Water, water everywhere and not a drop to … miss.

It feels that way with half of the solar system residing in the water element through November. The Sun, Mercury and Saturn are moving through Scorpio, while Neptune floats and goes uber diaphanous in Pisces. And Jupiter just stationed several days ago to make a long retrograde through Cancer, until early 2014. The perfect time to contemplate exactly what the water element translates to in astrological terms, in human terms in other words.

Well, you can start by watching this video*. Pay attention to the silkiness of the creature’s movements. The glide, the way everything seems still on one hand, but then in constant motion on the other. We take water for granted, thinking we know it, remember it, from our childhood days of swimming and playing in it — or standing in awe as we watched the deluge of a storm or cowered at the news of an impending tsunami (well, at least I did while living in Hawai’i.)

Like the other three elements in astrology (fire, earth and air) the magnitude for creative or destructive power is equal. And when you think about it, the way the Greeks and Indians did when they declared the four elements to be the very foundation, the components that composed our reality, both visible and invisible, the totality of our lives move through, within and without, the four elements. Meaning we reside in a world composed of the elements as we ourselves are composed of the very same essential parts.

Astrologers will talk a lot about emotions and feelings when it comes to the water signs, and that is true, in a vague sort of way; but I’ve found, more specifically that the water element — when highlighted in a birth chart or predominate by transits — presses upon our consciousness the unseen realm of images and symbols, and the ability to work with metaphor, poetry, song, or any creative medium that requires stillness and movement simultaneously.

Dreams and dreaming become more emphatic, the unconscious more crucial in honing the inchoate, the unformed. Creative solutions abound in myriad forms, shapes and expressions. The rewards are plenty, though the test, (the condition of being a kind of medium for transmission), involves a vulnerability that can be difficult to allow. This is the gift and the riddle of the water element — the capacity to create is dependent upon a condition of openness that is both delicate and fierce; working that riddle requires the wisdom of a poet and skill of an artist.

From my perspective, this is more what the water element alludes to.

Drift in that notion awhile and then share your ideas with me below, please. I’d like to hear your experiences and impressions.

*(Apologies re the treacly song that accompanies the video. I recommend turning the volume down when you watch. At least that’s what I do)

Ray Grasse, the author of one of my favorite books on symbolism, The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives, posted this on Facebook awhile back. He noted:

“Hard to describe the impact this piece had on me as a 19-year old, listening to it on a small tape recorder during a camping trip in Wisconsin under an impossibly starry night sky. Especially good for late-night listening. For those who don’t already know, Holst boned up on the astrological meaning of each planet when composing each of his pieces for The Planets suite.”

Zombie survival guides. Alien interventions. Super bugs. Reality show raptures. Economic cliffs. Anti-Christ-Palooza. Terrorists and Tiaras. Bit coin. Gold coins. Gluten. NSA. GMOs. Homo-trimony. The new Arcade Fire album.

Signs, symbols and Zeitgeist stingers. Time traveling omens from Armageddon are the stock and trade of our modern day narrative. The stories and anxieties we lay down and fret about until the Ambien kicks in. But why such a narrow bandwidth? Where’s the bigger, wider picture? The range of other frequencies?

Scenarios of doom monopolize our inner landscape because speeding up to the end means a new beginning is just around the corner. That’s one theory. The catch of course is the way we resist other narratives. It’s critical now to think beyond the parameters of being a garden-variety human being. This is the nut of the ‘message’ from the ongoing, exact as of today, again, for the fourth (out of seven swipes) Uranus Pluto square.

When food, money, energy and optimism are scarce we become attached to whatever sort of hoard (be it our meager amount in savings or the way Plutocrats hog all the wealth and investments in their seemingly exempt world) we’ve come to associate with as a means to see us through to the new phase. The catch? You can’t cross the river in a boat and then take that boat with you as you explore the new world. It’s too cumbersome and defeats the purpose of surrender.

So we’re looping right now. Sort of like animals do before being eaten by a predator. You’ve probably seen shots like this on those nature shows you watched as a kid. The prey runs around and around in a circle, hysterical, before the killing bite is administered by the predator. Right?

Our inner animal is a bit freaked. So, like your pet, you need to assure it all will be well. You’ll take care of things and keep the wolves away from the door. Do that for your inner critter, you’ll gain a lot of traction in the process.

The weirdness happens when we observe ourselves observing others and the world we coexist in. If we’re not dwelling on our own crisis of faith, then we want to read about it in the news or watch it in a sci-fi or horror film; a tacit way of confirming that everyone’s sort of fucked up at the same time.

Fact or fiction doesn’t matter — just that we’re seeing clearly that everything is caving in — that’s the essential ‘meaning’ behind the obsessive imagery we circulate and share and post and tweet about it — over and over and over. It’s the Hologram of the Season. The reality bite that keeps on biting.

As I’ve already mentioned, I associate this End of Days meme with the fourth swipe between Uranus and Pluto. The number four makes things sharply concrete; there’s less of a feeling for a creative outlet with four, like there is with the number three. Four is two plus two which feels like two sides against two other sides — the nature of two being opposition and discord. A doubling up of angst.

