It begins with this:

                I am afraid of water. 

            My friend Daryth, who once studied Freudian psychology (which, had he stuck with it, would have led to loving his mother more than he felt comfortable with), informs me that this is called hydrophobia.  I suppose I also have thalassophobia, which is a fear of oceans, because there are plenty of things occupying those waters with stingers and teeth, and I don’t need to be one of them. 

            Come to think of it, I suppose I might also have decidophobia, which is the fear of making decisions…decisions like whether to include these phobias, which have little purpose outside of having names I like, in an essay relating to water.  But since I began this, I will say that I may have triskaidekaphobia, which is fear of the number thirteen (why take any chances?) and katagelophobia, which is fear of ridicule (you wanna make somethin’ of it?) and at times arachibutyrophobia, which is the fear of having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.   

            A word from the science community, which I admire but am not right-brained enough to properly communicate with: The human body is 65% water. Incidentally, the salinity of our blood is exactly parallel to that of ocean water.  70% of the earth is covered in water, and 98% of the world's water is in the oceans.  There are approximately 322,280,000 cubic miles of water in the oceans and approximately 3.26x10 to the 20th power gallons of water on earth. This is not including, of course, the full-sized man-made lagoons that decorate some of the lobbies of fancier hotels in Vegas.

            Every month I retain water for several days in order to accommodate the baby I will never have, and my body puffs out in such a way that even my fingers feel fat.  On these days, I will be bold enough to say that I may in fact be 70% water. 

            I am seventy percent afraid of myself.

            When it rains on your wedding day, they call it “pennies from heaven.”  Question: Why is it supposed to be good that God is throwing change at you?  And why pennies, which don’t ever add up to much? 

            When it rains at a funeral, people comment on the blackness of the clouds and the eerie nature of the sky and say:  “Heaven knows this is a sad, sad day.”  No one ever says that this is God’s way of lubricating the journey, so that the dear departed can slip n’ slide right into heaven.  I think of saying this, but then I remember that I’m not supposed to laugh, even if I do believe in an afterlife and don’t really see this as sad.

                Weddings, funerals, and rituals in general hosted by The Church of All Worlds, (which is a church based on the novel Stranger in a Strange Land) always involve water.  I suppose a novel is as good a thing as any to base a church around, especially since some would argue that the Bible is also one, in essence—it just has had a longer shelf life.  To commence their ceremonies, a goblet of water is passed from person to person, who communicates this sentiment along with the passing: “Thou art goddess/god. May you never thirst.”  When one hears this, the appropriate response is, “drink deeply” but variations of this are welcome.  This is called “water sharing” and is something they employ due to their belief that man evolved from water, our original hosting grounds are water (amniotic fluid), and therefore water shared is life shared. 

            Water can also stop life from being shared.  If a man’s testicles are submerged in water the temperature of a warm bath, and then an ultrasound is given, the man is sterile for six months.  There are no known harmful side effects, and after six months he is ripe and ready to breed again.  Why this is not yet performed at parties is beyond me, but since I am a novice at all things electrical, I will not be the first to host a testicle shock-a-thon. 

            In the Tarot, there are 22 cards in the major arcana, and 56 in the minor arcana.  The word arcana is derived from the Latin neuter arcanus or arcanum, which means a deep secret or a mystery, a secret essence or remedy.  In the minor arcana, there are four “suits”: the cups, the wands, the swords, and the pentacles.  The cups are equated with water, (think:  “my cup runeth over”) and water cards are often illustrated in the color blue to remind the card reader of this.  Water often symbolizes peace, tranquility, romance, and in a reading can reflect something taking place in your emotional landscape.  Let’s step outside of the minor arcana: the image on the Star card (of major arcana fame), card seventeen, to be exact, is often a nude woman pouring water from a pitcher over her head and into a moving body of water.  This is to symbolize a contribution to something that already exists, a building on something and a recognition, a self-inflicted birth without benefit of the womb, a baptism of sorts.  If you add the one and the seven of card seventeen, you get card number eight, which is Strength, and this should be noted by any reader of cards so that they can remind the person seeking answers what it takes to get to that cleansing, purifying, pool of water present in the Star.  The card before the Star is the Tower (sixteen), which is often represented by a crumbling man-made structure engulfed in flames, on an island, where there is no escape for those that reside within, unless they choose to jump from the windows into the violent waters below.  I think of Alcatraz, and those that tried to regain their lost freedom and failed, ended up dying there, and after death continued to reside in the now vacant rooms, as ghosts with unfinished business.  The Tower before the Star, equals death/destruction before rebirth/creation; it is easy to remember this way.

