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I-Ching Hexagram · 泰 · Tài
11. Peace
Heaven and earth meet. A rare window of ease and prosperity — use it to nourish others too.
Keywords
Harmony · Prosperity · Flow
The field
Earth above, heaven below. Reading the picture: the sky has come down and the ground has risen, and they are mingling in a way they normally do not. Peace is the hexagram of rare alignment, the window when the public order, your inner state, and the people around you all happen to be pulling in the same direction. Wilhelm-Baynes warns that this configuration is brief by nature; it is the spring before summer, the conversation that lands cleanly, the project where everyone shows up rested. The instinct here is often to hoard the moment. The hexagram suggests the opposite: spend it. Plant. Reconcile. Pay the people you owe. What you build during peace becomes the structure that holds when the next standstill arrives, which it will.
Stance
Use it for relationships and for foundations. The conversation you have been postponing will go better now than later; the work that needs everyone's consent will get it now in three sentences. Pay the small debts. Tell the truth that does not cost you much today and would cost you a lot in winter. And rest, properly, while the air is still soft. Energy spent in peace is not wasted. It is invested.
Shadow
The shadow is the assumption that peace is permanent, and its twin, the guilt that cannot bear receiving it. The first becomes complacency: the meadow is mistaken for a permanent address, and when the weather turns, no one has prepared. The second becomes self-sabotage: the person who picks a fight in week one of a calm spring because calm feels suspect to them. Both squander the actual gift, which is the chance to build something during a season where building is unusually cheap.
Changing lines
When peace changes, the air is shifting and the meadow knows before you do. A line moves, and the resulting hexagram tells you which direction the weather is leaving in. Sometimes it is straight into standstill, the natural complement; more often it is into a hexagram that asks you to apply the strength you stored. Read the change as a notice, not a punishment. The harvest is being gathered.
Line pattern
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