aka Difficulty at the Beginning
Teeming, chaotic profusion. But the Chaos resolves. Perseverance furthers. (One day, I will count how many times, in how many hexagrams and changing lines, that phrase appears. Perhaps it might be as useful to notice where it does NOT appear.) Everything is in motion.
It is difficult to weave chaos. I am a natural sorter, orderer, taxonomist; I can make sense out of all sorts of tangles. I had a bag of selvage I bought from a weaving store. It was an experiment; it’s pretty enough, but comes in random colors and is expensive enough to not be useful for my criteria. When I thought about how to create Chaos, I saw that bag and thought, Bingo!
The nature of the hexagram is that order slowly derives from a chaotic beginning, so I started separating and grouping the colors ever so slowly as the weaving progressed.
There are a few solids in the header section; beige and pink. The first line is itself chaotic, but nonetheless distinguishable from the ground. In the picture below, the first line is the bit with the solid pink and turquoise, as well as lime green and orange. It’s not meant to be clearly distinct from the background. Subsequent lines will become more distinct (in plan).
9 at the beginning means: It furthers one to appoint helpers.
I have wondered how to find help for the business I imagine. Two days after weaving that line, I thought about asking my brother to partner with me in the next phase of this business. He is an artist, too, and may be moving in a new direction in his life.
