writing session on 17 February 2022 | moderator: MJ Jahntz
For this week’s prompt, MJ drew from i Ching sticks and read out the correspondences, which then served as the prompts for our writing session.
So this week, the prompts are in the body text.
60
Knot
Limitation
Water over Lake
- Trying to sail a boat without any wind
- The seasons change as they should
- Do not continue on a path of limitation.
This one resonates hard. There’s something very pandemic-y about it — trying to sail a boat without any wind, like it’s March 2020 all over again and we’re all becalmed and silent, staring at each other from across the gunwales of our own little isolated dinghies.
Someone was complaining again on Facebook about how it’s too warm this spring, a February with 3 60-degree days in a row. Her husband chimed in to counter it, telling her to stop grousing, in good-humored tones but with barely veiled venom. Even the chillest hippy couple in town are getting on each other’s nerves, I guess.
She’s not wrong that it’s too warm for early spring but so what? It has been, over and over again, for years now. She’s preaching, if you could call it that, to the choir, if you could call US that. No one who sees her posts will suddenly say MY GOD, YOU’RE RIGHT — I will immediately and without delay put a stop to all my rampant and irresponsible consumption of fossil fuels. Jeff Bezos is not creeping on her wall. OPEC has muted her notifications. We are again, all staring at each other blankly, rocking gently in the becalmed pandemic climate-change-ridden waters.
And I begin to wonder if that is just how it is, and how it has always been, that the seasons are now changing as they should, that the forking path decision has been taken and we are walking on the road where springs are warmer than they used to be and this is just now how it is. There’s no ethical disaster here. There’s nothing except the inevitability of everything changing, all the time. Who is to say that we would have always, always had cold Februaries, forever? Something about the loneliness of being in my own boat has made me either accepting or utterly disillusioned, or some kind of philosophical that the Greeks probably had a word for but I don’t know it. Fatalistic, there, that’s it. It was Fated that Februaries would no longer Freeze, and now here we are stripping naked on Presidents’ day. So it goes. Who’s to say that it wasn’t always going to go this way.
As unnerving as my fatalism is, if I flip the philosophical coin I think maybe that is how I have stepped off the forking path of limitations. There can be something physically oppressive about the weight of This Should Not Be — the teeth gritted against what is clearly now Truth.
The Body Year 