yang · yin — tetragrams 10–18 — 1 February to 13 March
Everything arrives at once, and none of it arrives straight.
The first line holds; the second breaks once. Heaven’s region, but the ground beneath it has given way. What was buried in the first nine now has somewhere to go, and goes there crookedly. Landing here usually means the thing you asked about has already started. The question is no longer whether, but in what shape.
The season opens at the beginning of spring and runs through the rains and the waking of the insects. The breath assists what is hidden, then stirs and opens in the east, and things begin to differ in their forms. From there the nine run every hazard of early growth: overfull and unstraight, divergent, childish and knowing nothing, multiplying day by day, steep and pointed and single rather than double, branching until nothing can stop it, crossing into its opposite in full light, learning at last to draw back at difficulty, and finally waiting on something outside itself before it will advance.
This province tells you the shape a thing is taking, and it is rarely the shape you designed. Do not read a crooked figure here as a warning to start over. Early growth is crooked because it is growing toward something it can sense and you cannot; the correction you want to apply may be a correction to the light. Two figures in this province, Excess and Divergence, answer to the same Yijing hexagram, as later pairs will — where the Mystery divides what the Changes left whole, it is telling you the difference matters. If you have come here twice on the same question, you are being shown two versions of one beginning, and asked which one you have actually been living in.