A strong soul (Hexagram 34)

Every once in a while, a poem surges to the front of my mind in response to a cry from the deeps ... Folks who read my Post-Cynical Seer blog know that I've been living for a long time with major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Both poetry and the I Ching are perennial sources of soul-food -- wisdom, comfort, imperatives to open the heart and the mind.

Last night I had a dream that is one in a recent series that is revealing an inner shift ... from conflict to resolution; from relational chaos to truce and peace. On my direst mornings, after a dream like this, I wonder briefly if I'm dying ... Is my soul making amends, releasing all bonds? Are the people I'm dreaming of in this new context also dreaming of me ... letting me go?

Then I shake my head, and rise ... and I understand that when an intention (such as making peace) is constant, it works in us and through us organically ... often via dreaming. Despite apparent chaos on the surface, the depths are making sense of things ...


This morning's poem "headline" was Marge Piercy's "For Strong Women." For the first time, I've chosen to "tweak" a poem -- translate it, in a way. This poem speaks of the imperative to love, no matter what ... and to the one essential power that we all contain: the power to love. I believe that the will to love is an evolved, cultivated will to survive ... and one way to consider the I Ching is as a compendium of 64 variations on the theme of Love as the primary creative power ...

Hexgram / Principle 34, GREAT POWER, is imaged as the elements Thunder over Heaven -- a conjoining of massive energies ... a great storming surge of force. What will we do with our power? Here is one possibility, based on my tweaking of Marge Piercy's poem:

We are strong who love
strongly and weep strongly and are strongly
terrified and have strong needs. We are strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
we are not strong as stones but as wolves
tending our young. Strength is not in us; we
enact it as wind fills a sail.
What comforts us is others loving
us equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.

The original passage:

A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.

Marge Piercy, "For Strong Women"

Link to the entire poem: http://www.breakoutofthebox.com/strongwomen.htm


A few links to Hexagram 34:

http://www.kufty.com/oracles/i-ching/will/wilhelm34.htm

http://www.yitoons.com/yicards/yicard34.jpg

http://www.compassionatedragon.com/hexa34.html