Reflections Seeded from the I Ching ? Volume One

For eighteen months, beginning in the early part of the pandemic, Mike Parker drew a hexagram from the I Ching most mornings and wrote a short reflection on what it opened in him. He didn't record the hexagrams. He wasn't writing commentary, and he didn't want the work to become an argument with the long tradition of interpretation. He was using the I Ching as a daily, randomly chosen door ? and walking through to see what was on the other side.

The first 126 of those mornings are gathered here.

These are not interpretations of the hexagrams. They are reflections seeded by them ? short pieces about disorientation and pause, about waiting and the long view, about overloaded frameworks and the slow return to what matters. Readers familiar with the I Ching will sometimes feel a hexagram behind a piece; readers new to it can simply read.

Each reflection is paired with a photograph from the woods, parks, and landscapes the writing emerged inside of. The book can be read sequentially or dipped into ? many readers come to find that the page they open at is, more often than chance alone would suggest, the page they needed.

This is not a book of answers but of invitations. It is for anyone living the ongoing process of transition, anyone working with the I Ching as a tool for reflection rather than divination, and anyone who has found contemporary contemplative writing too thin to nourish them. The themes are simple: the art of letting go, the uses of stillness, the importance of following your core truth even when the path is unclear.

There is also, here and there, a refusal to pretend the world is not what it is. The reflections do not stay in the personal register only. They notice what is happening at larger scales, and they say what they see.

Volume One of an ongoing work.