Water

Water is the element of emotion, empathy, and compassion. The ebb and flow of emotional states, ranging as wide and as deep as any ocean. Water is the place for coping mechanisms, defense mechanisms, the realm of self-preservation in the face of stress. The face of stress itself, for the ocean can be as perilous as it is beautiful and life-giving. A hurricane is equally as beautiful as a sandy beach, and in the eyes of Water, they are the same.

The cleansing element, represented by the cauldron. A vessel, not the actual liquid. Because a cauldron can be filled with anything, as we have the capacity to feel anything, from the harshest rage to the tenderest love to the most ardent joy. Water can overwhelm as much as give life. Our bodies are 80% water, but we can still drown. With the balance of logic, or rationality, emotion becomes a tidal wave from which there is no escape.

Water is as present in our lives as the rain. Water is held as the element of the Autumn and Twilight. Twilight  causes more accidents on roadways than any other time of day because of the liminal space it produces every single day. Autumn is the time of harvest, or plenty, and of reflection as we look forward to the cold of winter. It is a time of aging, as the year begins to wane. It is in the time that Northern European traditions begin the new year. For as the earth dies, as the trees lose their leaves and become bare as old bones, they celebrate the gestation of a new year, as a mother awaits the coming of her child. As the sun sets int he west, we know that it will rise again in the East, where Air begins the cycle again.

Oceans ebb and flow with the whim of a single outside force: the moon. Emotions react to stimulus in this way, ever shifting, ever changing. Unmoving water stagnates, becomes filled with all kinds of things that grow and rot and allow other nasty things to breed and fester. Flowing water remains clean, clear and able to shift around obstacles and traumas. Still water allows for reflection, but water must move in order to remain clean. The ebb and flow of motion and stillness.  Even ice moves, glaciers cutting away at landscapes over hundreds of years. Even in solid state, water in nature continues to move.

Water is also used to reflect, both within and without. Water is nature’s mirror, showing us not only what we know, but what is around us that we may not. Water has been used by seers for millennia for this very reason. Water revitalizes the body, clears the mind with it’s thick waves and it’s floating stillness. Water, much like fire, is an equalizer, but it is a fickle as the wind itself. A single particle of anything placed into water will affect the boiling and freezing points of water. Water itself cannot be compressed. When it freezes, it expands instead of shrinks, the opposite of every other molecule. Emotions, if repressed and bottled up, eventually explode.

But it’s not all water parks and ocean jaunts and mermaids. To be stuck in water is to be a creature entirely of emotion without rationality, without logic, the opposite of air.

Water is a feminine element, along with Earth. The Masculine elements are air and Fire.