“Daylighting” is a term used when buried streams and rivers are brought back to life in towns and cities.
Here we are at the beginning of Cancer season, the water sign associated with the beginning of summer, making daylighting personal for us right now.
I love to read books that tie in with the current zodiacal season, especially books that are not about astrology. If I ever started a book club, that would be the format.
I’m currently reading Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane and it’s a perfect book to read during Cancer season.
He reminds us that every human is a waterbody:
“Water flows in and through us. Running, we are divers. Seated, we are pools. Our brains and hearts are three-quarters water, our skin is two-thirds water; even our bones are watery” (p. 16).
Cancer season can expand the range of our self:
To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and in so doing – how had George Eliot put it? – ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’ (p. 82).
Jupiter is in Cancer for the next year and is a planet that symbolizes meaning. Macfarlane describes how both meaning and water can be impounded:
Meaning, as well as water, can be impounded: can still and settle behind dam walls of thought. The impounded meaning of ‘river’ is now one of ‘service provider’, an identity held in place by structures of the imagination as well as of the land. We have become increasingly waterproofed: conceptually sealed against subtle and various relations with rivers, even as they continue to irrigate our bodies, thoughts, songs and stories. Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places (p. 20).
In Jungian psychology water is associated with the feeling function, which we can use to become less impounded.
With Jupiter in Cancer, this “daylighting” – or becoming less “waterproofed” – will be not just for our own individuation. Meaning will come through home, family, nature, culture and connecting with our ancestry.
As Jung said, “Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself” (CW 8, paragraph 432).
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