Fifteen

I wanted to talk to the Siberian man about what he said last time. We were sitting on a beach, in the sand. It was late afternoon, the evening wasn’t born yet, I knew the sun couldn’t have set, there was too much light, but I could not actually see it anywhere. I didn’t see the sea, either, though I could hear the waves, and feel the salty vapour on my skin. We must have been very close, and yet, I couldn’t see the water…

The Siberian man was sitting next to me, but he was a bit blurred and glowing around the edges, as if there was very thick fog around him…

And I asked him, “What did you mean last time about the element earth mistaking itself for the shape it takes, that this threatens the flexibility of perspective?”

“Perception is the womb of feelings. It is the womb of thoughts. It is the womb of intuition. Perception is Being… Try and just sense things…”

He asked me to lift up my hand and close my eyes. He was stroking my palm, it felt like light electricity. Next, I was floating in warm water, it entered my body through my right fingertips, circulated within and left through the other hand. Then I was out of the water, and a cool summer breeze was stroking my skin… I could feel memories gathering around me, but I decided to keep them away, I wanted to be in the here and now.

“Emotions are bridges” the Siberian man said, “they connect the present with the past. Feeling is remembering. However powerful emotions are, you must flow with the here and now when you remember, don’t let yourself be transported and stuck somewhere else. Otherwise there is never a here and now. You always only half-perceive, you fill in the rest with feelings, thoughts and intuition. You must try to perceive as raw as you can, stay with it, don’t take leaps. You think you know how to perceive, but instead of being aware of the here and now, you try to freeze in time the things you are experiencing, because you want to grab and understand them, to hold onto them, you want to be able to go back and analyse them… but how can you perceive something that is not here? That is no perception…”

“But what if I see or hear something that cannot be?”

“Perceive now, mistrust later”, he shrugged, with a naughty smile.

Fourteen

I was in the dark, some reddish light was filtering through the walls, it was warm and soft, I was in my body, again. Then I saw the room around me in half-light, through eyes still closed.

Next, I was with the Siberian man, we were at sea, going very fast in his boat. At one point, there came a huge wave, but instead of pouring down on us, it stopped and stood still, I could feel some of the water as vapour on my skin.

And the man said
-“The most important thing now is to maintain your  flexibility of perspective and develop it even further. You’ve come a long way in that domain, you already have some muscles there. But you are afraid that your emotions will take it away from you, that they will blind and freeze you. But it is not water that is afraid of changing and flowing, it’s not your feelings that are holding you back. Look, water can take any shape it wants, fill in any form and it will still be water, and it knows it.”

And we got out of the way of the wave while it was still frozen, to a safe distance, and watched it melt and plunge into the sea.

– “But what is it in me that threatens this flexibility, what is afraid that I will lose myself, that I will cease to be who I am by coming  here?”
– “What is the element that can most easily mistake itself for the shape it takes, because it’s the most solid of all?”
– “Earth?” I asked.
He nodded.

And I thought of the Moon and Saturn in Virgo in my natal chart, and I wondered…