Hexagram 44, Coming to Meet

Something small has just walked in the door. Look at it carefully before you offer it a chair.

The figure

The lower trigram is Wind, the eldest daughter, gentle and penetrating. The upper is Heaven, the father, creative and strong. The picture is wind moving under the open sky, reaching into every corner. That is the generous reading of the figure, and it is a real one.

The lines tell the other half. Five solid lines sit on top of one broken line that has just appeared at the very bottom. Something yielding has slipped in underneath something strong, the first dark line entering a bright figure, the start of a decline nobody has noticed yet because it is still so small. Both readings are true at once, and the skill of this hexagram is holding them together.

Coming to Meet is paired with Hexagram 43, Breakthrough, which is this figure upside down, with the one broken line at the top on its way out. There the old thing is leaving. Here a new thing is arriving.

When it comes up in a reading

When Coming to Meet comes up for a question, something or someone has arrived unexpectedly, or is about to. A person, an offer, an idea, a temptation. It is new, it is small, and it has charm. Meet it with your eyes open.

The hexagram is about discernment at the first encounter, when a thing is still small enough to be weighed and turned away if need be. Once a yielding line has climbed halfway up the figure it is a great deal harder to show the door. So the moment to decide is now, while the deciding is still yours.

I read this one often around relationships and partnerships, and the advice is the same every time. Enjoy the meeting. Be warm. And do not hand over the keys on the first afternoon. The one that insists on being accepted today is the one to be careful of.

There is a lighter side too. The tradition also reads this figure as a meeting that was meant to happen, the right person turning up at the right moment. Those happen. All the book asks is that you look while you are enjoying it. Welcome what comes, watch what it does, and give it time to show you what it is before you decide what it will be.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, your life has been shaped by chance meetings. The big turns in your story often started with a conversation with a stranger, a job you did not apply for, a face across a room at an event you nearly skipped.

You carry good instincts about these arrivals. You can usually tell which chance encounter is a signpost and which is noise, and your first read on a new person is more often right than wrong. You also know that some arrivals bring exactly what you needed and some bring a year of complications, and telling the two apart early is a large part of your growing up. You tend to be the unexpected arrival in other people's lives as well.

The gift is recognising the meetings that matter and stepping into them. Doors open for you through people.

The shadow is using people. The same knack that spots the significant encounter can turn into treating every new person as a resource to be worked out and worked over. The mature version meets every person as a person, with a story of their own, and keeps no ledger.

The work is a steady middle path, neither suspicious of everyone who arrives nor wide open to whatever walks in. At maturity the Coming to Meet person has lived a life shaped partly by chance and entirely by what they chose to do with it, and the partnerships and opportunities that grew out of random meetings add up to something that was never random at all.

If a line moves

When you cast Coming to Meet with a moving line, its position tells you where the encounter stands. A line moving low in the figure is the beginning of the matter, the first arrival and the moment of deciding whether to let it in. A line moving in the middle is the heart of it, the influence settling in and showing its nature. A line moving high is the end of the matter, where an arrival has either been absorbed well or has gone too far and must be met head on. 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 Heaven 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 Coming to Meet is The Wheel of Fortune, the turn you did not arrange, and what you do once it has turned. Take that as my pairing and nothing stronger.

Who walked into your life by accident and changed it, and did you know at the time?

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