The equinox season is over. The Sun sinks into the watery depths of Scorpio. The brilliant rays of the luminary of day dye the clouds with pink, purple, gold, and gray. The mirror of ocean reflects the sky. Yet the brilliant light as heaven meets the ocean, hide treachery and wildness. As the twilight of the equinox gives way to the dark of night and late autumn, so does the depth of the ocean conceal the shark and the kraken. The light on the rippled surface conceals poisonous fish with enormous teeth, who either generate their own concealing darkness, or else dangle their own alluring, self-generating light as a lure to the unwary. They imitate the Sun’s own brilliance in the depths, but rarely for entirely-honorable reasons.
As the Sun sinks into the deeps here, and the days grow shorter in the northern hemisphere, subtleties abound. Hawaii notes the famous “green flash” of sunset, when the vastness of the Pacific focuses the rays of the Sun so that the brilliant radiance is briefly seen through billions of tons of salt water.
When in object of brilliant heat is thrust suddenly into a container of water, such as a cherry-red iron knife straight from the heart of the forge plunged into the quenching barrel, the fire converts the water to steam in an instant. The space around the knife becomes a column of steam, superheated water sublimed instantly from liquid to gas. The fire in the heart of the water becomes invisible, as the fire of water rises like a newborn storm-cloud out of the depths. The heat does not dissipate with prolonged contact — rather, the column of smoke and steam forever rises, unless the cavitation’s pocket is somehow broken or disrupted. Nor does the object truly lose its heat until it is brought forth from the quenching barrel or the ocean and allowed to rest in the open air for a long while — even then, the ground around it will scorch.
When fire is submerged in water, though, the result is well-tempered. Hard and disciplined yet flexible and focused. It takes an edge that will cut and even kill. It is focused like a laser — or like the setting Sun seen through the ocean. Either green with envy or green with creative gifts, the scorpion has clever and practical hands that are as skilled in the greenhouse as in the jeweler’s forge. The disciplined creative energy hides its light in color and turbulence as air pockets are created where water encounters fire.
Yet it must be remembered that this is a reaction. The waters of Scorpio are a still pool or a Great Lake or the vastness of the Atlantic. The fire plunges in, and the water responds with alacrity to the invasion of its dominions. Nothing is burned, nothing is destroyed, by the encounter. But the scorpion is transformed by the encounter, transforming instantly to a studied and deliberate turbulence, a forceful and upward energetic surge that quenches and tempers whatever disturbed it with such fury.
You can drown and burn to death in that mysterious, wet, clinging heat. Or you can come out of it purified and shining with new splendor.
