Hexagram 53, Development

The picture is a tree on a mountainside. You come back in ten years and it is twice the size.

The figure

The lower trigram is Mountain, the youngest son, keeping still, the ground that does not move.
The upper trigram is Wind, also called Wood, the eldest daughter, gentle and penetrating.
Wood growing on a mountain is the tree I just described.
Its roots work slowly into rock, and because the growth is slow the tree is anchored, and because it is anchored it can grow tall.
A tree that shot up in a season would blow over in the first winter.

The tradition also reads this figure through a wedding, the proper old kind with its stages, each in its turn.
The wild goose that moves through the figure, from the shore to the high ground, was the gift given at a betrothal, and the picture still carries that meaning.

Its pair in the sequence is Hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden, which is the same six lines turned upside down.
Development is the wedding done in order. The Marrying Maiden is the arrangement nobody planned.

When it comes up in a reading

When Development comes up for a question, I read it as a plain answer about pace.
The thing you want is coming, and it is coming at the speed of a tree.
The sense of the old text is that this is a good hexagram, and the good in it depends on your willingness to take the steps in order and stay the course between them.

Most people who ask an oracle a question want the thing to hurry up.
This hexagram says no, kindly and firmly.
What you are building has stages, and each one is doing a job you cannot see, the way the roots are.
Force the pace and you get something tall and hollow. Respect it and you get something that stands.

I also read it as a hexagram about doing things properly.
The old wedding was slow because slowness proved sincerity.
Anyone can turn up with flowers on a Tuesday.
When this comes up around a relationship, a new job or a move into a community, I suggest the person let themselves be known over time.

And notice where the goose ends up.
It starts at the water's edge and finishes in the air, high above the mountain.
Patient development gets there.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, your life unfolds in clearly marked stages, and each stage stands on the one before.
You do not skip steps. You would not know how.
Fast fixes and outcomes forced before they were ripe have never appealed to you, and when you have tried them they have never worked.
You trust the sequence, and in my experience it has mostly repaid you.

You tend to follow recognised paths, the apprenticeship before the trade, the long courtship before the marriage, the years of groundwork before the role with your name on the door, and the stages produce solid results.
At seventy, the carrier of Development can usually look back and see a clear arc, one chapter preparing the next. That arc is the gift.
What you become, you become completely, and the wisdom you carry late in life is the sum of each decade's patient work.

The shadow is rigidity about the stages.
Life does not always come in the traditional order, and the carrier of Development can be thrown when it does not, or can judge other people for skipping steps that were never theirs to take.
The mature carrier keeps the pattern of gradual growth and lets go of the insistence that it look a particular way.
Looked back on from later in life, you are the tree on the mountain, fully grown, well anchored, and the shape of you is the shape of all the years it took.

If a line moves

When you cast this hexagram and a line is moving, the position of that line tells you where you are in the matter.
The two lower lines are the beginning, the first steps up the slope, where the right move is to go carefully and accept that the start of anything feels exposed.
The two middle lines are the heart of it, where the question is whether you are resting in a place that can hold you or pushing on into ground that cannot.
The two upper lines are the end, where the development is complete and the danger of going too far is losing touch with the ground you started on.
The moving line changes to its opposite and gives you a second hexagram, the one the situation is heading toward.
The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows you how to find it.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives you Mountain and Wind on their own.
The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, and its Chinese Calendar page explains the slow cycles this book was written inside.
My own association in the tarot is The Hierophant, card 5 of the Major Arcana, the figure who presides over the ceremony and insists the steps be taken in their proper order.

What are you trying to hurry that is growing at exactly the right speed?

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