Hexagram ䷿ 未濟 WeiJi - Incompletion / Starting over

HuoZaiShuiShang WeiJi JunZiYiShenBianWuJuFang

火在水上，未濟，君子以慎辨物居方。

There is the fire over the water, which is the image of hexagram WeiJi. Learn from this! Please be cautious, inspect the situation, and choose your strategy.

 — DaXiang 大象  

As usual, the first four words in this DaXiang sentence describes the pattern of the hexagram. The first word, Huo 火 Fire, stands for the top trigram ☲, Li 離. It holds the symbolic meaning of Ming 明 for bright, brightness, clear, understand, and illumination.

The second word, Zai 在, means exist, appear, be on/in. The third word, 水 Shui is the symbolic image of the bottom trigram ☵, Kan 坎. The next word, Shang 上 means above, up, top, high, or over, which further describes the status of the top trigram and its relationship with the bottom trigram. We can intuit that there is something not quite right, or even dangerous, about a fire burning by itself over water.

It is personally not difficult for me to call forth this image because of experiences throughout my childhood. As many of you already know, I grew up in a remote village where we kept our ancient lifestyle until the 1980s. When I was growing up, China was a very poor country. For example, we had to secretly gather dry grasses and sticks under the cover of night, just to have enough fuel to make our small cooking fires. If we were caught doing this, we could be publicly shamed or even jailed. By the time I was seven years old, my mother insisted that my older brother and I take turns each week making rice porridge for breakfast. We had to learn to make a fire, master the skill of starting and controlling the fire using a bellows, to boil water, and properly cook the rice porridge before we went to school, six days a week.