Back in the beginning of 2024, I attended a talk by Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger. Now, I can't really explain the science behind what she said to us during the talk but the gist of it was that animals basically come from fallen leaves.

She said it in this super poetic way that I'll try to paraphrase from my notes: when a tree releases leaves into water, those leaves fall in a fractal pattern and leave a skeleton behind. What those fallen leaves, those accidents of nature, end up giving back to the environment is a bunch of particles called humic acids. Those humic acids, somehow, become an agent for iron which is why the land holds iron that the sea seek out.

When the oceans seek out the irons in the land, those irons combine with an enzyme and that creates proteins. In Dr. Beresford-Kroger's, "Anything that makes protein gets bigger. Anything that gets bigger wants to divide."

And so—life! Little algae, single celled organisms, fish, orcas, and mammals. This is the beginning of animal life. As Dr. Beresford-Kroger says, this is why fishermen say, "To catch a fish, you must plant a tree." Fish don't literally grow on trees but they are birthed by the accidental interactions between fallen leaves and the circulating water.

The last hexagram in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching is called 未济. What does this name mean?

未 is Chinese for "yet to be" or "coming soon." The character itself shows a tree that is still growing. That's why it has all of those branches extending outwards, reaching out, because the task of a tree that is growing is unfinished.

济 literally just means to cross a river. It can also mean river and it's the name of a specific river too. The character doesn't just show a river, though. It shows a water radical next to a current which is being crossed.

These two characters together form one word: imperfection, incompleteness, or unknown. The hexagram itself is the water trigram on the outside and the fire trigram on the inside, a reference to the later heaven bagua map but upside down. The later bagua map is a map of the many miracles caused by imperfect movement. Water sinks down from above and mixes with fire which rises from below, indicating change. Hexagram 64 is an opening—an opportunity caused by a sacred accident.

It's a hell of a hexagram for a divination sequence to end up. Time remain incomplete. We don't know, simply don't know what will happen. Life is made up of accidents.

Now, I'm not sure if the people who created the I Ching before it was ever sequenced by a king meant for Hexagram 64 to appear as the last hexagram or whether they even intended an order in the first place. I'm also not sure when this divination technology was made, how it began, or how long it took. I don't think anyone does which makes me wonder: could the shamans who created this divinatory technology, like the fishermen, know that animal life first came from fallen leaves?

Because the name is clear. 未济 is a growing tree, a tree with an unpredictable future, that grows next to a river. The cross on top of the water's current shows that something is clearly falling into the current, perhaps causing circulation with irons and acids and enzymes and proteins. Could there be some kind of ancient memory here? About the origin of animal life coming from the imperfect action of trees next to water?

When a tree sheds a leaf, I don't think the tree really intends to do that. It's an accident or a waste product of the tree. It's just an old leaf that the tree can no longer sustain that it drops. I don't think that the tree has a full plan of what it wants that leaf to do. It's just an imperfection of its life cycle.

And yet, animal life springs out of those fallen leaves. We owe our own lives, as moving life, not to some grand plan but to a tree's discard.

I think about that when I stumble into a sense of perfectionism sometimes—the fact that the true home of all animals isn't a planned city or even a willful creation. We are here because of an accident and our bodies are made from the imperfections of the world. If this world were perfectly balanced, if nothing was wasted or allowed to be discarded and if everything operated according to what is known, then we wouldn't exist at all. We are here because someone, a tree, decided to throw away something without knowing what might happen.

And maybe the fact that animals come from the accidental refuse of trees was and has been a known fact for some time. There's the saying from the fishermen and this record that we call divination.