Coming to Meet in Family

Wind moves under heaven, reaching everywhere — and the dark line has re-entered at the bottom, small and charming: the resentment offering its first reasonable complaint, the outside influence pulling a child sideways, the "little" habit the home starts to organise around. Check it with the brake of bronze (line 1): immediately, while it's still a lean pig — grown, it rages, and what two fingers hold today needs a rope by spring. The discipline is the halfway: meet everyone and everything with open mind and tolerance, but no further than dignity allows. Where an influence carries real seduction, the answer is reserve, at once, at the door. All the household's later struggles are this opening line, postponed.

Toward the flawed and difficult in your own relatives, keep the tank stocked (lines 2 and 4). Contain a family member's failings with a light, constant pressure — the fish kept quietly, neither indulged nor violently suppressed — and don't parade the struggle to outsiders. The opposite failure empties the tank: harshness, moralising, and disdain drive the relative away entirely, and the lack is felt exactly when you need them (line 4). Shade the melon (line 5): protect what's tender and still ripening in a child or a sibling rather than gripping it — what force could never extract falls ripe, of itself, from heaven. And if hostility comes to meet you (line 6), horns out — withdraw completely, and bear the offence with composure.