Hexagram 62, Small Excess

Mountain below, Thunder above. Two solid lines sit in the middle of the figure with two broken lines under them and two broken lines over them. The firm part is small and it is surrounded.

The figure

Mountain is the trigram of the youngest son, keeping still, two broken lines with a solid line on top. Thunder is the eldest son, arousing, movement, a solid line at the base with two broken lines above it.

Put thunder over the mountain and the picture is of a storm rolling over a peak. The sound is enormous and the mountain does not move. Up there the thunder is louder than it is on the plain, and it is also further from anything it could actually strike. Big noise, small effect, and the stillness underneath outlasts it.

The tradition also saw a bird in the shape of the figure. The two solid lines are the body, the broken lines on either side are the wings, and the counsel that came with the picture was that a bird should not fly higher than it needs to. Stay close to the ground. Keep to the small.

Its pair is Hexagram 61, Inner Truth, Wind over Lake, which is this figure turned inside out, firm at both ends and open in the middle.

When it comes up in a reading

When Small Excess comes up for a question, the moment is asking you to think small and do it very well. Whatever the grand plan was, put it down for now. The hexagram says the small matters have unusual weight at the moment, and that a modest step carefully taken will do more than a bold one.

The sense of the hexagram is that there are times when being a little too careful, a little too humble, a little too thorough, is exactly right. The name says excess, and it means excess on the side of the small. The book is quite clear that this is the right kind of too much for the time being.

And a caution. Small Excess is a correction. It is the answer you get when grand gestures have been the problem. If your life is already all detail and no horizon, read the figure as a mirror. Perhaps the storm is simply reminding you that the mountain was always there.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you are a person of the small things, and I mean that as high praise. Where other people see only the big picture, you see the detail, the small kindness, the minor adjustment that turns out to be the one that mattered. It is how you are built.

You understand that small acts compound. A thousand small right choices make a life and a thousand small wrong ones make a mess, and you have known this since you were young. You operate in the place where the small choices get made.

You are modest in a way that suits you. You do not overstate your part, you do not claim what you did not earn, and you do not push for grand when ordinary will do.

Crafts, editing, fine work with hands or materials, the careful research, the household that simply runs, the commitments that are always kept. That is this figure, and it is the foundation a great deal else gets built on.

The gift is solidity. Your life and the lives of the people you care for run better because you noticed.

The shadow is smallness that forgets the whole. Attention so fixed on the detail that the larger picture goes missing, the perfect spreadsheet for a project that should never have started. The mature Small Excess climbs the mountain every so often and looks at where all the details are going, and can scale up when real scale is called for.

The work of a life here is knowing which moment is which.

If a line moves

The I Ching counts lines from the bottom, so line 1 is the lowest. When one of the lower lines is moving, the matter is at its beginning and the counsel is about staying close to the ground and refusing the early temptation to fly. A moving middle line puts the question at its heart, where care and over caution sit side by side and you have to tell them apart. A moving upper line speaks to the end of the matter, and here it carries the sense of the bird that has flown too high and too far from the nest, the small thing pushed past where small was useful. Whichever line moves, change it to its opposite and you have a second hexagram, the direction the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page walks through that step by step.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Mountain and Thunder on their own, with their lines, their places in the family and the pictures they carry. The Chinese Astrology section has a page on Yin and Yang, and this is a good figure to read beside it, two yang lines held inside four yin. My own association in the tarot is the Eight of Pentacles, the craftsman at the bench doing the same careful thing again and again until it is right, and I hold that as my picture and nothing stronger.

What small thing have you been meaning to do properly, and what big thing have you been using as an excuse not to do it?

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