Year of the Yin Wood Snake - a simple reflection…

“We are being lived by powers we pretend to understand.” W.H. Auden.

Our direct experience of reality lies between the opposite yet connected poles of Heaven and Earth. Formlessness and form. When we pause to observe everything on Earth below and in the Heavens above we see order and pattern in all Natural phenomena. Health and wellness is to live in harmony, to synch up and to flow with the patterns and powers of Nature. Life then becomes light and effortless. “We are being lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

The Daoists created a cosmology of symbolic patterns observed in the Heavens (called the Heavenly Stems) and in the Earth (called the Earthly Branches). This year of 2025 is the Year of the Yin Wood Snake. Yin Wood is the Heavenly Stem and Snake is the Earthly Branch so lets look at the symbolism via a trigram associated with each.

Yin Wood is associated with Wind ☴ and Snake is also associated with Wind ☴. The Heavens or sky exists above the Earth below so this would create Wind ☴ above Wind ☴ as Hexagram 57 which looks like this ䷸.

This gives us an indication for the type of energy that we will feel this year in all aspects of reality, in our internal landscape and in the external landscape. Nature speaks in a symbolic language. It is time to keep our awareness open for the symbols of the Yin Wood Snake. Here is one simple image to sit with, let your imagination roam:

“In Nature, it is the wind that disperses the gathered clouds, leaving the sky clean and serene. And the penetrating quality of the wind depends upon its ceaselessness. This is what makes wind so powerful. Time is its instrument.”

The I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm.