# [D10:3M] Vision: [[The Garden is Trembling but the Dreamer is Still]] Hexagram: [[Tenth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Tenth Trial]] Symbols: #dad #ocean #mother #four #twin #blood #omnisuburbia #hands #feet #head #duncetime #eye #garden #car #Omphalos #road #dreamer #solitary March 7th, 2016 I. “Come on,” said the dad, “we’re so close to the ocean.” The mother said, “look, hon, there’s that seafood place. Remember?  And the cute little antique store.” “How’d you kids like to live here?” the dad said. The four-year-old twins looked at the piles of dead bodies on the blood-soaked streets. The dead twin, the brother, always saw the past and the living sister always saw the future.  This is why they tended to see the same things, and also why the mom and the dad saw mostly nothing at all.  They lived in a blind and purgative omnisuburbia, perfect as a plastic jewel in an abandoned shopping mall vending machine. “So many people out today,” said the mom. “Nothing has changed.” The dad said, “the old pizza joint is still up and running. Who wants pizza!” The bodies looked more or less like they always did: bloated, naked, and absurd.  Some were missing limbs, hands, feet, even heads.  You might see a stray finger or toe rolling along in the blood puddles, a rare and quizzical flick or nudge in the rotting stillness. Of course, it’s always possible that what the twins perceived, that their parents did not, wasn’t so much a symmetry of past and future but, rather, other nested cross-dissolving presents in the collective fishbowl duncetime of the walleyed masses.  Duncetime: A neutral territory where neither past, present, nor future intervene on the Stage of Crippling Denial.  A kind of pitiably dreamless sleep. II. The gardens trembled beneath the envoy of armored cars, as did the Omphalos at the end of the road, as it always had anytime a dream was about to end. The Dreamer of this dream was a true Solitary who slept peacefully still even as the dream soldiers, standing up in turrets, approached him on the dream road.  For even in the dream, the Solitary knew the approach itself as Eternity and did not react as one usually does to an approach, as if approaches come out of nowhere.  A thing might approach seemingly out of nowhere, he knew this, yet such a thing never fully arrives, never passes.  This is how Eternity works, all the more real for its frightfulness.  This is how a dream tends to go when a whole country sleeps at once, and the Solitary’s country had been sleeping a long time. III. What did the gardens grow? One thing, or two things, were the conjoined twins, stuck together in back, sprouting up from a pea green chute.  The two knew each other as voices and sources of discomfort, but never upon the face of one had the other gazed. Until one day, as the usual charioteers and their dormant guns ever-approached beneath the vibrant sun, the twins were met by the Solitary, who had glimpsed them from afar.  He called the one _her_ and the other _him_.  He cut them apart with an electric pruning saw he kept in a nearby shed with the tractor and buckrake. The two nakedly gazed on each other and embraced in humiliated uncertainty and bled from their backs onto their trembling feet and the trembling garden.  It was only a short time before the Solitary, neither approving nor disapproving, separated them and sent them on their ways.  Off they went in opposite directions, toward pasts and futures, forever approaching what can never be reached.  For every straight line follows a circle.