            Where am I?  I know water in this:

            I had a dream last night where I was crying, which is something I rarely do (I hate to part with any of my 65, sometimes 70%), because I received a phone call that my older sister Dawn was dead.  It was the year 2010, (ten years after the year of the Dragon, and three years after the expiration date given by the Mayan calendar) and I was surrounded by car accidents, explosions; a hot air balloon burst and fell onto power lines and all the people aboard were electrocuted.   I was Dawn’s next of kin, for some odd reason, which left me with the responsibility to call everyone from her husband to my mother.  The walls around her heart had become very thin, she worked too hard and it exploded.  Ten years from now, she will be thirty-three.

            But where is water in all this? 

            Remember the Tarot.

            My sister Dawn is the only water sign I know, (in the astrological sense), a Pisces-- and I only know her as water if that water is boiling but neglecting to remove impurities, leaving behind the poisons and the minerals that make water both contaminated and a provider of vital nutrients.  She: a woman in a white lace wedding gown, emerging from a church to the sound of ringing bells, the flashing of pictures, the cheers of the crowd-- to light up a Marlboro and rapidly suck it down, lips pursed in bored irritation, her eyebrows furrowed into the lace of her veil.  My sister, who after twenty minutes of picture taking was tired and hungry, informed the photographer that if he took one more fucking picture of her she would introduce that camera to an orifice he probably wasn’t very in touch with.  If she is water, she has never been bottled, has never had bubbles, and has never been pumped from a virgin spring.  I think: a boiling geyser.

            When I think of water, cool, cleansing water, I think this: a woman who speaks in a voice between a whisper and an audible hello, eyes gracefully lowered in the company of strangers, her body moving like spilled ink.  Such a woman manages to say even the most horrendous words, like  “cock sucker” with such syrupy beauty that you’d be inclined to think being a cock sucker isn’t all that bad, if she would only say it again.  I think of velvet dresses and snaky black tattoos, subtle and slow eye movements nearly disguising their need to investigate, and a strut artfully fashioned after years of subconscious practice and adjustment to the evolving body.  It is almost unbearable to watch such wicked, liquid women eating strawberries or bananas. 

            Water: 70% of my collective insides. Fear in this: my flames being extinguished.

            Water hands in palmistry: long fingers, long palm.  Sometimes confused with air hands, which consist of long fingers and a square palm.  A good way to tell which one you are (if you are torn between the two) is to close your fingers over your palm.  If your fingers extend past your palm, you have water hands.  If they do not, you have air hands.  After passing this test, if you do in fact possess water hands, you may be someone who is considered “sensitive, emotional, and caring.” [1]   This definition irritates me, because I am inclined to ask if that leaves us non-water folks on an island of heartless bastards.  But anyway, these folks will turn down the lights upon entering a well-lit room, (if they don’t request candlelight).  They will ask if you’ll open the window, (they always seem to think it’s stuffy).  I don’t know why, but they tend to squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom.  They scrape the insides of a jar of peanut butter.  They rip open empty bags of flour to get the last bit of pasty white dust free and into their cake batter.  They are usually slim and feminine in build, and their physical health tends to suffer during times of emotional trauma, which, just for the record, consists of everything from someone calling fifteen minutes late to the slow depletion of air in their bike tires.  Their palms have a tendency to get clammy when stressed, and their skin often maintains a certain level of moisture, usually through sweat.   Sort of amphibious...

