Category: Practices

We took down the tree yesterday, marking our official end of 2021.

I had wanted to take it down on the first, but the kids lobbied an extra day, but we got sidetracked on Sunday and it was suddenly bedtime.

Same for Monday. So I was going to take it down myself that night, but the kids insisted on being part of the process.

So we took it down on Tuesday morning. I put on the Peanuts Christmas album in the background and we enjoyed our last party of the holiday season, taking down the ornaments, lights, and tree, punctuated by a breakfast halfway in between.

A mundane event; a punctuation for the passage of time. I’ll get maybe ten more of these with my daughter (if she doesn’t grow out of it before heading off to college).

2021 was again a strange year, but with the kids growing up fast, I suspect every year will be unique, whatever “normal” we settle into.

So here’s to the next strange year. Let’s hope we make the most of it.

Like many other hobbies, I’ve cooled a bit on the I Ching. For a while, I consulted it once a week, but it’s been a while since I last visited the book. Like my bread baking, I will coast on the knowledge I picked up over my first couple of months of diligent practice. Or maybe like the Ukulele, I won’t visit much at all.

With the honeymoon phase long past, I won’t be finding many more internet resources for the I Ching, so this seemed the appropriate time to compile some key links.

Biroco – S. J. Marshall’s book reviews were a great introduction to the world of the I Ching in English. I also follow his method for interpreting the changing lines. A comprehensive site, though I suspect that some people might take issue with some of his harsher judgments of various translations. However, I picked up the Wilhelm/Baynes and Lynn translations due to his recommendations and have been pleased with both.

Hermetica – A lot of good resources, both weblinks and book reviews. He also shares his own translation of the book on this site. His page comparing a multitude of hexagram names is quite interesting to peruse.

Russell Cottrell – Another site with many reviews with a few virtual divination resources. He also explores a lot of other ideas, including a page comparing 44 translations of #3 and #36, and a nice pocket format I Ching based on the Richmond translation.

Online Clarity – A nice forum and good community around the I Ching. I’ll occasionally pop into Reddit as well, but prefer the homier feel of this site. I also enjoy Hilary’s email newsletter. She was recently interviewed on youtube which covers quite a bit of ground as an introduction.

Wikipedia Hexagrams – A concise location of hexagrams and English and Chinese names.

LiSe – I have not explored this site much, however many people have recommended her site. If I was to start exploring the I Ching again, this would be the next spot to dig into.

Fred Hatt is a New York artist who has made a good video of divination with yarrow sticks.  It takes a while (a feature of this style of divination), but he chats his way through the process. He was also the guest on this great podcast episode which includes an audio demonstration of divination with coins.

Finally, I must close with this extended quote from Fred Hatt’s autobiographical blog post.  It has nothing to do with the I Ching, but wish I was as comfortable with myself as Fred is with his path in life, “while I ignore this official Art World, it ignores me back.”

I rarely write about my own life here on Drawing Life. I avoid drama and so I imagine my life would be pretty boring to anyone not close to me. I devote much of my free time to drawing, photography, and other creative pursuits. While I show work and do events and performances fairly regularly, I’ve always maintained my art as an amateur practice. Of course the word “amateur” means lover, one who does something for the pure love of it. Since I work for a living, I don’t have to worry about creating work to please a market or to make it fit what some critics want to write about. I keep the work free, and I follow it wherever it leads me. To be honest, while I love a lot of living artists and their work, the international contemporary art scene as a whole, with its mega-wealthy collectors and ego-driven art stars, its combination of pretentious discourse and cheap gimmickry, bores me, and while I ignore this official Art World, it ignores me back. I’d rather treat my work as my own exploration of perception and practice. I do want to use it to communicate to a larger audience, but I’m actually more driven by the pleasure of sharing one on one, the special connection that develops between me and my models, the people I sketch portraits of and the people whose bodies I paint, the dancers and performers I collaborate with, and the fans of my work that visit my studio, sit with me on the floor and look through piles of drawings or photographs.

Fred Hatt

Growing up conservative Christian, divination carried an illicit edge.

But a Tarot deck is just a normal deck of cards with a fifth all-trump suit. Still spooky?

A while back, my daughter and I messed around with a tarot deck to create a variant on War that improves upon the original (the big change was that we evened out the players’ decks after each round; whoever won more cards banked the extras).

With the Tarot deck in hand, I also played around with a card reading after the kids went to sleep.

The booklet that came with this deck was very specific. The cups = love, coins = money, etc. Each card had specific effects in its orientation and place within the tableaux.

