Hexagram 46, Pushing Upward

A tree gets a little taller every year and one day it is tall. Nobody ever saw it leap.

The figure

The lower trigram is Wind, the eldest daughter, gentle and penetrating, and Wind is also called Wood. The upper is Earth, the mother, receptive and yielding. The picture is wood growing up through the earth, a seedling pushing through soil with nothing but patience and the pull of the light, a little at a time, for as long as it takes.

Nothing about this figure is dramatic, and that is the teaching. The growth is steady and nearly invisible from one day to the next. Come back in ten years and the seedling is a tree.

Pushing Upward is paired with Hexagram 45, Gathering Together, which is this figure turned upside down. One is many things collecting in a low place. The other is one thing rising from it.

When it comes up in a reading

When Pushing Upward comes up for a question, the way forward is open, and it is slow. You can get where you are going. You cannot get there this week.

The book's advice is to keep moving and to go and see the people who can help. This is one of the few hexagrams that says plainly to seek out those further along, a teacher, a senior, someone who has done the thing you are trying to do, and to ask. The tree pushes toward the light. You are allowed to push toward the people who have some.

The second piece is about direction. The old text says, in effect, that heading south is favourable, and I take that as keep going the way you were going, toward the light and the warmth, with no detours to check whether the other road might be quicker. Pushing Upward rewards the person who picks a direction and holds it.

The third thing is the invisible stretch. A tree does most of its early work underground, in the roots, where nothing looks like it is happening. Pushing Upward asks you to keep working through that stretch, trusting that growth you cannot see is still growth. Most people give up in the root years. The ones who do not are the ones who end up tall. So do the next small thing, ask for help from people further along, and stop digging the seedling up to check whether it has roots.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you grow steadily. Year on year you reach a little higher than the year before, and the result across decades is considerable, though almost nobody saw it happening, including you.

You trust time. You understand that real growth takes the time it takes and you do not try to force it, which puts you at odds with most of the modern world. Your eyes are on what you are growing toward, and that picture pulls you through the dull stretches.

In practice you build careers, bodies of work and personal skill that rise in a steady line across a long horizon. At fifty you are noticeably further on than at forty, at seventy further than at fifty, and you got there without a single leap.

The gift is growth that lasts. What you build, you build to be used, and it is still standing when the fast builders have moved on.

The shadow is impatience with your own pace. Every Pushing Upward person has a season of looking at someone who shot up quickly and wondering what is wrong with them. Rush this figure and you get a plant that is tall and brittle and snaps in the first wind.

The work is to keep growing through the dry years, when the roots are doing all the work underground. At maturity the Pushing Upward person has grown into real capacity, the skill of decades of practice and the position reached by patient application. The tree of your life is tall by the end, and every inch of the height is earned.

If a line moves

When you cast Pushing Upward with a moving line, its position tells you where the growth stands. A line moving low in the figure is the beginning of the matter, the seedling and whether it trusts itself to push through the soil at all. A line moving in the middle is the heart of it, the climb in progress, where steady effort and good company carry you. A line moving high is the end of the matter, where a person keeps climbing from habit after the summit, and the warning that growth without a direction is just height. Change the moving line to its opposite and you have the second hexagram, where the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows the step with a worked example.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Wind and Earth their own sections and shows how a pair of trigrams is read. The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, the two forces every line here is built from. In the tarot, my own association for Pushing Upward is the Seven of Pentacles, the figure leaning on a hoe, looking at a vine that is not ripe yet, and going back to work. Take that as my pairing and nothing stronger.

What are you growing that nobody can see yet, and are you still watering it?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.