Yi

The Sun Wonder. Yi is grass and saplings a few days out of the ground, still curved from the effort of getting there — soft, damp, winding rather than straight. What it asks about is opportunity and the turn a situation takes, and whether a thing can be got done gently instead of by force. Where Yi falls, there is usually a way through that nobody has to be shoved out of.

• Opportunity and the turn: the outcome being hoped for, the bit of room that suddenly opens up, and the helper who genuinely carries weight rather than merely agreeing.
• Bending and leaning: detours, indirect routes, nothing that travels in a straight line — and growth that climbs by holding onto something already standing.
• People and fields: women — a wife, a girlfriend; and doctors, performers, painters and writers, along with art and culture in general.
• Two Yi, one plant: the one rooted on the earth plate holds the history it grew from and the thing that is truly taking the weight, and the one climbing on the heaven plate shows the bend the situation has now and the direction it will keep growing in.

On a question about illness, Yi means Chinese medicine and herbal treatment. Western medicine and pharmaceuticals run through a different symbol entirely, Tian-Xin (天心). Both are medicine, and they are not answers to the same question — check which one the chart is actually pointing at before reading the reply as advice.

Nature

What the person involved is after is harmony and growth at its own pace — the relationship, the feeling and the process count for more than the milestone. Head-on conflict gets avoided, other people get considered first, and the mildness on the surface conceals a set of positions that do not actually move.

Style

Timing and rhythm rather than force. The person involved will let a thing ripen instead of pushing it, and is usually found in the supporting seat: the visible credit goes to somebody else while the structure holding the whole thing up is theirs. When conditions are wrong they wait, and here waiting is a decision, not a failure to act.

Strength

Connecting people, and keeping them connected. The person involved finds the balance point inside a complicated set of relationships and can hold trust across years, which suits the bridge, the adviser, the long-term supporting role. Slow to show anything, and still paying out long after faster approaches have run dry.

Impression

Not the most striking presence in the room at first sight, and then unusually easy to be around — warm, well-judged, the one people gradually start handing things to. Soft, and fully alive with it. Nothing sharp anywhere, which is exactly why nobody quite substitutes for them.

Pitfall

Accommodation runs past the point where it starts costing something. The person involved hesitates at the moment a choice has to be made, cannot say no, and gets drained a little at a time by things never actually agreed to. Afraid of damaging the relationship, they leave the true sentence unsaid — and the relationship quietly becomes the thing that got damaged.

In a building, Yi is the soft and the bendable — not the parts holding the structure up, but the parts life is actually lived against: the bed, the windows, the dining table, small furniture, timber flooring, and whatever is there simply because it looks good.

• Objects: carved beams and painted columns, artwork, wood carvings and oil paintings, rattan chairs and tables, the bend in a pipe or the turn in a staircase — and flowers, climbing vines, medicinal herbs, cloth and silk, and rope.
• Buildings and places: lawns, gardens, orchards and vegetable plots, galleries, beauty salons, and any building whose point is that it is beautiful.
• Outdoors, read wooden bridges, planting and cornering — winding streams and roads, waterfalls, and hill country that curves rather than juts.

Yi and Jia (甲) are both Wood, and in a room they could not be further apart. Jia is the heavy structural piece — the main beam, the thick column. Yi is the soft, curving, climbing sort of thing: the bed, the window, chairs and stools, small furniture. One house, two entirely different inventories.

Also considered as a secondary indicator for: Health / Medical.