☰

I find myself returning to these ba gua, these ancient Chinese symbols, though I cannot quite say why the fascination took hold. There is something in their form—a beauty, yes, but more than that—an ordering that reveals itself when one traces their patterns through the Book of Changes. It is as if, in their arrangement, something previously inchoate finds its shape.

I find myself trusting—is trust the right word?—that such wisdom circulates among those who have wrestled with existence and emerged with something to say. Why not pause to understand what someone wiser might tell us? Even without scientific validation, might this not be sustenance amid the noise?

The symbol ☰ (乾 qián) invites subjective interpretation—this much is clear. For myself, someone drawn to making things, I read it aspirationally: pure creative force, the initiating principle. Yet I find equal resonance with its complement, ☷ (坤 kūn), the Receptive—which I experience in my careful tending of open source projects, that particular form of maintenance and nourishment.

What draws these symbols together in my mind? Perhaps what Erikson called generativity—that developmental hunger to nurture what comes after us. Or Adler's social interest —the capacity to hold others in mind while thinking, while creating. To lead, to make something new or refined, requires a kind of listening: What does the world need but cannot yet articulate? What hovers at the margin of shame, where important truths risk dismissal—exactly where the clarity of tomorrow waits quietly, poised?

When we create, we extend some part of our interior life outward, like a snail venturing from its shell. In that gesture we discover that self-esteem is not a possession but a process—endlessly negotiated in each encounter between what we risk showing and how it is received. Watch what happens in that suspended moment when someone encounters what you've made: if they dismiss it, something in you contracts; if they pause with recognition—"I never thought of it that way"—something else opens. This is not vanity but the irreducibly human experience of staking ourselves in the world.