# [D25:7M] Vision: [[The Time Forgiveness Takes]] Hexagram: [[Twenty Fifth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Twenty Fifth Trial]] Archetypes: #swan #lake #fish #feet #eyes #door #tree #sun #ocean #bed #star #mountain #infant #coyote #hands #arm #face #father #mother #brother #sister #darkwindow #dog #ears November 6th, 1911, 2011 1. Dear Swan,  Last night I dreamt you were living on a small lake outside the town of my childhood. The water's surface was like a thin glass floor, and you could look deeply into it, the way you do into all things. What should you find beneath but the very town, that deep and distant municipality as seen from your bird's-eye view.  Your webbed feet in slow silhouette waved from their heavenly light, just beneath the glass sky above. A lot happened in town on any given day, entire lives unwitnessed, if not for you.  The prehistoric townsfolk, the ishifish or the fiery-eyed crabs, lived and died in seconds before your watchful eyes.  But your vigilant gaze could not follow them everywhere, into most of their offices or their homes, where, in nanoseconds entire generations came and went behind closed doors. In the dream, I worried for you, for I could see from shore, tied to my tree with my master's leash, that you took your sworn post as sole witness of life down there as a kind of sacred duty, as if the balance of the world were to depend on what you, excavator of shortest dreams, should occasion to discover.  Now as I found fewer human years ahead than behind me, I remained pinned to my tree with great compassion for your hopeless task. When the season came, as it always must, that you should grow sick and take off for warmer climates, the lake froze behind you.  I watched as you pushed into the sun like a tiny speck before a vast and burning eye.  Unable to look into it for long, I blinked, and you disappeared. 2. In my own season, I learned slowly to chew through my own leash. I learned how to step onto the ice, keeping my weight behind me, one tentative paw out to test, then the gentle roll of me forward onto it, no cracking of the floor beneath.  Out on the middle of the ice, I cleared enough snow away to form a window onto the town below, where everything you saw had happened.  I peered into it and found my town changed beneath your witnessing of it, and only very little did I recognize.  I saw seahorses photographing themselves in fits of narcissistic personality disorder, all along Main Street, monetizing their spirally good looks and buying up all the choral district real estate.  Had these creatures lived here when I was but a wee pup? Seahorses like that would have been dealt with, and not kindly.  For my town had permitted nothing so flippant or showy in its day.  Indeed, it had permitted nothing at all. I remember its only coffee shop, which was, in reality, more of a donut shop.  The coffee burned the stomach and the donuts caused certain inconsistencies of the bowels.  We would get together there, in those days, grateful for anything at all.  As the years progressed, Jubelt the Java Clam perfected his brew, and one could taste in it fruits and flowers from some divine paradise halfway across the world.  The pastries, few of which were still in the donut category, were arranged like a garden of earthly delights, pistachio green and goat cheese cream with plops of local berries.  The bm's felt as slick and delicate as  the arrangements looked.  Yet the prices forced the old folks out, and a new generation believed every improvement of the set to be an invitation to star in a yet untitled but ongoing film about starring in films. They wore their costumes and their entourages alike, pointed their cameras at themselves and at the treats they were too afraid to eat for fear of gaining weight.  And before long, dear Swan, I too found my soul and my pockets empty.  You know this story.  Everyone does.  And what difference has it made to know it?   The town which once permitted nothing now permitted it all, vastly unimproved by its vast improvements. 3. Yet some things seemed frozen in time even as the world sped by.  Take the church of my town, for example.  As a child, I had lost everything to it.  My father wandered off from my mother and the litter, and though we would still see him from time to time, coming in and going away, or out with another bitch down some alley or another, he seemed no longer to recognize my siblings and me.  When not in the company of others, he kept his snout in the Bible as he went, and dared not look up from it.  My church had become his church, and I ceased setting foot in it.  It was after all, the most popular hangout spot for liars and hypocrites. Yet on holidays, my siblings and I were forced to join him there, and church was the one place he would look at us, and the one place where I didn’t want to be seen.  His eyes would be red and glassy and his paws wet and trembling.  He would lean on us there, as some dogs do, as if begging, not our forgiveness of him, but God’s forgiveness of us, his faithless fallen children.  Often I thought to myself, if this dog is the model of father, of what use is the father? I stood in the cold, on the frozen lake, observing my town with such interest that I did not notice my feet freezing to the ice.  Seeing what had happened to me, I felt suddenly desperate to move on, and to quit my spying.  But I could not move without great pain and there was no one to help me.  I strained and gave up, and gave up again, until, in my loneliness, I settled down into the blinding white snow.  4. I wake in my bed.  It’s still dark.  Everything in my throat and nose is dry as usual.  The small  voice says make some hot tea and go out back.  I listen to the small voice because it's been getting stronger over the years and months and even recent weeks.  And I know that, somehow, dreams like the one I just had, and my improved ability to remember them, are all tied together with the small voice.  I call it all, simply, "the will to live."  I sit with my lately improved will to live beneath the desert stars and before my god the Mountain, which lulls me into an excitement of finding, within the dark infant form it takes on in the southern horizon, a life I wouldn’t have known existed as little as five minutes ago.  The tea soothes my throat and I nearly drift off to sleep again on at the patio table.  But then the laughing and crying of the coyotes come reeling in with the breeze of night, those high-healed, lipstick-smeared grievances and drunken promises of revenge. I used to think life out there in the dark was something different from life right here under the patio lights.  