            Sex as water: two people rolling into one being with legs becoming arms becoming hands becoming tongues, (where are we?) everything in and out of becoming being knowing touching tasting smelling we are and were...one evolving series of cells that can freeze and melt again and boil and burn and evaporate and…never really cease to be water.

            I think about whispered I-love-yous, not desperate cries, and slow, soft touching-- never desperate grabbing and clinging and thrusting and fucking; there is no fucking with water, only the soft sensual making of love.  Frequently such people need you to stop touching when things become intense, they don’t thrive on the intensity the way fire people do, the burning people who go until death seems like a very real possibility and then they push the scream one octave higher.  No, the water people need an eye of the storm where everything is peaceful for just a few moments and then they can face the chaos again.  Fire people don’t know any eye; we just rage and rage and rage…

There are disagreements to be had when you are a fire person, a fire person with air hands so that every motion is a fanning until your entire universe faces combustion.  Compromises are difficult, confrontations worse, and love affairs are rarely romantic.  I’ve never loved a man who has tried to water me down, tried to soothe the beast that has come to govern my existence.  When I encounter the more soggy flavor of men they are frequently uninterested in me and my brash manner and my long list of demands, my distrust, my lack of naiveté (at least in the manner they covet it) my independence, my random crying fits, my insatiable desire, my roving eye, the way my laughter resonates louder than anyone else’s in the room…

            I know water men when I meet them right away; they don’t respond well to lusty jokes of “Can we stop talking and just fuck already?” and walk on eggshells around me as if I could blow at any minute.  They open doors for me in a grandiose manner that seems less like courtesy and more like an attempt to be courteous; they make too much of an effort not to notice the female body and often describe themselves as “sensitive” without another pointing it out to them.  They claim to have no lust, they say they only desire love and to be loved, and they mean it.

            I tend to sleep through rainstorms. 

            A man I would be inclined to describe as watery noticed me once when I was carrying a couple of over-filled grocery bags home, and he asked to carry one for me.  His eyes were soft and blue (ah the soothing smell of the ocean), and possessed such genuine kindness that I was immediately suspicious.  We walked together to the end of the street, and when we hit the office I was heading to, he handed me my bag and asked if I would be okay for the rest of the way, and I said I would.  He watched, and waited until I was safely inside.  He monitored my presence, made me feel more delicate than I really am, like someone in need of such careful comfort.  The fires in me raged, as I turned to him, inspected him, his smile so genuine.  Hmm…           

            I am certainly afraid of water. 

***

            I fall in love the way some people consume alcohol: in large amounts and very quickly.  But only a romantic prankster, someone who loves on and off and behind your back and doesn’t worry about you not getting the joke, can cause me to fall in love over and over again.  Such men confuse me, and then my romantic inspiration runs dry, and I have to go through a spell of writing hateful poetry before I fall in love with them again.  I fall in love with men who never bring flowers, and laugh at me as often as with me.  Men who hold me when I’m crying and tell me I’m beautiful in times when I’m not.  Men who instigate fiery debates with me over topics that I never thought I would encounter, like the merits of a pedophile, and encourage me to go for the jugular.

            I fall in love with men who neglect to bathe, and when they do tend to smell musky again before they even dry off.  Men who eat massive amounts of food several times a day, when they remember to, but will eat nothing with tomatoes or onions.  In love with men who brush their teeth with fennel toothpaste and when they drink, only drink Guinness, because there’s something intriguing about drinking a beer that is the consistency of a meal. 

            I fall for men who wear shirts with holes in the elbows, but manage to purchase every new and expensive electronic gadget that appears on the market.  Men who offer me pet names like come-dumpster, which always makes me laugh out loud, and men who openly gawk at other women when they’re with me, because they’d rather not lie and say they never notice. 

