I was born under a water sign: Cancer. Certain experiences that I encounter seem to confirm the characteristic of being like water. Others feel more like a rock in the stream.
I remember arriving at a theater in plenty of time to see the previews and purchase popcorn and a drink beforehand. The crowd wasn’t that large and there were several servers filling orders as fast as they could. But the previews had finished when I finally got into the darkened theater with my tub of buttered popcorn and cup of orange crush.
People keep arriving, their nervous energy like water flowing in a stream bed, while I was a rock in that stream. People behind me kept moving forward. I would feel a shoulder pushing against me, then it would slip in front and begin pushing back against the front of my shoulder, until their leg and hip had also slipped ahead. Or was I the water in which otters were swimming upstream?
Water signs tend to be unsure whether we are doing enough to take advantage of the opportunities of our lives. If we were signs with more passion, more certainty of purpose, then our movement through the world might feel like a balloon rising in the air, or sure-footed walking upon the ground, or a candle flame burning steadily, or a salmon climbing a water fall. But water signs don’t climb, float, burn, or leave home, except by convincing ourselves it would be good for us or the world to do so.
If crowds are made up of individuals trying to improve their relative position, or who just go along with what they feel is expected and rewarded, who is looking after our community, our society, our world, or just our own tumbling thoughts about them?
You hear that unless we take care of ourselves and do our best to create a strong, good foundation in ourselves, we can’t be much good to the world. But while we’re working on ourselves, what is happening to our world? Could there be a more direct path to helping our world know that we care what happens to it? Our lives are so short and the needs of our world are so much greater than our own individual needs, are we really that central to the dynamic of this life?
When I ask myself how the stars would have instilled in me the Astrological qualities of water, I recall that I drowned when I was two-years-old. I have no memory of this event, but I can imagine my lungs filling with water at the same time as my mind filled with the warm feelings of being welcomed by all those beings whom I didn’t know from a few months walking upright on my new planet.
I haven’t found a way to benefit from the possibility that I had a luminous near-death-experience when I was too young to learn anything from it, but it occurs to me now that we may all have had a similar experience and all have trouble learning from it. We must have all had to say Goodbye to those friendly beings when we embarked on the journey that brought us here.
Maybe I’m not as much like water as I’d like to be. Masaru Emoto took photographs of water crystals that were beautifully formed when they had been in the company of beauty and kindness. Those ice crystals would retain that perfection–as if they remembered the experience that engendered it with deep fidelity. If the water that composes 70% of my body can remember with appreciation the beauty of this living world, why does my own gratitude wax and wane as quickly as a leaf twirling in the wind?