When Mars Kicks In

How is your Mars in Cancer going? Even though this factor has been in play for nearly a month now, it kind of snuck up on me. It wasn’t front of mind the way that a more flamboyant Mars might be – I’m not sure it was even back of mind. Until…

The other day I took a sip of tap water and spat it out because it tasted so weird, almost like synthetic water or liquid tupperware. Then I downloaded the latest “drinking water report” which I think every water authority has.

It didn’t even include microplastics or maybe I missed them amid the listings for poisons like cyanide and arsenic, volatile organic compounds and “by products of the chlorination of herbicides” etc.

How come I have toulene-free nail polish but it’s in my water? My frequent exclamations of “the fuqers“, “what the fuq” and other similarly eloquent statements were emotional enough to draw the attention of my golden retriever, an empath.

Then I composed an email to the water authority but deleted it. I realized that my opening sentence about how you would get the death penalty in Ancient Mesopotamia if you polluted the water supply because they considered water itself to be a magical spirit could have been taken the wrong way.

Hungry Water?!

Undeterred, I moved to looking into desalinated water – which is apparently nicknamed “Hungry Water” in Dubai, Israel and other places where the water is mostly desal.

Not Hungary Water as in the Renaissance era rosemary-centric fragrance invented by the Hungarian Queen’s alchemist: Hungry as in so famished for nutrients that it – reputedly – seeks to sustain itself with your mineral stores when you drink it.

To me this sounds almost vampiric and it was at this point my daughter intervened; “I’m sorry, but vampire water? Why are you suddenly all aggro and hysterical about water?”

I paused, remembering that two days prior, I’d walked down a street where every half a block or so, water hydrants had sprung out of the pavement – or so it seemed – and were all open, gushing massive amounts of water down the street.

I asked the worker at the 10th hydrant what they were doing and he glared as if I’d asked a deeply personal question: “we’re flushing the storm water,” he said. “It’s the water that comes from the sky when there is a storm.”

He conveyed this in a distinct pass-agg ‘how dumb are you?’ tone I haven’t heard since high school.

Is Stormwater Cancerian?

If you think of the Water element signs, Pisces is the Ocean, Scorpio the lakes and Cancer the springs that bubble up in places, but also the rivers and creeks, no? Or even the rain?

While this is symbolism that describes each sign’s mode, it also fits.

The worlds’s first desalination plant was apparently built by British colonialists in Yemen, in 1869 when Uranus was in Cancer. It became more widespread and substantial in the early 1930s, when Pluto was in Cancer.

Me: Logically, it’s not actually Vampire Water but…

Daughter: No kidding.

Me: But the reverse osmosis process that strips out salt and “other impurities” from the water also takes out all the minerals. They are added back but…

Daughter: So what’s the problem then?

Me: It’s not in the form of the kind of minerals you might see in a mineral supplement or springwater. It’s “alkalinity addition using hydrated lime and carbon dioxide and treatment using sodium silicate, aqueous ammonia, sodium hypochlorite, and Fluorosilicic acid.“

I thought of Masaro Emoto, the Cancerian author of The Hidden Messages In Water and became teary. Reviled as a pseudoscientist, his ideas of water having consciousness were beautiful and poetic: “The memory of life arrived on this earth carried by the soul of water. From this memory, life awoke, the human being emerged…”

Astrologically, you know when Mars is the primary influencer in something because you snap into mission mode. Mine was Operation Hazardous To Inhale – research why substances deemed a public  emergency if they spill on the street are added to the water supply.

It’s also interesting that public health authorities have considered adding potassium to the desalinated water due to concern that the deficit of it in hungry water is raising the rate of heart attacks.

However, I was diverted by one of the best written pieces I’ve ever seen which also made me cry. People with natal Mars in Cancer – are you a natural crier?

The article is about a suburb in Sydney and how the existing wetlands, rivers etc were just concreted over so the water keeps trying to emerge and flow. It’s broadly applicable, however, as this is a worldwide urban phenomenon.

It also makes the salient point that for a much lower cost, everyone could rain harvest:

“We have removed stormwater from our cities as quickly and efficiently as possible, but in the process, we have lost something important. Water brings life to the landscape, enriches communities and is essential for ecology. We now have an entire infrastructure for stormwater – set in concrete – that is difficult to undo or change.

But if we saw rain as an asset, we might start to use water where it falls. Two-and-a-half times more rain falls in the Cooks River Valley than we use, and yet we are prepared to steal rainwater from another valley – from Warragamba – and pump it across to shower, drink and keep our gardens green. If we valued rain, stormwater wouldn’t even have a name…”

Another quote: Maps that had once carefully drawn its tributaries now labelled them all ‘natural drains’. They were no longer creeks. They had become stinking ditches, the carriers of typhoid and a danger to public health. The gentle winding stream was now a public menace.”

What’s the bet that all of these themes will be a big issue with Uranus in Cancer next decade?

So how is your Mars in Cancer going and have you noticed any water weirding?

Image: Toshio Nishi