            I fall in love with men who rush to my house in five minutes flat when a light bulb explodes in my face, and then spend the next several moments trying to extract the shards with a slightly damp toothbrush.  Men, who leap over nurses to hold my hand during more painful hospital procedures, and wince themselves as my grip on their hand tightens.  Men who say they aren’t bothered by the late night phone call, they’re just glad that I’m okay.  In love with men who stay to the end of really bad movies staring Robert Redford, and while the rest of the theater loudly sobs and passes back and forth boxes of tissues, we guffaw into each other’s shoulders. 

            I fall in love with men who get me gifts like large bronze statues of Ganesha and Free Mason pocket watches.  Men who remind me that I can perform simple electronic feats, like programming a VCR or hooking up a computer; that a penis isn’t required for such understanding.  Men who have no patience with my insecurities, and frown at me when I wonder out loud if they really and truly love me. 

            I fall in love with computer programmers, who, when I request compliments, respond, “I love the way your face crunches up when you’re doing something you love.”

            In love with air signs (Gemini, Aquarius, Libra, etc.).  Air, such a necessity for the starting of a fire, for turning a single spark into a flame, then into a warming bonfire.  Together, somehow, through some chemical reaction I don’t understand, we (the Aries and the Aquarius) create our own version of water, something without the uncomfortable dampness of rain-saturated clothing that takes so long to dry out, something sticky and warm and slightly unnerving that nonetheless quenches our thirst and calms the raging flames that could quickly burn out of control.  Perhaps we are more like foam.

           
           But dehydration occurs when more water is lost from body tissues than taken in.  I call upon the forces of the science community again: Phosphates, nitrates, etc. build up in tissues as the body's ability to eliminate them is reduced, and cells, which are essentially bags of water, lose their ability to function at full efficiency.   When you actually feel thirsty, you're already 3% dehydrated. Initial effects include exhaustion and lightheadedness progressing up to hallucinations, system collapse, and finally death.

            I ask him how he is sometimes, and he doesn’t answer.  He tells me how his job is going: that a new set of routers came in and they should improve the quality of their company ten fold; that there was an investors meeting last night; two hundred customers have been added in the past two weeks alone; people are leaving their competitors in droves.  He tells me about the story he read in the news that the world’s chocolate supply will be used up in ten years, so I’d better stock up now.  Or the story he read about flax seed oil and the ways it benefits the human body, and how he’s been using it and because of this water has begun beading up on his skin.  This leads to him telling me about how when he’s eating fish, salmon in particular, he likes to press it into the roof of his mouth so he can taste the fish oil for a moment before it sinks in. 

            I am fascinated, but I still don’t know how he is.

            I ask a question.  He says he doesn’t want to talk about it.  I ask another question, and he answers the same way.  I ask when he thinks he’ll want to talk about these things.  He says that he doesn’t know, but I shouldn’t ask anymore, he’ll let me know when he wants to talk, if he does.  He tells me to stop prying, and I get very quiet. 

            Sometimes, he doesn’t say much of anything.

            He says that he thinks about writing me a letter, something to disclose all the things he doesn’t say.  This leads me to frequently ask him if he’s written it yet.  I think about writing him a letter sometimes, but I don’t.  

            I don’t like the warm bath that follows the hot shower of falling in love.   I like to boil and I hate to simmer, it doesn’t feel like progress.  But I know that if we boiled and boiled and boiled we would evaporate and cling to the windows and become humidity and the discomforts that follow it, and a completely different form that doesn’t feel like water at all...though it would be.

            I suggest to him that perhaps we could come up with a new word to mean love, one that seems more real than this mythical idea designed by a collection of long-dead literary folk for the purpose of enticing a love-hungry crowd.  I would much rather hear, I laguz you.  Laguz, the rune for “lake” in the Elder Futhark Runes, the oldest alphabet, found carved in stones in ancient Nordic lands, used for divination and conversation.  Why can’t we be the ones to bring this ancient alphabet back?  And how could I possibly doubt what others fail to define, what they do not understand and are not equipped to interpret, when there are no outside sources promising that he could not possibly laguz me?  This can be part of our own arcanum, something others cannot label correct, or incorrect, something beyond them and their limited understanding.  But should they intrude upon our inside circle of forbidden occultist knowledge, there’s another word waiting to be invented, another mystery waiting to be revealed, another something they don’t know that can be ours and ours alone. 