My field notes show that Uranus is associated with time warping. A hybrid process of time speeding up, which means our subjective experience of time is altered and tweaked out — it kind of forces us to feel and peer into the future, despite our best efforts to avoid perception. This quickening happens via Aries. So the sense of urgency, to remove constraints, shackles, anything that limits freedom, imparts that time bomb feeling. Tick tock. Uranus becomes the hair shirt we’re wearing. It’s exciting to think about it except for one small impediment:

Pluto is akin to a black hole generator. When our awareness is touched by Pluto, nuclear fission occurs; meaning, we phase between one reality and another reality in such a way that forces us to leave the former reality and pop into the later reality which, to our animal nature — our survival drive — is associated with annihilation of the former, and so, well, we balk and freeze and hover. And yet the worm hole beckons.

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Today while I was shopping in West Seattle I decided to take a break and grab a coffee before heading back to the ferry. I was frazzled. Not irritated exactly, just eager to ditch the compression of Seattle’s traffic, get home and throw some salts into a hot tub and soak and drink some wine.

After I decided on where to stop for the Americano, I moved into a cross walk to cross the street and then instantly, as if materializing out of the ethers behind me, a twenty-something hipster — dressed in black and wearing a black cap and sporting multiple spider-themed tattoos and pulling a black suitcase on wheels behind him — was behind me.

As we moved in tandem across the street, with the suitcase’s wheels clattering and grinding on the asphalt behind him, the guy kept inching closer into my personal space. It was like his presence was crawling up my back as I moved towards the coffee place and I felt flummoxed and startled by how quickly someone could get in your face without ever inviting or eliciting such a meeting. Something was afoot.

Speeding my pace, I aimed for the establishment, lost him and entered with the door of the biz closing behind me just as he popped/kicked the door back open — dragging the suitcase behind him like a ball and chain.

I got in line to order. And then he was in line to order, next to me, but, again, with his presence pushing into the field around me so he might have been sitting on my shoulder fidgeting with his phone, lost in its screen, while I was making a conscious effort to ignore him and focus on the cupcakes in the display case (one of which was flavor-named “Kate” — god knows why. I decided to take a picture of it and send the shot to my friend Kate). But even my cake distraction couldn’t dislodge the guy’s omnipresent vibe. It was something akin to a rash.

I ordered, got my coffee and no cupcake and moved as far away as I could into the jungle of chairs and tables, to find a bench and table out of sight of the dark guy.

Two minutes later, with a coffee and the fucking suitcase behind him, he was sliding in beside me on the bench that served the row of tables in front of us; where he proceeded to methodically, like a scientist unpacking a warhead, free the contents of the mystery suitcase on wheels.

As the gear was excavated, each item, to my irritation, was placed on the same bench we were sharing until so many items were piled atop one another they were edging into my thigh.

At this point I could no longer focus on the newspaper I was reading. Something in me had finally surrendered at the event horizon of his black hole and I was pulled into the guy’s buzzing mandala of Look At Me. And so I was all eyes. Read more

Rémi Gaillard is a guy who lost his job as a shoe salesman and then decided to transform the big question mark in his life (as in “What to do next?”) by spreading that question mark all over the world as a culture jammer, (as in people scratching their heads while watching him and asking “What the fuck?) Read the entire article here.

Pardon the melodrama but I’ve gotta start somewhere — with something.

I did everything except what I’d intended to do throughout the summer.

But I’m a wizened Cancer and I know better about how my creative flow creates.

We’re always hearing about athletes stoking themselves, like Mount Vesuvius, into their ‘peak zone’. Or muse-possessed artists working non-stop until stigmata appears on their hands and feet. And then there’s those mothers who raise Mack trucks up with their bare hands should a child be pinned beneath an axel. Yes, those sorts of super states are factual, but they are also highly romanticized. And not part of my creative reality. Just thinking about exertion like that makes me want to take a nap.

The lunar association with Cancer is both a horror and a gift. There is the always satisfying absorption of solar light, holding an impulse and molding it into something original. But there is also the dark side of the moon that, heretofore, only Pink Floyd have ever explored publicly. And there’s the rub.

Until a Cancer learns about this other half of their nature they remain caught in the constant waxing and waning of the light, waiting for a moment’s pause to gather their bearings, hit the perfect note. But of course that moment never arrives, that promise of perfection remains allusive. And so there are many stillbirths and the bad moods — the loss of persistence, that follow.

The dark half of the moon is the bardo that a wise Cancer (or any creative person) eventually learns to abide in. They come to see it as part and parcel of the creative way: To have no sense of light — no direction or purpose. The only poet I’ve ever read who wrote about this place was T.S. Eliot and he illuminated it perfectly in his masterpiece Four Quartets.

Eliot illustrates the dark of the moon by evoking the subway “when an underground train…stops too long between stations. And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence. And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen. Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”

This is the realm of the pre-conscious. Or the pre-conceptual. In this place all is perfect but also motionless. Life-less. The journey into form has not commenced. The options and the potentials are limitless, but what to designate, what to bring the solar gift of light to?

The dark side of the moon is a borderless landscape of nascent pre-things. A realm where every impulse, idea, thought, word and image is poised like a cat ready to pounce. All it needs is a mouse. Or carrot (not to mix metaphors — so scratch that.) This is the realm Cancers might access but only after they’ve paid the price of admission. And often the price of admission is a lot of doing (seemingly) nothing.

And from the nothing comes the something. Read more