Relationship and connection

The I Ching speaks about love as it speaks about everything: in images of movement between two forces. Hexagram 31, Resonance, is about attraction that comes from both sides; hexagram 8, Union, about coming together that holds. Neither describes your beloved. They describe what can move between people.

People have brought exactly this to the oracle for centuries. You will not be told whether it lasts or who is right. What you get is an image of the movement between you — closeness, distance, rhythm — and of what your own side of the connection is asking for.

You can ask, but the answer will keep returning to you. The I Ching reads the field you are standing in, and the other person is not in the room. A question about what someone else feels usually comes back as a question about what you are doing with the not-knowing.

Hexagram 31 is called Resonance: a lake resting on a mountain, two things responding to each other before words arrive. It is the classic image for attraction that is mutual rather than pursued. It says nothing about whether that holds — only that something is genuinely moving between two sides.

Hexagram 31, Resonance, for mutual attraction, and hexagram 8, Union, for belonging that holds. Hexagram 32, Endurance, speaks about lasting, and hexagram 37, The Family, about order inside a circle. Which one arrives depends entirely on the question you bring.

Ask about your own side of it. "Does he love me?" asks the oracle for something it cannot see; "what does this connection ask of me now?" opens the image. The I Ching answers what you actually bring, and the second question leaves room for an answer you had not scripted.

The oracle does not answer that, and any reading claiming to is reading more than is there. What a throw can show is what is moving in the situation now: whether something is closing, resting or turning. Hexagram 24, Return, exists — but it describes a movement, not a promise.

That happens, and it is worth sitting with rather than throwing again. The images are old and wide, so an uncomfortable one is usually pointing at something you already suspected. It remains an image though — not a verdict, and not the last word on your situation.