            I’m content in that we both agree to love him, and we both agree to love me.  I laugh and enjoy him, but I’m sometimes thirsty, and by the time I am, I am already 3% dehydrated.

***

                I know a good Christian boy, and I only know one, and his name is Matthew.  He paid me a visit in a dream that served to invoke the spirit of water, the fourth element in a series of five, the others being earth air fire and spirit.  It is not unusual for one of these elements to invade the soothing space of evening dreams, nor is it unusual for them to bring animal and astral friends with messages to share that I will more likely than not forget by the time the alarm goes off for the first time.  In this dream, it was burning hot, and Matthew was playing in the water, a body of water that could only be something as powerful as an ocean, only I’m certain it was smaller, and he was riding tremendous waves into the shore, being cooled.  It was the most perfect beach I had ever witnessed.  There were no pop bottles lining the shore, no syringes with dried blood on the tips of the needles, no random placement of a license plate or a slightly frayed beach towel, no dead fish floating along the surface, having suffered the pains of pollution.  The body of water was surrounded by jagged cliffs and canyons, deep green hills, and the water was endless, endless, endless...I felt so safe, so in awe, but for some reason I couldn’t join Matthew in this ocean, this grand laguz. I could tread near the shore, the perfect white sand sliding between my toes, I could feel the moisture in the air, but I was not allowed to enter.  The more I longed to enter, the further I distanced myself from it.  Matt looked at me sadly across the waves, an expression of peace and completion on his face. 

            I told Matt about it, and he thinks I was deprived in this dream because perfect water comes from God, God being Jesus Christ, who is someone that I have not exactly accepted as my savior.  He mentions a few passages from the Bible that I cannot remember, about God providing water, about God turning water into wine, about God and water and the connection they have, that I do not have because I’ve never known these baptismal waters.  I try to digest as he feeds me these Biblical references, but for some reason, I cannot.  I can remember Surahs of the Qu’ran, I can remember quatrains of Rumi, but I cannot remember this. 

            I am, after all, a heathen.

            This is why:

            I have read the Qu’ran, many Buddhist texts, Thich Nhat Hahn, the Dali Lama, Ibn’ Arbi, Rumi, Z. Budapest, Starhawk, Raymond Buckland, books on Witchcraft and gypsy religion, books on Chaos magick and pagan spirituality, books on Isis and Bridget and Diana, books about reclaiming the goddess, books on Shamanism and working with animal guides, books on druidry, books about the patriarchy of the three major Abrahamic religions, books about things being as above, so below, books about Papa Legba and Oshun, Ganesha and Kali, Allah and Muhammad and Khadijah and A’ishah and Ali.  And occasionally, I skim through something known as the Bible, which for whatever reason doesn’t feel as good as some of the others. 

            Thich Nhat Hahn, (someone I have read closely) describes Jesus and Buddha as brothers.  I think this is a nice idea; after all, their ideas were similar.  Buddha would think this is okay, and Jesus probably would too.  From what I understand about Christians, they probably would not. 

          
           Every year I go to a pagan festival called Starwood.  I watch Druid, VooDoo, Wiccan, and other sorts of pagan rituals.  I tend to laugh at the Druids, at the Wiccans and their need to incorporate cookbook witchery (watch as I throw gun powder on the flames and make them rise up!) as a means to emphasize the power of their Goddess.  However, my laughter falls silent and my eyes register awe when in the overwhelming presence of the VooDoo Mambos, who transform willing pupils and participants into insects through the invocation of the Insect Loa, which leads to their heart rates increasing, and breathing rates to double in order to accommodate their new insect forms.  My sense of awe is carried into the presence of Oracular Seiths, who work with Nordic traditions, and travel to the underworld and speak with Freya and come back with answers as to how we can best govern our lives. 

