Channel 35–36 · Transitoriness

Channel 35–36 runs from Gate 36 in the Solar Plexus, the emotional motor of the bodygraph, up to Gate 35 in the Throat, where feeling turns into voice and motion. Wire an emotional motor to the Throat and wanting stops being private weather: the appetite to feel a thing, taste it, live it all the way through, gets a way out into speech and action. Because the current starts in the emotional centre, it comes as a wave and not a steady hum, a high end and a low one, and it has to finish its arc before it means much.

The sun clears the horizon, then goes back under it.

The two hexagrams are one trigram pair, flipped. Gate 35 carries the I Ching’s thirty-fifth figure, 晉, Progress: fire above the earth, the sun rising into a widening day. Gate 36 carries the thirty-sixth, 明夷, the Darkening of the Light: the same fire sunk beneath the earth, the sun gone down. Read them as one wire and you have the whole turn of a single day, rising and setting, which is what the channel is named for. Nothing it touches is built to be kept. Everything is passed through.

Held well, the system reads this as the person who has actually lived the range and can tell you what it was like, whose knowing arrives only in retrospect and is worth the wait for it. Held restlessly, it is the appetite that leaps at the next intensity for its charge and calls the wreckage growth, never staying with a feeling long enough to let it land. Everything it touches, it is built to let go of. What survives the letting go is the only thing worth saying.