Reunion

Traditionally Gathering Together. A lake above the earth, gathering and holding what flows into it rather than letting it scatter and disperse the way it otherwise would on its own. Reunion favors organized, purposeful assembly — community, celebration, or collective effort brought together around something genuinely worth gathering for in the first place, not just for its own sake.

It appears around community events, organizational efforts, any situation calling for bringing people together purposefully rather than letting attendance happen by accident or obligation alone. Its counsel emphasizes proper leadership and sincere purpose as prerequisites for success — assemblies organized around legitimate, unifying goals tend to work; gathering without clear purpose or capable leadership risks disorder that undermines the whole point of assembling at all in the first place.

Say you're organizing a reunion, a fundraiser, or a community initiative that needs a lot of different people moving toward one shared goal despite their different reasons for showing up to it. This hexagram favors moving forward, provided there's real purpose behind the gathering and someone genuinely capable of leading it through, while cautioning that an assembly organized around vague or self-serving purpose tends to produce disorder rather than the strength genuine unity provides when it's aimed at something real and worth the effort.

Often read as an echo of Hexagram 8, Approach, on a larger, more organized scale — where Approach describes intimate, voluntary bonding, Reunion describes larger, structured assembly involving more people and more formal coordination between them. The old text favors substantial offerings that match the seriousness of what's being gathered for, since a purpose treated too casually attracts a correspondingly casual, less durable unity in return for the effort. A gathering this hexagram favors should leave people feeling more connected afterward, not merely more organized on paper than they were before it started.