I like the translation "Calculated Inaction."
DeKorne's note:
"To nourish oneself through inaction is to digest and absorb the energy of one's instinctive responses. As in any nourishing assimilation, their strength then becomes your strength. The true adept is one who has digested all of his passion and is thereby empowered to use it for his own purposes. Instead of engaging in civil war, he has united his forces to act in the world."
The hexagram also includes an aspect of eating and drinking in good cheer while waiting-- the recommendation is that that is the way of the superior person while waiting in the face of danger. Sort of like "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
In the ebb and flow of my inner life these days, I never know what is going to come up. This morning, at about 1, I woke up infuriated that A has not contacted me or communicated with me. Some wiser voice in my head, or my higher power, or something, gently said "Can we find a way to work with this?" That was all. I reconfigured my stance a little bit and mulled that over.
Can we find a way to work with this?
What happened then was a turn to all the possible ways that a lack of communication is to my benefit. For my protection. That is one way of working with an obstacle: it's for my protection. Like a closed lane on a highway, closed because there's a huge rock slide or something. Aggravating because all of the traffic slows down, we sit and wait, etc. But I wouldn't want to drive at 70 mph into a pile of rocks, no matter how awful the traffic jam is.
So that's one way to wait with assurance-- to take whatever is an obstacle or an apparent delay and assume it is for protection. To be grateful to have protection from my impulsive nature that always wants to rush in, engage, get entangled.
That helped me get back to sleep and I overslept today-- up at 5:15 instead of 5.
In reading this, with the promise of a couple of nights alone under the sky, an interview to teach at such a fine school, and so much work already completed on your PhD, I remembered this line from Gerard Manley Hopkins:
ReplyDeleteAnd for all this, nature is never spent; there lives
The dearest freshness deep-down things.