Some problems can’t be solved; you simply have to wait until you outgrow them.
That Jungian theme came to mind as I read Hexagram 23: Splitting Apart of the I Ching, our hexagram host for this next week of Taurus.
The image is of a mountain on top of the earth. Just as a mountain experiences continuous erosion, the old ways of living must be stripped away.
It’s not good, at such times, to imagine the future and make plans. You need to bring your energy back to the centre and honour the process: this is a time to be transformed, not to act.
Moreover, until the old is so utterly stripped from you that you have no choice but to think in new ways, you will only be able to re-create the old patterns.
I Ching: Walking Your Path, Creating Your Future by Hilary Barrett
In the book The Faithful Gardener by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, which is perfect reading for Taurus season, she describes a time during her childhood when the local government stripped their land bare to build a highway near their property.
It was heartbreaking to lose all the trees and plants. Estés’ uncle instructed the family to leave the land bare and unseeded, as this is the best way to attract seeds of new life. The seeds would know how to find the bare, scorched earth.
Sure enough, the seeds arrived, and a small forest of hardwood trees grew over a long period of time. To Estés and her uncle they felt like they were in Eden.
I learned from my dear people as much about the grave, about facing the demons, and about rebirth as I have learned in all my psychoanalytic training and all my twenty-five years of clinical practice. I know that those who are in some ways and for some time shorn of belief in life itself—that they ultimately are the ones who will come to know best that Eden lies underneath the empty field, that the new seed goes first to the empty and open places—even when the open place is a grieving heart, a tortured mind, or a devasted spirit.
The Faithful Gardener by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
An important insight to ponder in the wake of the recent New Moon in Taurus.
Everything that is built up – power, or achievement, or the edifice of self and identity – must continually erode away. It leaves behind an enriched inner world, and a quiet sense of being at home here.
I Ching: Walking Your Path, Creating Your Future by Hilary Barrett
What is eroding away in your life?
How is your inner life being enriched as a result?
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