Musings on love in the *I Ching*

Love, as reverence and right action, saturates the I Ching. I wonder if reverence is a chosen ripening ... a willingness to see existence in a certain way ... to accept its whole as orderly, good and beautiful -- despite experiences that occur on the jagged outer rim of the blessed ordinary ...

Love comes in so many flavours ... and I believe that to love is our highest, truest calling -- regardless of where we think love itself comes from.

I sense that love is intrinsic to our makeup, lying in potential until the first moment of conscious relation ... (how to say this...)

... It seems to be a fundamental contradiction that we must be separate from another in order to relate with one another. A just-born baby is brought apart from its mother ... and they re-engage the bond through gazing, suckling, cooing, nestling ...

... I suspect that love -- or its lack, or perversion -- is the primary determining factor in how we live our lives, moment to moment ... and in how existence moves through us ... how the eight Elements of the trigrams (Heaven, Earth, Fire, etc.) express their infinite possibilities through our actions and relations.

The Elements act themselves through their interbeing, how they influence one another ... so a central image or metaphor for Change (the One Principle that is the heart of the oracle) could be weather ...

... because we all know that weather's always changing ...

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Perhaps our own story of love is our fate, our myth ...

... And here is where the I Ching gives us, from its grounding in the whole of things (the Tao), an understanding of all the flavours of love.

It may be that Love as a principle is illustrated in Hexagram 8, UNION -- Love as what bonds and binds us; love as our primary potential and fuel.

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... I got to thinking this way after pondering my husband, with whom I feel fundamentally safe, cherished, at home ... I concocted a wee poem this afternoon while following him down the hall; he was heading out to buy some groceries before (speak of the devil, hee hee!) the forecasted freezing rain / sleet / drizzle / ice pellets (yes, they're calling for all four) hits our neck of the woods...

Your love

calls me

to

skinnydip

in the ocean

of Being

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Perhaps, in a way, we could call the I Ching

64 Flavours of Love

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What do you think?

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I'm off to cuddle with Roo, who has been protesting Mommy's intractable infatuation with being online. Poor old girl (she's twelve) has arthritis in her hips and she needs to smush up with me on the couch ...