Today began with 5 Coffees!

What if I turned the old­est book in the world into a dig­i­tal pro­gram?

That was almost, but not quite, the ques­tion I asked back in 1988, in Rome, when in some youth­ful abun­dance of ambi­tion I wish I could recap­ture, I was learn­ing two lan­guages: Ital­ian and JavaScript.

The book in ques­tion was the I Ching, a Chi­ne­se work dat­ing from the 10th cen­tu­ry BCE. For some, it’s an ora­cle — a way to intu­it the will of God or Gaia or the Tao. For oth­ers, it’s a Jun­gian mir­ror on the sub­con­scious. For oth­ers, it’s just solid and poet­ic wis­dom, a kind of Taoist self-help man­u­al of how to live a moral and bal­anced life.  My hip­py col­leagues at Green­peace, back in the 70s, used the book to guess where in the wide Paci­fic they might find the Rus­sian whal­ing fleet. (Leg­end has it that fol­low­ing a rain­bow proved a more suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy, though in fact they were covert­ly get­ting coor­di­nates from a friend­ly gov­ern­ment.) I myself, in 1982, had asked the book the ques­tion whether I should quit my com­fy, salaried job at a Boston book­store for the uncer­tain­ty of becom­ing a full-time Green­peace vol­un­teer. The respon­se was Hexa­gram 18: work on what has been spoiled. My path was set.

What I didn’t know back then was that my con­stant com­pan­ion on that path would be the same yel­low book that offered up that advice, but shrunk to the size of thing that didn’t yet exist: a cell phone.

More than a book, the I-Ching is an inter­ac­tive text. You ask it a ques­tion, then rit­u­al­ly sort a pile of yarrow stalks between your fin­gers in an elab­o­rate process that con­cludes at a num­ber, which indi­cates a solid or bro­ken line, one of six that make up a hexa­gram. In my app, it looks a bit like this:

So back in Rome in the 80s, my only ques­tion was “Can I write a pro­gram­me to do all that rit­u­al sort­ing for me?” And that’s all my ear­li­est effort was: an exact repli­ca­tion of the yarrow sort­ing method. My goal was not just to sim­pli­fy the process of con­sult­ing the book, but to pre­serve a math­e­mat­i­cal odd­i­ty that wasn’t present in the tra­di­tion­al west­ern short­cut of cast­ing three coins. But that idea grew into what’s become a life­time pas­sion project of expand­ing and refin­ing a ful­ly fledged I Ching App, orig­i­nal­ly designed to run from a flop­py disk on a PC-DOS based com­put­er, to today’s ver­sions for I-Phone and Android.

Over the years I went from sim­ply gen­er­at­ing a hexa­gram num­ber, to then dis­play­ing the orig­i­nal text, to cre­at­ing my own inter­pre­ta­tions, to adding oth­er trans­la­tions, all the while ask­ing users for sug­ges­tions and improve­ments. One asked for a jour­nal. Then a jour­nal which accept­ed emo­jis. Anoth­er want­ed to swipe between screens. An auto­mat­ic save func­tion. Anoth­er helped me add the orig­i­nal archaic Chi­ne­se. Anoth­er want­ed their most beloved trans­la­tion, Legge, as an option.  A lookup library that allowed a full text search. A line gen­er­a­tor that per­mit­ted you to cast real or vir­tu­al coins. What began as a solo project became a work of com­mu­ni­ty wish ful­fill­ment.

I added a secret East­er Egg that I would share only with folks who left a kind review, a rat­ing, or who, despite hav­ing paid for the app already, chose to buy me a cof­fee as an act of appre­ci­a­tion.

And this has been the absolute­ly best thing about this entire project. Yes, I love the alchem­i­cal JavaScript mag­ic of turn­ing words into spells that cre­ate images and text and expe­ri­ences. I love writ­ing text that some­times shim­mers with rel­e­vance or spooky mean­ing. I love being able to mag­ic up a request­ed fea­ture that some­one has asked for. But what I love more is putting some­thing out into the world with love and gen­eros­i­ty and hav­ing that love and gen­eros­i­ty come bound­ing back at me like an eager pup­py with a stick. It takes many forms. Kind words:

Stars:

And Cof­fee. In some cas­es, SO MUCH cof­fee!

And it’s ever so reward­ing to know that at any given moment, mul­ti­ple some­ones in mul­ti­ple some­wheres in the world are open­ing my app, ask­ing a ques­tion, and reflect­ing on an answer that’s trav­elled cen­turies to arrive, I hope, at pre­cise­ly the place and the moment it’s need­ed.

As I wrote on my Buy me a Cof­fee page:

What I do I do for love. But I also love cof­fee. I buy cof­fees for artists and cre­ators and vol­un­teers that do things that I love.

When you buy me a cof­fee for things I’ve done that you love,that makes me love to do them all the more. 

The world needs more love.

And cof­fee.

Part of the more beau­ti­ful future that I like to imag­ine, and which I’m try­ing to actu­al­ize through var­i­ous online vol­un­teer­ing efforts and through my work with Danc­ing Fox, is a world fueled by a gen­eros­i­ty econ­o­my.  Where all of us have a chance to do what we love, the abil­i­ty to reward what we love, and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be reward­ed for what we love.

If you’re curi­ous you can find my app, I Ching, App of Changes, for Android and i-Phone.

And if you have a favorite artist or mak­er or blog­ger whose work you love, buy them a cof­fee, willya?