Gate 16 · The Rehearsed Leap

Gate 16 sits in the Throat, the centre of voice and of doing, and it makes a single channel: 16 to 48, the Wavelength, dropping straight into the Spleen. Gate 48 is the well, depth that has to be drawn up before it is worth anything. Gate 16 is the draw itself, the moment that depth breaks surface as sound or as a move. Nothing stands between the two centres to slow it, so the reach for depth and the leap into performance arrive as one gesture.

Depth below, sound at the mouth.

The hexagram is the sixteenth, Yù, usually given as Enthusiasm. Thunder breaks resounding out of the receptive earth: five yielding lines and one strong line in the fourth place, around which the rest arrange themselves. The old commentaries read it as music and as timing, the note the ancient kings struck to honour merit and to set an army marching. Enthusiasm here is not a mood, it is readiness put to use, the current that gathers people and makes a thing possible.

On the wheel it is the twenty-third of the sixty-four, opening at 5°45′ of Gemini, opposite Gate 9, the sacral focus that answers a leap by narrowing it to one line of work. Its crosses circle the same field from three angles: Planning at the right, Experimentation at the juxtaposition, Identification at the left.

Carried well, this is talent that has served its apprenticeship, the difficult made to look easy and then risked while the feeling is still warm. Carried thin, the same current fires on appetite alone, all leap and no well, or it rehearses and never jumps. The depth is what buys the voice its hearing.