# [D9:3M] Vision: [[Under the Skin]] Hexagram: [[Ninth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Ninth Hexagram]] Symbols: #skin #mountain #stream #wand #forest #bead #tenthousand #sea #fish #purplefinch #two #twin #bodyadrift #fire September 23rd, 1616 I. My skin is sitting with me among the chokecherry and mountain spray spread out along the stream and up the the opposite face of sandstone, up its craggy gaps and brief stairstepped flats.  The morning light opens up over a far crest and between leaves and branches so that its wands and coruscations move across the forest floor and over my skin and sparkle on the stream water as if in search. My skin is made of words and of pale clay and I like its contrast with the whorl of red September bush beads, punctuations set alight in the grey cursive of petiole and peat. No signs of autumn yet, but signs of signs.   How when your thumbnail divides the bud from the pine needle it smells like an orange now, not that the needle changes, but the air.  Not that the air is cold yet, merely skewed a little upward from the downwardness of dead-center summers, when pine is still exactly as it seems.  How when you dig a few inches into the soil and put a handful to your nose, it is different from yesterday, sweeter too, like the needle.  How, as the winter comes and goes, as snowmelt showers from forest ceiling and patters like indoor rainfall upon its floor, you’ll know the first day of spring by the 10,000 diamonds winking in the air between trees, caught in faint networks of strings woven overnight by the unseen spiders of the unseen woods.   How life is busy in the dark and already luminous by morning. How signal is known only in contrast to noise.  How, learning to perceive the change before change, a word appears in the clay of the skin: Dukkha.  How everything that does holds everything that will.  How recognition prepares the heart.  How tears prepare the body. II. Depending on the day, my skin might smell like the faraway sea or the fish washed dankly to shore.  But as for the low quiet sounds emitted from deep in the pores, always its dull chattering is all too human.  All too human: a phrase meaning “the animal I don’t know.” But what animal am I then? Above my skin and me croaks the froglike vocabulary of crows, out and about in the hammering latticework of flickers and peckers.  The ornery curse word of the jay cast against the choirboy apologizing of the chickadee.  My skin holds it in its wet clay folds, the easy pondwater rippling of the purple finch, and just behind the door of song, the faraway scree and echo in the granite cliffs of the red-tail.  My skin holds and records hawkscream in its miming ledgers, muttering lowly oh, and oh. III.  The pores of my skin deepen at dusk, and puss when I rise at dawn.  The feeling is like that of being buried in the sand as the tide rises, and though I feel burdened, I am not in pain.  The sound my skin makes is a gasp, for my skin is a gasp.  It has come to sound like itself, something which survives in the air for a moment before growing brittle and frail.  It is slipping away from me now in two perfect half stones, two more among the ancient enumerations of the mountain we dwell in.  Soon, I am lost and can’t find my camp.  Is this what winter is like here? Is this winter or is it just after?  My skin’s twin husks are sinking into the mud below me, or next to me, or within me I think.  I don’t understand these distinctions anymore and what I feel must be a kind of fear.  The words grow obscure and quietly fade into earth while the deafening hawk nears. The grasp of its talons is a point of heat within a chasm inside me.  I have only to accept what is happening for my body to drift beyond grasping, and for this great fire to spread.