            I deeply admire many Muslims, those so devout to their faith that they make pilgrimages to Mecca and pray five times a day in that direction to pay tribute to Allah and his prophet Muhammad.  I admire many Buddhists, who in the deepest state of meditation in the mountains of Tibet somehow manage to emanate such an energy that it melts all the snow around them.

            If you were to ask me for a title, for a name, for a reason, I would consider myself a pagan Buddhist, I suppose.

            Some Christian folks are not okay with this.  In their world, there is a right and a wrong.  I am wrong.  They may blame my decision, which differs from theirs, on decidophobia.  It doesn’t matter if the God I love has the same name as theirs.  I must only love God as a him, or perhaps a trinity of hes, I must love God as a masculine pronoun, not a combination of the two, a hir, a shhe. 

I will tell you of my love affair, only Rumi and his fellow whirling dervishes seem to understand.  There is an emotional knowing, a cause and effect knowing, and many in-between knowings.  I am not sure which applies here, but I am certain that God is something that I know, part of my arcanum.  I cry when I think of God. 

I converse with God at times like an old friend, babbling about how my day went and the details of what I’m working on.  I tell hir jokes that the average person wouldn’t find funny, hoping that I won’t have to explain it to God, shhe’ll get it anyway.  I request strange things from God, I ask hir to keep me focused, I ask hir to help me through the day and make sure that I do what needs to be done, I ask hir for the time to daydream, I ask hir to break my television so I can fight the urge to be absorbed by it.  I ask hir to read a PJ FunnyBunny book with me, because we both seem to laugh at the same parts.  I ask hir to make me less crazy, not too insane, not to the point where I don’t know it anymore, where I really think it’s possible that people are following me.  I ask God to make me laugh when I start to lose it, to remind me that it really isn’t as bad as it seems, to calm the demons in my head which are demanding my attention and asking to be placed in charge of my psyche. 

            I know this: when I am almost gone, almost not inside my body anymore, when I am walking the very thin line between sanity and insanity and I’m beginning to choose a side that would make this lifetime less of a success, I feel something.  I feel the arms of something around me, quieting me, and when this happens, I don’t cry anymore.  I relax, and I can sleep.  Some might call this the presence of Jesus, or Mary, the Virgin Mother.  Some might call it Buddha, or Tara.  Ganesha.  Allah.  My guardian angel. My ancestors. Diana. Bridget. Some untapped part of my brain that I accessed in some way in order to preserve the other parts of my brain that are being challenged.  I call it God.

            I am alive because of this.

            When I think of God, I cry.

            For some reason, I always fall for Darwinian scientists, and others that will never believe this claim of a God.  I think this allows them to do the doubting for me.  I don’t doubt.  I don’t know why, but I’ve never doubted. 

            I think of dreams, their value.  How many books have I read that describe them as a source of magical inspiration?  These books might say that what I am learning through this dream, through this dream of water, is that what I have been believing all this time is wrong, since I can’t go anywhere near the water, the source of life.  They would say that I am always working around it, always noticing it but never approaching it.  I step near the water, I want to understand it, to know its’ importance in my life, to honor it and taste it as something flavored with something instead of nothing.   The closer I step to this uncharted territory, the closer I come to getting my feet wet, the more calm and comforted I feel by the lifeless texture of the sand.  I am stuck somewhere between truth and truths.

            Perhaps there is some way for me to blame this all on arachibutyrophobia…

            There is still me to contend with.  The fire in me cooks my kettle.  The air in me keeps the burner going.  I cry when the water becomes too much for me to handle, when it floods my insides and makes me soggy.   I cry to wring out the towel when I go beyond the 65, the 70%.  I drink things that make me thirstier, beverages loaded with alcohol and caffeine, things that make me fool myself.  I wash myself in a tub because the shower doesn’t work.  I enjoy being naked and wet without being fully submerged.  I like that I can enter or escape at will, that I am bound by nothing.  I enjoy it all, both the initial shocking heat and the manner in which it quickly cools and turns cold.  And still I sit, watching my hands instantaneously age due to staying just a little too long, enjoying myself a little too much, just a little too much. 

            And yet: I am afraid of water.