Now, this is where the religious folks have it right. This is not good entertainment. Such a practice with specific prompts will put things in the head that don’t need to be there.

However, that’s not an issue with divination in general.

I also played with the Decktet, a modern deck designed in 2008. The creator has published suggestions for using his cards for readings with an open interpretive system. Instead of relying upon concrete predictive functions for each card, a Decktet reading creates a network of relationships between the cards. This method is much more suggestive and might be a great way to unearth the unconscious.

A few months later, I started messing around with the I Ching. Maybe I’ll revisit the Tarot one day, but it’s hard to beat several thousand years of Chinese divination.

Over the past month, I surpassed my expectations with the I Ching by memorizing the non-intuitive “King Wen” sequence of 64 hexagrams, as well as their English and Chinese names.

The two critical tools for this exercise were my flashcards on Quizlet and on Pleco. (Quizlet is a free website and app. Pleco is a free Chinese dictionary app, but I paid extra for its flashcard functionality years ago.)

It was unfortunate that Pleco’s flashcards could not render the hexagram unicode characters properly, however this limitation turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Quizlet was great for learning the hexagrams. Switching over to Pleco without the benefit of seeing the hexagram image on the screen almost felt like starting over, but the extra mental effort locked in my memorization. Soon after moving to Pleco, I started visualizing the hexagram sequence in my head, which I suspect was a nice side effect of this difficult limitation. And of course, Pleco was indispensable for learning the Chinese characters for the titles.

The path I took in learning the sequence was unorthodox. I started by pulling a few hexagrams that had been thrown in recent sessions. I realized that a purely random approach was unworkable so I pulled out all the hexagrams with Thunder below and with Lake above. (I chose these two trigrams because they were most analogous to my old rabbits Badger and Peppercorn.) Then I started to get systematic. The obvious first choice should have been simple doubled up trigrams, so I added them into the mix.

At that point, I had about thirty hexagrams memorized. I completed the remainder by filling in the gaps in the sequence, starting from the beginning. It was slow going for a bit, but the memorization quickly coalesced at the end. For this last step, it was nice to have previously memorized milestones scattered along the entire sequence. It created a path where the mind could while rest when reciting the sequence in order.

After memorizing the sequence with English titles and Chinese pronunciations, I decided to learn the written Chinese characters. This last step only took a week. I don’t know much written Chinese, but I suspect my multitude of attempts over the years really greased the skids for the process.

All in all, it worked. Since the process went faster than expected, I don’t know if there is much value in trying to optimize the process. Just do it.

This was a good exercise in memorization with the help of modern digital tools. These flashcard programs didn’t make the effort easy, but they certainly made the process less difficult. Whenever I had a short break (or spent an hour in line to get a vaccine shot) I’d pull out the phone and work out my brain.

The benefits from this effort were immediately noticeable, even before I had memorized much of sequence. I use the slow yarrow stalk method for building the hexagrams, so I have plenty of time to mull the possible results during the process. Knowing the sequence by heart has enriched the divination process since I delight in pondering the forking paths before the final answer reveals itself.

Outside of the benefits to the I Ching practice, it was good to just go through a pure exercise of raw brute force memorization. The value of memorization diminished considerably in this age of the ubiquitous internet. However, this skill should not be completely discarded, and there is value in practicing focused concentration. The sense of accomplishment felt great, and since the process didn’t take nearly as long as I feared, I will be more willing to deploy this mental tool as the need arises. After all, I was willing to embark on this exercise partly because of the distant memory of learning koine Greek when I was a devout Christian, a quarter century years ago.

And heck, even if I move onto another obsession in a few months, I now have an interesting sequence for counting sheep, to help me fall back asleep if I wake up too early in the morning.

I was working through my Quizlet flashcards and decided to also learn the Chinese titles, so I made some flashcards on Pleco, the Chinese-English Dictionary App.

Unfortunately Pleco doesn’t render the hexagrams on iOS, which would have been really slick.

In the end, I produced two flashcard sets, both exported as txt files.

This first set includes the King Wen hexagram number, the Trigrams, and Judgement (Gregory Richter translation), as well as the (modern) Dictionary Definition of the words. (If you open it up, you’ll notice an odd character peppered throughout the file – this character is used by Pleco to designate line breaks on the card.)

The second is just a list of all the Chinese words that was used for these titles. This is intended to tie into the Pleco dictionary and does not include its own definitions. I produced this set because making custom cards by adding I Ching info took out the formatting that made the standard cards more readable.

Have fun!

Notes on my new practice of conducting I Ching readings.

