Water

Before I became a teacher, my friends gave me the gift of a horoscope reading. I was skeptical, but interested so I visited an astrologist in her home and gave her the algebraic details of my birth. Weeks later, she prepared an elaborate chart with beautifully designed planets encased in artistically sketched wheel.

I don't remember much. Her office in the loft of an enormous house. Her quiet and kind voice. The parchment of the chart. Her acknowledgment of my doubt. And these three "readings."

1. Most of my planets were in the family house. This meant I was deeply connected to family -- biological or not -- and I was a person of integrity and loyalty, she said.

2. While I was venturing into the correct profession (according to her interpretation), I should focus my attention on younger students, not high school students.

3. I had very little water in my chart. I can't remember what that meant for me, but I remember the astrologer saying, "You will need to surround yourself with water in one way or another to help you feel balanced."

I'm not sure if what she shared with me was "true" or if it has reflected my past 23 years correctly, but these three remembered points have offered some remarkable clarity.

1. While I struggled for a long time with my family (the biological one), I have never felt as close to them as I do now. It took some work -- especially on my part -- but I not only love my family, I enjoy them for the most part. I couldn't have said that 25 years ago. The therapy work I did around my family did make me feel balanced and understanding that "family" is more than genetics has also offered me an expansion of my familial circle. My logical family is as important as my biological one.

2. I started my teaching career teaching 8th grade. I moved to the high school grades within 6 years and while I spent another 6 years there, I headed back to the middle school age because it felt more comfortable. For the last 4 years of my career, I taught 5th grade and that felt like the perfect age.

3. And this is the point that has astounded me the most: I need water. I crave water. Not just to consume, but I need to be around it, immersed in it, and not too distant from it. When I think of my "happy place" water is always there generally in the form of a river though I can find peace by the ocean or a lake just as easily. When I am feeling out of balance, I need only expand my access to water to lift my spirits even slightly.

Today, as the water levels crest above their flood stage, as the rain falls like water poured from a bucket, as the ground squishes like a drenched sponge I am not unhappy. I feel balanced.

"I have a scientific question about water," I told Ann last night before we headed to bed. She studied science, I did not. "If you weighed all the water in the world, no matter the form -- gas, liquid, or solid -- it would weigh the same over time, right?"

"Yep," she yawned. Rain makes her sleepy.

"Like for thousands of years?" I asked. "It just recycles again and again over time, right?"

"Millions of years," she mumbled and then paused. "We could be drinking the sweat of Elvis or bathing in the urine of dinosaurs," she added.

"Ew!" I whispered. "Too much information."

But it wasn't really. When I try to hold the concept of water in its entirety, I sit in awe.

Record amounts of rain are falling on us right now. The once heavy snows in the mountains are melting. Our rivers from north to south and east to west are all flooding. The water of the world is focused on us right now. This means that somewhere else, somewhere continents away, there is a record-breaking drought. The sponge of the atmosphere is squeezing above us and not over other areas of the world.

Yesterday, while walking my assigned dogs for the day, the water on the sidewalks came up over the sole of my waterproof boots. The small dogs I walked were soaked on their underbellies from their fur sloshing through the running water. I had to leap over clogged street drains where lakes of water pooled and stagnated.

"What's a cubit?" a co-worker joked last night referring to the Bill Cosby routine about Noah and his arc.

"It feels like that doesn't it?" I laughed.

Ann went off to work this morning, tired and grumpy. "It's the rain," she said. "Indoor recess again and the kids are wacky."

"Take them outside," I suggested. "They aren't made of sugar. They'll survive."

And, I think, perhaps they are like me needing to surround themselves in water to feel balanced.

"I wish I could," she grumbled, "but the principal makes the call, not me."

It's not raining as hard right now. In fact, I think the rain has stopped as I can't hear its patter on the windows or the roof. It will make my life easier today if the weather dries out a bit and it will help all those people forced to evacuate their river homes. Still, I find a strange comfort surrounded by water determined, I suppose, by my birth under constellations aligned in algebraic equations.