Becoming Water
We’re only a few days into the new year, and we’ve awoken this week to yet more news of chaos in the world. So, I’m scrapping my planned post in favor of sharing a short missive on the central theme of my life at the moment.
I am becoming water.
I believe this has been my primary lesson in 2025, and I have a feeling it will be essential to moving through 2026 as well. With new horrors unfolding in each news cycle, in addition to the challenges in my own personal life, I’ve been on a journey borne of necessity. Thanks to years and years of personal work, it’s the next natural progression, but I’m immensely grateful to have been able to embrace this moment in time with the flexibility necessary to find peace amidst the chaos.
What do I mean by becoming water?
I tend to think in symbolism, and my mind likes to create visual representations of concepts for me. It’s how I understand best. I’ve been many things over the course of my 41 years, and perhaps the one I’d become most identified was earth. Maybe it’s my Taurus stellium, but the image of roots has always felt right. As I healed and grew, I saw myself almost as an ancient tree atop a mountain, solid and immovable. This worked for me, as I finally felt at home in myself. It offered a stability and security I’ve always wanted, and it’s served me well to approach life from this posture. After an early life of feeling more like a dandelion seed on the wind, most of my late 30’s was spent on embodiment. On consistency. Permanence.
Right now, however, and for the past year at least, I’ve been learning to let go of some of that rigidity. Water moves. It’s able to adapt. Bend. Find its way through the cracks to keep moving. It can be a calming presence, moved only slightly by the breeze, but it can also be an unstoppable force, polishing jagged edges and carving new paths. It cleanses. It restores. It brings vitality, even to barren land. And as I look at my life and the world around me, I’m finding that we need water now more than ever. To this, my Scorpio stellium cries, "Yes!”
While I still remain grounded in myself, I’m learning to move and bend—to flow—with the energy around me. Instead of resisting it or trying to change it, I’m recognizing the power in letting it move me. I see this most clearly in the way I engage with conflict and hardship. This past year, my autoimmune condition flared, bringing me out of remission for the first time in years. Simultaneously, as I was losing physical abilities I’d only recently regained, I was back in court with my ex husband, fighting to protect our children. I won’t share more, as I want to respect my children and their privacy, but long story short, there’s been another legal battle. While, in the end, the judge ruled entirely in my favor, it’s been a challenge. Add to that a silence in the querying trenches, unlike anything I experienced in previous rounds of querying, and we’re left with a year that certainly seemed to bring more unknowns than anyone could prepare for.
Still, in the middle of all that, my family has experienced beautiful connections as well. We’ve had game nights, watched movies, gone for walks, and spent unplugged time together in one of our favorite spots to visit. We’ve shared hours together in meaningful conversation. We’ve tried new things and uncovered new passions. We’ve made friends and accomplished big goals. We’ve lived and loved, possibly more than any year before. Even with all the obstacles faced in 2025, we’ve found our way around and through. We’ve navigated the cracks and turned barren lands fertile. We’ve accepted the reality of things while also creating more of what we wanted, simply by refusing to be stopped. By moving forward, together. Maybe because it was more than we could have prepared for, and not despite it.
My kids sometimes accuse me of idealism, but I’ll take it. In my past, I was a pessimist. I would have called myself a realist, but that was emotionally dishonest, and a way to defend against disappointment and heartbreak. Now, I’m able to see things more for what they are, and even when I can hold those difficult truths in one hand, I can also hold hope in the other. It isn’t the kind of hope that deludes itself into believing all will be comfortable, peaceful, or pleasant. Rather, it’s one that says, no matter what, we’ll be alright.
Because it’s never so simple as the good-bad binary I grew up believing in. I’m here to experience all of it, and I cannot do that from the mountaintop of my own creation. I must be down in it, flowing over, around, and through it. The heat of anger and hatred in the hearts of so many may boil me until I evaporate, but I will return as rain again, and I will bring healing with me when I do. I may freeze from the despair and callousness around me, but I will thaw and run wild again with the returning sun. Water can move in and out of these phases without losing itself.
And so can I.