I started my exploration of I Ching by reading the pocket edition translated by Thomas Cleary. Even though I did not enjoy Cleary’s prose and most of these ancient allusions were utterly impenetrable, reading the basic text without commentary was a great introduction to the structure of the book.

That said, I did not conduct readings until my copy of the John Minford translation arrived in the mail, which has an extensive commentary to shed light for personal readings. Minford made a quirky choice to toss in a few Latin phrases in the readings, which I find atmospheric (but is certainly a YMMV preference).

The first readings were sparse because I was asking indeterminate questions. However, I’ve been stumbling into better insight, due to increasing familiarity and learning to ask sharper questions. As with much in life, the most important step for obtaining a useful answer is finding the right question. Hopefully this practice will continue to be more insightful as I improve at this skill.

None of the answers are earth shattering – I am usually reminded of well trod aphorisms that I’ve said many times – but the applications are sometimes unique and novel. For better or worse, I suspect this practice may be an exercise in self confirmation bias. To be sacrilegious for a moment, the base text of the I Ching is an impenetrable word salad (at least for a beginner), so there is an obvious danger of reading what one wants. One ought to consider the warnings of S. J. Marshall and remember dire lessons of history when someone overly-enthusiastically embrace the ambiguous pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle.

I jot notes of all my readings in a notebook. If past experience with sketchbooks are an indication, I won’t ever refer these old notes in the future but the most important aspect of writing things down is that it focuses the mind at the moment.

That said, I did come across an interesting coincidence between a consecutive readings the other day. It’s both easy to dismiss as just chance, but the animal spirit inside of me still wants to put special significance on the moment.

A week after after starting this ritual, I added two extra steps to each session. After the I Ching reading, I read a section of the Dao De Jing. I’m just marching through it front to back, jotting a couple notes along the way, and I plan on rotating through various books of wisdom (such as the Analects or Art of War) with this practice. Finally, I close with writing down a Chinese proverb from the ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs, (referenced via an addon in Pleco). This last step gives me a chance to write and read a little (non-archaic) Chinese, and I think an earthy aphorism is a necessary benediction after drinking the heady stuff of the other two books.

The other day, I researched the yarrow stalk method of divination (a much longer process than throwing three-coins six times method). In the process I found out that I had been calculating my coin throwing incorrectly. It was a minor error since overall probabilities were still consistent, but the actual results were “incorrect”. However, I had been getting good insight for the past couple weeks. This early error is a good reminder that divination is a self-conducted mind game. The key is to allow chance put fresh unexpected input into your brain. I suspect you could practice bibliomancy and just flip the book open at random.

I scoured the backyard for twigs and got 50 sticks and have found that I quite enjoy this method of divination. It is a considerably longer route to getting an answer, but noticeably more pleasurable. It seems that sometimes the answer just comes from spending 20 minutes with the question doing a relatively mindless counting task. And for a guy who is as fidgety as me, this is likely the closest I’ll get to a meditative practice.

The internet has a habit of transmogrifying a passing interest into the only thing in the world. Everybody’s into it now! I’ve joined the I Ching Reddit as well as the OnlineClarity forums, both of which have users who carry themselves with a discomfiting certainty that I recognize from my teenage years as a Reformed Baptist.

S. J. Marshall’s excellent Biroco.com and Bradford Hatcher’s Hermetica.info are also quite self assured, but they are both comprehensive resources with recommendations from folks seem who really know what they are talking about. Finding these websites spurred me to record these notes. This is a post is a marker of how I started the practice, since I suspect things may shift under his influence.

A less dogmatic and much more sympathetic take on the I Ching is this lovely essay by Will Buckingham. I might just pick up his book inspired by the I Ching, as well as Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies (any excuse for a Calvino is a good one).

With only a couple months, I’ve barely started this practice compared to these illustrious students. I’m still on the fresh, exciting part of the learning curve, where new insights are gleaned every few days. I’m curious when the dip will hit, and whether I will drop this like many of my other dustbin hobbies. Ultimately, that’s a problem for another day. At the moment, my intended next steps are:

1. Keep up the practice.
2. Incorporate S. J. Marshall’s method of interpreting changing lines.
3. Play more with the Yarrow Stalk Method.
4. Print copies of the Nigel Richardson books for use during readings. Also, get a copy of the Wilhelm-Baynes Translation with its Neo Confucian background and Richard Lynn’s Translation with Wang Bi’s (Neo Taoist) commentary.
5. Learn to memorize the hexagrams. I’ve been using a set of flashcards that I assembled on Quizlet.
6. Read Minford, Lynn, and Wilhelm-Baynes cover to cover (separately from the readings).

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