A Weird, Wordless Water World

4.14.06


With its arrival in Cancer yesterday (Apr 13), Mars joins Venus in the water signs. So if you want to prosper these next three weeks, you'd best go with the flow.

Mars in Cancer means we move by the rise and fall of our gut reactions… which keeps us in close touch with the ever-changing vibes milling around our bodies… but could just as easily bring a case of motion sickness, due to the ceaseless ups-and-downs that mark water's tidal cyclings.

Expecting rock-solid steady-as-she-goes stability will underprepare you. Instead, don your sea legs and climb aboard. At least nobody will tire of the always-fresh scenery. Everybody's drifting somewhere—even when we stop swimming and let the current carry us.

Water refuses our impulse to control. It swirls and streams according to its own patterns, and will course wherever it finds room. Water rushes into the cracks, filling any emptiness with its wet wonder. Does it wake us up, or dampen our spirits? Depends on the moment and our mood, and neither can be accurately predicted, no matter what odds the forecaster submits to speculators.

The planet of drive, determination and discharge of energy (Mars) is in the sign of emotional response (Cancer), and we'd better listen to what our feelings tell us to do. That requires less thinking and talking, and more quiet observation of subtle atmospheric shifts. We know what's going on, but we can't quite contain it all in words. We sense the water condensing around us, hovering heavy in the air, yet can't see or touch it.

Still, we feel the difference between brimming luck and lurking danger. Will we respond appropriately to such vaporous wisdom… or dismiss it as irrational?

If I could draw you a picture of Mars in Cancer, your midsection would be attached to everyone and everything around you—in your physical proximity and your psychic space—by invisible cords of rippling connection. Someone trips and skins his knee, and you're tugged downward to tend to his bloody wound. A loved one cries for help a thousand miles away, and you answer the call. Your favorite leprechaun whispers the secret location of that fattest pot of treasure, and you follow his voice: eyes closed, sixth-sense opened. But geez, if you had to explain where you were headed and why… oh, forget it.

Along the road, never seeing past the next stop, you'll amble through periodic downpours. For a couple moments, the sky will turn mystic pink, then gold and brown. The storm will reache you, or you it. Cloudburst opens, and… inundates! Your sweater is drenched! Your hair's a mess! But not a person alive hasn't faced this rain. And then it passes.

With Venus in Pisces to heighten sensitivity levels, we're in a land of compassion. We instinctively understand what it's like for each other. We grant leeway, forgive and tend to glitches. We see the best, and imagine better versions of the worst.

Or when too much of a good thing turns us to suckers, we get sucked in, willing to overlook major mistakes or mistreatments because, just maybe, enough loving-kindness can save this ship from sinking. Soon enough, we're grasping for lifejackets, tired and treading for our lives, heads held barely high enough to stay above the water and save our lungs from flooding.

The romantics have their day, too, to cast the vacillating afternoons in dreamy shades of pink and purple, yellow and blue. I can't explain why those are the colors I picked, but… oh, forget it. If they're right, then they're right.

Everything we need to paint the day in joy is here. If only we weren't so insistent on executing by the book, following the plan, telling them what we think they want to hear, to try to control their reactions with book smarts, instead of addressing their hearts, inviting them to know us by the pools of feeling in our eyes, and gazing into them with tender regard, as if your life story and mine are a single run-on sentence, connected by a river of punctuation and never stopping at a period

(and Mars is in Cancer through June 3…)