But now just listen to them.  They haven't got a single serious issue to discuss among them.  It's just idle gossip and pure speculation.  They're out there misinforming the other animals, disorienting them until some dumb bunny gets itself eaten alive.  That sound out there, Swan?  It's all greed and deception.  And the birds?  You think they're singing to us? No, they’re mapping their territory like some cartel of work-a-day cartographers.  Sounds for height, width, depth, amplitude, distance.  Repetitive yet not identical from sequence to sequence.  Shifting as their position shifts.  Shifting in relation to the positions of other birds. Us? We hear all this and think it's God.  Well it is!  It _is_ God! We run from one version of God into whatever version better suits our expectations.  We say: here is a world I can integrate into whatever I need to believe to stay sane, and over here a world which fails the very parts of me which would otherwise be capable of making something good out of what I might find in the dark. 5. I think of all the ways your witnessing of my town has changed it.  Isn't it strange how the eyes' rays can be cast into the heart of another place retro-causally?  Or is it just me who thinks that?  I remember my father in the seat next to me in church.  I watched him shrivel and weaken in the days and weeks leading up to his Baptism.  I felt the sweat from his hands on my arm or neck and cringed in disgust.  I visualized smashing my elbow into his face and dragging him up before the crucifix and letting him bleed out in front of the congregation.   We fought our wars over the years.  I beat his ass once when he threatened me.  I dragged his face with my hands on the back of his head across the carpet, with my knees in his back, until his face rubbed raw.  He went to work that way for days afterward.  This man who betrayed us and then sought to “save” us.  This wasn't a man; it was a plastic sack.  My father, who blew my college tuition money on hookers and the K-Love Christian radio station.  My father, whose sex addiction killed his youngest son, my brother, by infecting my mother while she was pregnant with him.  My father who got both my mother and sister incarcerated in different types of prisons when they beat his ass or ran away, respectively.  My sister locked up in a Christian Boarding House for Troubled Girls for preferring her boyfriend’s house.  My mother in jail for letting my father know how she felt about my sister being there.  My father, who has survived an unsurvivable cancer.  My father, who, having become nothing at all, has almost infinite space and compassion for others in his old age, whose heart contains no trace of malice to a human soul, who volunteers with the homeless and the poor.  My father, who, after surgery, could eat only ice chips and could not walk.  And I traveled back to Phoenix to be with him and to carry his weight on my shoulders, to lift his half-naked sweaty old-man body up out of bed.  And when we all expected him to die, I let him die.  And when it turned out, no, it looks like he'll live, and with each passing year he still lives, I’ve let him live.  With each year lived, I live with him, older myself now, and I thank God for the peace we’ve cobbled together and marvel at how little sense any of it makes at all.  How ordinary my  broken heart, powerless in the face of such an asymmetrical symmetry, a death between two lives, and another, and another.  How much time forgiveness takes, at all times, and in every past and future moment. His voice on the phone saying the doctor has never pronounced a pancreatic cancer patient cured.  Whoever this man is, I have only known him seven years.   And my brother?  If lost to me, then lost to each of us, each of us broken by the same loss.  And if not lost, then never gone.  His ghost has brought me here, and I have brought him too. The figure-ground reversal of this present absence is always also a dark window onto the other world, the truer world. 6. It’s spring, Swan, and the lake is thawed and you alight on it as before.  I’m not sure if this is the following spring, from the previous night’s dream, or many springs later, following many other dreams.  But something is different.  We’ve greyed, both of us.  Looking out toward you, I see tears streaming from either side of your beak, down your feathery neck and into the water.  You face toward shore where I stand alert, as if to show me what I’ve done.  From across that little distance, I sense something has happened but I don’t know what it is, and I would certainly jump into the water if experience hadn’t taught me that no one likes to see birds of the water disturbed, nor the scent of a wet dog.  I smell something unusual about the moment, but I haven’t the words. I wonder, Swan, if you’ve ever heard of alexithymia.  It’s Greek for not having words for feelings, but it also names a disorder prevalent in traumatized children and adults.  Those with alexithymia simply cannot identify with what their physical sensations mean.  They might look angry but will deny it because they don’t understand that anger is what they are feeling.  The same if they are terrified or even just worried.  Being unable to discern what is going on inside, they are often out of touch with their needs, and therefore have trouble taking care of themselves.  Whether, when, and how much food or sleep they need is a common example. Alexithymia sometimes looks like autism, and indeed, autistic people sometimes have alexithymia. Sometimes my friends joke I’m autistic or aspergery.  Unlike many of the other dogs, who will roll over on their backs to demonstrate peaceful or playful intentions, I will continue to jump and bark and stomp my paws.  So overwhelmed am I with an energy I cannot name, I might neglect to hear the yelp of a dog whose leg I’ve landed too heavily upon or whose ear I’ve bitten too hard.    7. But if I were to jump into the lake now, I would try going straight to the bottom, holding my breath for as long as I could, to check in on my deep dark town, to see it how you might have seen it, and to find out if I mightn’t see it better your way, to discover, now, some new part of it.  Perhaps I would find it changed, actually, looking a bit more like your own faraway town, having colored mine in ways which reveal a truer nature previously overlooked.  More than anything, Swan, I wish, like you, to have wings, so that I might reach a brand new shore, perhaps ancient and well-loved where you are, but previously unknown to me.  Even now, the familiar landscape is dropping away. With love and gratitude, Dog