March opens with a flood. Both Saturn and the North Node in Scorpio, a tenacious water sign. Since mid-Feb until the middle of this month, half the solar system is in Pisces, a diffused, receptive water sign. In July, Jupiter goes into Cancer, a nurturing water sign.

Sunken Treasure

All year we are being asked to reconsider the importance of water, as a physical substance – that stuff that covers 70% of our planet — and as an energy: the universal matrix whence all life springs.

There is no escaping water, the most mysterious of the four elements. It connects and unites everything we can see and everything we cannot see.

Treasure Islands

This month the Pisces corner of the water triad¹ is peaking. In early March, our innermost selves are marinating in imagination. Neptune, Mars, Mercury, Venus and the Sun will be spreading a thin mist of feeling over ourselves and our surroundings. To take full advantage of this dreamy time is to surrender to spiritual and artistic musings, accepting and enjoying the nature of illusion.

In the external realm, the geopolitics of water look to be big this year. As astrologer Austin Coppock reminds us, oil speculators are setting their sites on the Pacific Ocean, which is starting to look far more attractive to them than the war-torn Middle East.

Consider the renewed hubbub over the Falkland islands. Thirty years after the British-Argentine war, as politicians from both sides once again blather on about sovereignty and government, the true motives behind the conflict are revealed by the news that fossil fuel reserves have been discovered offshore.²

And Not a Drop to Drink

At this stage of the human awareness curve, our most obvious water crisis is the scarcity of H2O in an unpolluted form.

It’s an issue every living thing can identify with, since we have all experienced thirst. And even the privileged can at least imagine what it would be like to not have enough water to keep clean. Even so, water scarcity gets nowhere near the press that its enormous impact warrants; and it is doubtless because it impacts the global poor disproportionately.

This is going to change. No crisis is more urgent in the world today than the availability of clean water. Soon it will be deemed the most precious commodity on Earth.

Stewardship 

This is the year to get sensitized: to contemplate humanity’s guardianship of the Earth’s waterways. Not since the BP rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, two days before Earth Day 2010,³ have the portents of marine disaster been as acute as they are now.

It is being brought home to us that the healing of Gaia cannot wait. Every time we turn around, we hear of a new scientific report saying, in so many words, “Oh wow, it turns out Antarctica is melting a lot quicker than we thought” (New York Times, Dec 23, 2012); or “Oh dear, actually soot is three times more damaging to the atmosphere than we said in our last study” (New York Times, Jan 15, 2013).

More and more people understand, at least conceptually, that a massive clean-up must be begun, and that it is a time-sensitive undertaking. But being a recalcitrant species, we humans tend not to rouse ourselves until an issue is in our faces.

This year it will be in our faces. This is good news, because otherwise we would tend not to think about it. Water, the subtlest of the four elements, is the least welcoming of analysis.

The Choking Dragon

It is gratifying to environmentalists that so much attention has recently been given to the suffocating smog enveloping Beijing; to the point of embarrassing the Chinese government into responding with uncharacteristic transparency. Transparency is more than you could say for the air itself. (When the news about China’s record-breaking smog went global in February, Mars in Aquarius [sort of a cosmic pun, isn’t it: Aquarius is fixed {unmoving} air = smog] was opposite China’s natal conjunction of Mars and Pluto [pollution].)

But the fouling of the air is more obvious than that of water. Of the four elements, water’s energies are the hardest to see. They are hard to see in the figurative sense; in that intuitions, feelings, dreams and psychic hunches are so inscrutable that many people dismiss their importance — even deny their existence.  They are hard to see in the literal sense, too. Water pollution usually escapes the naked eye.

The most outrageous global offender in terms of water pollution is, once again, China; as it stumbles all over itself at breakneck speed, trying to out-capitalize the capitalists. Global researcher expert Maud Barlow suggests that 80% of China’s rivers are so thoroughly fouled as to be unrecoverable.

Nature bats last, but She may have to start over from scratch where China’s waterways are concerned.

Water Visibility

The acidification of the oceans, too, is likely to make inroads this year on the collective mind.  Another consequence of fossil fuels, acidification has gotten much less attention than has global warming.⁴ But the transits of 2013 may push it onto the public’s radar.

Another aspect of worldwide water use is the staggering amount of water employed in industry and agriculture. The reason this issue is so seldom discussed may be because it’s too complex to be communicated in a sound bite. Guzzling water for everything from generating power to lubricating machinery, industry accounts for an astonishing 88% of water consumption worldwide. Big Oil alone — already criminal because of what happens to the environments in which it is drilled and shipped — uses a billion gallons a day in the refining process.

It was eye-opening for me to learn, from Charty Durant, former fashion editor for British Vogue,⁵ that the fashion industry is one of the most water-intensive industries on the planet.

Diving In without Drowning

As individuals, how might we approach these water teachings? These transits want us to learn how to honor water both in form and content. Accessing the information is the content part. Letting the information in is the form part. To get it, we must feel it.

People with a lot of water in their natal charts are used to this meta dilemma. We are not only getting hip to what’s happening to the waters of Earth, but being invited to deepen our understanding about the process by which such knowledge comes to us.

The challenge here is not merely to inform ourselves about the issues. It is to consider them while keeping our hearts open. Daring to absorb what is happening in our world requires the courage to dive into the feeling realm — in both personal and transpersonal ways.

The former is symbolized by the personal planet transits. The latter is symbolized by Neptune in Pisces.

Jupiter in Gemini

It is human to want to shut down to pain, and it is not inappropriate to experience this information as painful. All the same, these transits are daring us to feel, fully, without shutting down.

It is no walk in the park. A certain stress should be expected, between the part of ourselves that knows things intellectually and the part that knows them intuitively. This stress is symbolized in March by the square between Jupiter in Gemini — which represents the knowledge that comes from information — and the Sun, Mercury and Venus in Pisces — which represent the knowing that comes from deep within.⁶

All squares are a challenge from the two signs in question. We are being dared to accept both energies at once. In letting ourselves feel both, and deny neither, we integrate them; and we grow. In the case of this mutable square, we are waking up to the genius of Water (some call it emotional intelligence, though it is at least as psychic as it is emotional), in the process of which we become more intelligent.

Notes

1 Cancer is cardinal water, Scorpio is fixed water, Pisces is mutable water.

2  A deal is being struck between an American company with links to the Pentagon and the UK company Rockhopper, which made the discovery. If these enormously valuable reserves come within the 200-nautical-mile area surrounding the islands, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner will claim them for Argentina.

3 Which famously took place the very day Chiron ingressed into Pisces (grief, universality), which is conjunct Neptune (water) in the explosion chart.

4 Water acidification is a result of the 80 million tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere daily, from not just the burning of fossil fuels but also from deforestation and the production of cement. Since the industrial revolution began, about one third of the CO₂ released in the atmosphere by anthropogenic (human-caused) activities has been absorbed by the world’s oceans.

5  See her article on fashion, The Tyranny of Trends.“The fashion industry mirrors back to us in myriad ways all things Neptunian,” she has said,” including deceit.”

6 In February Jupiter squared Mercury, Mars and Neptune.