An open mouth: solid lines above and below, hunger between. Yí is nourishment — what you feed yourself and others, in food, in words, in the steady diet of images and company that becomes character.
Its diagnostic is unimprovable: observe what a person nourishes, and what they seek to fill themselves with. Tranquility, the tortoise's self-sufficiency, is the ideal; envy of others' nourishment the disease. And the mouth works both ways — the Image counsels care with words going out as with food coming in.
問Yí asks what this relationship feeds on — appreciation or grievance, presence or performance — and what you each hunger for beneath the stated wants. Its practical counsel: watch the diet of words between you; careless speech is junk food for a bond. Nourish the connection deliberately and it grows; graze on resentment and it starves.
Professionally, Yí concerns what sustains you and what you sustain: the work that feeds your competence versus the busywork that merely fills time, the people your effort genuinely nourishes. Envying others' portions — the first line's drooping mouth — wastes your own gifts. Choose the harder nourishment that builds, over the easy one that bloats.
Inwardly, Yí is the audit of intake: information, company, habits, self-talk — the full diet of the mind. Its standard is the magic tortoise: a self so rightly nourished it doesn't gape at others' plates. Tend what you feed, the hexagram says, because you are, quite literally, what you keep swallowing.
A line speaks only when it is a changing line in your own casting.