to mistake the idol or box, for the grace which moves within it from one form to another.

Now Venus=Aphrodite represents beauty and she's upset that people are loving Psyche, or things of the mind, instead of the real goddess... herself! So she sends Eros to make the phantasm of the mind attracted to something ugly. Instead of which the mind falls in love with Cupid=Eros, it falls in love with love itself. The mind becomes hooked on love, but estranged from beauty's source, Venus herself. The forbidden box is supposed to have contained beauty from the underworld for Venus. But Psyche was tempted to open it to take some herself. But the box is empty. Beauty is not really in the box. The box is merely graced with its reflection. But it's nice she's forgiven her error.

The child of the mind and desire, Psyche and Eros, is pleasure. That's nice too! As opposed to suffering in the Buddhist conception. Though they are no doubt two sides of the same coin.


I did not have to ask my heart what it wanted
because of all the desires that I have ever known,
just one did I cling to,
for it was the essence of all desire:
to know beauty.

—St. John of the Cross

Uncompromising Love

Uncompromising Love

I love you.
I do not love
     your face, your hands, your voice, your words.
I love you!
I do not love you with
     my face, my hands, my voice, my words.
I love you with my whole body,
     the wholeness of you, the you-ness of you, that exotic other
     that loves me, that holds me at heart,
I hold you there too.
I love you, I kiss you,
     every square centimetre of you,
     of my imagination of you,
but is it really you?
or is it a symbol of you that I love?
a symbol of my own creation
     of wholeness, of you-ness, of exotic other.
If it were mere symbol,
then why write these lines to tell you?
except perhaps to keep the symbol alive
filling my whole being with perpetual longing
     that can never be satisfied,
     that is wholly satisfying,
     dangerous
you, I love you!

As dawn heralds the sun,
all my senses are roused
by the thought of your presence,
     haunting me,
I long for the touch of
     your face, your hands, your voice, your poetry,
that I may know you,
as if for the first time
and love you.

—okei (29th August, 2012)

Painting: “He Loves me, He Loves me not…” by Robert Fowler.

Hector said: Okei, how I love your poem. Take care, Hector

okei said: Thank you! Trying to work out what this means myself... The love is uncompromising, but it runs into an existential doubt about who is the Beloved, the "you" that I love. Although the love is whole, the Beloved must be reconstructed because this is the only way to overcome the doubt...in order to check that our idea of the Beloved has not passed into pure imagination... we must experience the parts that make up the whole. And in doing so, we reconstruct our ideal of love also, as in the beginning. So love is continuously being renewed.

Jon said: Indeed. Every time we love, it is the love of All That Is, loving itself. Every desire we have is the desire of the All That Is for itself. 

okei said: Jon, so I take it you prefer the first verse? I agree it's loving the All, but isn't there an uncertainty in the All, a doubt that we really know it? And that doubt can only be overcome by taking apart the All, uncertain of exactly what we will find, and recreating it?

Jon said: I don't think that's possible, Okei. That would make us the subject and The All the object - and, as I understand it, it's the other way round... If life is just a dream and we are the dreamers, then we are subject. But if we are the dreamed, not the dreamers, and if our apparent reality is part of the dream, then we are the object, the receivers of the verb... The very best "explanation" I've ever come across is Perfect, Brilliant Stillness, by David Carse. He had a complete awakening. The book seeks to impart some sense of the reality. I recommend it.

okei said: Thanks for the clarification. And thanks too for the book recommendation!!!

Lin said: ohh... wonderful ..... and you said you didn't get Rumi.
I think you and he both have the same relationship with Love, Beloved
but just express it differently. : )) Just great thanks for sharing.

okei said: Hey, Lin! Thanks so much, and check out this haiku version of one of Rumi's poems which I just did today

http://itsokei.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/unmarked-boxes-rumi.html

Song of the Dark Night (St. John of the Cross)

St. John of the Cross, “Song of the Dark Night”  (translated by —okei)

On a dark and windy night
With all my passions in love’s ardour pressed
O fortuitous delight!
I left without being witnessed,
My house now lying asleep in peaceful rest.

By darkness I took safe flight
Down the secret stair in concealment dressed
O fortuitous delight!
By disguise of darkness blessed
My house now lying asleep in peaceful rest.

I went out on that lucky night
Unseen I skipped in secret yearning
Not a soul crossing my sight
Without light or guide discerning
Save that flame which in my heart was burning.

This light guided me and shone
More surely than the midday sun and true
To where was waiting for me one
Who knew me well and well I knew
At that place where none appeared in view.

O dark night that was my guide!
O dark night more friendly than the dawn!
O dark night that joined the bride,
Beloved to her Lover drawn,
Lover into his Beloved re-born!

Within my flowering breast
Which entirely to him alone I swear
There he stayed in quiet rest
And all my gifts I gave him there
And the cedars too lent their breezy air.

The air down from the ramparts fanned
When I parted his hair, brushing each lock.
With the touch of his tranquil hand
In my neck I felt a shock
And all my senses stopped as still as rock.

Thoughts and memories released
Once the face upon the Lover laid.
All endeavours ceased —
Forgotten to myself I stayed,
Old cares amongst the lilies left to fade.

The last line echoes the words of Jesus:

Behold the lilies of the field; they neither spin nor weave, yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Paintings: “Monseigneur Love” by Thomas Cooper Gotch, “Solitude” by Albert Lorieux & “Blonde Nymph” by Paul Émile Chabas.

Thanks to Jon for linking Loreena McKennitt's rendition of this poem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km3zQkMl0iI

Mediterranean Travels (Goethe)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: (trans. —okei)

Do you know the land of lemon groves and pines?
Where in leafy shade, the orange golden shines.
A soft sea breeze descends from an azure sky,
The myrtle standing calm and the laurel high.
                     There! There!
Would I with you, oh my dearest!, like to roam.

Painting: The Bridesmaid by John Everett Millais.

Humilty (Goethe)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: (trans. —okei)

Humility 

In the masterworks I see
How their magic works on me
Through their beauteous harmony. 
Gazing at what I have wrought,
I see what I really sought —
How much still to do I ought!

Painting: Charles E Perugini “Girl Reading”, also known as ”In the Orangerie”.