The I Ching continually blows my mind ...

Long story short: I recently began to hone a memoir that I have been struggling to write since my mother died over seven years ago. A sage and prominent writer recently offered himself as the author-in-residence at my local library ... and I gave him my manuscript to assess. He called it "beautifully written" ... and "raised to the level of art." I feel that my work has been smitten with grace ... that I have been both blessed, and called to honour my mother's memory through what I write. I feel humbled and responsible to hold the sacredness of my mother's life intact as I reveal some of our shared history ...


... and here is where the Oracle comes in. This morning, I apprehended a transformation that has been informing me for years ... suffusing my entire being ... remolding lifelong conflicts and misunderstandings into a serene, reconciled awareness of forgiveness and atonement --> at-one-ment. Every small story ... every moment ... has blended into a resting whole.


Oh! I love intuition.

I realized this morning a completion of a theme ... a circling of memory into meaning -- and that is the resting place. That is where the Oracle calls me to see this completion as a Hexagram, as a Principle.

I didn't cast my coins; instead, I remembered ... and found myself returning to the holiest places of my childhood. Most of those places were watery: lakeside summer camps; the Caribbean Sea; my grandfather's home -- and his swimming pool.

A few of those places were the homes of elders who nourished me ... the homes of my grandmother, whose warm vanilla pudding was always capped with banana slices ... and the blue-halled house of a nanny whose kitchen was scented with freshly baked cookies. Years ago, I wrote a poem about this place:

Memory

"...sweet wet flour," I read,

in a book about somebody's grandmother's kitchen,

and I'm in La-La's house, bracing

my little self against a knobby blue wall;

I'm a shadow, barely breathing,

knowing

that somewhere,

cookies lie in wait.

...Watery places and sources of nourishment ... I intuitively thought, "Water over Earth" -- Hexagram 8. UNION.

I grabbed my I Ching texts ... I searched out "Hexagram 8" online. I scribbed in my journal 'til my hand cramped.

"Things come together," the Oracle says of the 8th Hexgram. "Things are known as one."

What is the apprehension of a truth if not the blending and reconciling of seemingly disparate and paradoxical elements? ... after the long sieges of struggle to understand, to forgive, to lay to rest all conflict; to realize the decades-long discipline of discernment and soul-baring.

Water over Earth ... Imagine a bowl, of a size that you can cradle in both hands ... a beautiful bowl, filled with water ... pure and sacred, sun-kissed water ... filled with all that your soul has been to this moment ... all that you are. The light and the sea of you. All your gifts and blessings; all your curses and pain; all of your moments of being; all of your meanings and metaphors ... all of your living, in one holy place for you to gaze into ... the ocean of you, teeming with life ...

... You hold your whole life in your hands, and see that you, yourself, are whole ...



Goddess photo: by Millenium Twain, via http://phoenixqi.blogspot.com.