An Abhainn
The New Moon in Cardinal Water on the 25th of June at 11:31 am BST conjoined Propus
Art by Jennifer Conghalaigh
The river moves differently where Síne walks, its currents slowing as though the water itself wishes to linger in her presence, to memorise the shape of her shadow as it falls across its shimmering skin. She comes each morning with her bare feet leaving faint impressions in the damp earth, her toes curling into the silt as though rooting herself to the stories the riverbed keeps hidden beneath its layers of time-worn pebbles and forgotten bones. The air tones with the quiet intensity of a plucked harp string, vibrating with possibilities that even the birds pause to consider before continuing their songs.
She kneels at the water’s edge, her reflection rippling into something larger than herself, the edges of her form blurring as though the river struggles to contain what she truly is. Her fingers dip beneath the surface, stirring the liquid light that gathers there, and the water responds by merging itself around her wrists like a lover’s embrace. She does not know that the poems she whispers to the reeds take root in the mud, sprouting into verses that wind their way through the roots of the willow trees, that the fishermen who drink from this stretch of river find their dreams laced with sonnets they swear they’ve never read.
The land drinks deeply of her presence. The apple trees bow under the weight of fruit sweeter than any harvest before, their skins gleaming with the same russet hue as her hair when the sun catches it just so. The wheat grows tall and golden, each stalk humming with the rhythm of her footsteps as she passes, the grain heavy with the promise of bread that will taste inexplicably of memory and of something just beyond the reach of language. Children playing by the banks return home with pockets full of smooth stones that fit perfectly in the palm, that grow warm when clutched tight, as though the river has pressed its secrets into their cores.
Síne herself feels the pull of something nameless, a current beneath her skin that mirrors the river’s own meandering journey to the sea. She cups the water in her hands and brings it to her lips, drinking deep of clarity, of conviction and of the quiet certainty that lives in the space between heartbeats. Words come to her, rising like fish to the surface, their scales catching the light as they spill from her mouth in a cascade of imagery and emotion, every syllable a pebble dropped into the pool of the world, sending ripples far beyond the stretch of her own vision.
Somewhere downstream, a poet wakes with a line on her tongue that tastes of river water and wild thyme. A farmer pauses mid-step in his field, struck by the sudden understanding that the earth sings to him in a voice he’s always known. The village baker pulls loaves from the oven, the air thick with the scent of something like nostalgia, like home.
And the river flows on, carrying Síne’s gifts in its currents, suffusing her essence into the fabric of the land, each molecule a container for the wisdom she unknowingly bestows.
****
Have you ever lowered yourself onto the riverbank, the cool earth pressing back against your palms as the water glides past in an eternal procession? On the rare occasion that the Sun shines in Ireland, warming the skin, sunlight fractures across the surface, scattering shards of gold that dissolve as quickly as they form, known as scimpliní.
Artist unknown
There is a kinship between this moment and the uni-directional flow of water. Think of times when you stand beneath your shower's cascade, enclosing you in a liquid embrace, its thousand fingers working loose the day's tensions, its lightly tinkling cadence opening you to the reality of the 7th dimension, where sound’s healing matrix floods you with insight and inspiration.
"The river bore us on. The trees leaned over, bending their white heads. The world seen through the rain-washed air had a new sharpness, as if a thin blade had sliced away the surface of things, revealing a brightness beneath."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
Before the advent of the shower, it was the River that provided the channel through which your aura and soul were cleansed, its passage speaking an non-verbal language, its soothing murmuring relaxing your busy mind, and its freshness smudge-sticking the darkened entities that inhabit the recesses of consciousness. It is virtually impossible to stand beside it without feeling your mind’s edges soften and countless soul’s have poured their private weight into the free flowing current so that it is carried away, leaving you lighter for this surrender.
For countless centuries, the river the spontaneous clarity that comes being in the presence of this purposeful stream of water is not only manna sent from heaven, but it is heart opening and heart freshening. In Ireland, the river moves through the Gaelic imagination as a living vein, its currents threading the liminal space where the tangible merges with the intangible. To stand at its banks is to feel the pull of an tsruthán beo, the living stream, whose waters cradle the wisdom of the salmon and the blessing of the goddesses.
Generations have skimmed the water with their palms, casting offerings of butter wrapped in dock leaves or twists of hawthorn bark, a silent prayer to the spirit that dwells within the ripples, a keeper of draíocht, the marrow-deep magic that weaves memory into the present. Its’ surface a shifting parchment where the depths guard the weight of all that has been entrusted to it. What you see shimmering on its surface is never just light or shadow, but the unedited truth of how things merge: your face now and the face you wore at seven, the present sky and the storms it carries from yesterday’s horizon. Lore has it that to walk its banks is to walk the edge of a dream, just like rising through that misty veil when you wake each morn.
Similarly, the sign of Cardinal Water, Cancer, makes no distinction between reflection and reality, emotion and memory merging like tributaries into a singular-directed river as they seek a way to a common sea, as both are embraced with equal weight just as the heart holds joy and sorrow in the same uncharted depths. It is the perfect vessel for all that slips beneath conscious thought, whether it is that half-remembered dream, the grief folded into the creases of an old letter, the way certain afternoons taste of childhood for no reason at all.
This is why Cardinal Water flows through memory like a river current, because it refuses to choose between what was and what is. Dip your hands into the river, and the chill you feel is the same coolness that washed through you when your mother placed a damp cloth over your brow when you forgot to step out of the sun in the balmy summer of ’76 and heat stroke threatened to blow a gasket! Emotional memory held deep in the liquid matrix.
The Luminaries align on the morning of the 25th of June 2025, conjoined Propos, a artistically eloquent reddish soul splintered star with perchance for associative thinking, singing with insight and a haunting tone that draws you back to innocent times when you engaged your lucid imagination without consideration as to whether your creation was ‘good’ or not. Falling in the water sign associated with the River, you have an opportunity refresh your heart as you breathe in the ionisation invigorated memories, to cleanse your aura of doubt, to place your hands in the moving dream-current and to activate and recharge your heart with the dynamism of this ‘stream’.
What tears did you shed last moonth during the Hyades times, that have opened up your heart, emptying it of all the grief that you carry? This moonth, the heart is actively flowing (Cancer) and you stand on the banks of the river, not only receiving inspiration, but also more consciously connected to the flow of riverine goddess energy that soothes, cools and animates the land. Just as the River is alive with the goddess, so too is your heart – tender yet firm, forthcoming and gentle. This is the moonth to let flow all that is in your heart, and to direct it and your creative essence outwards into the world, just as all those loving Cancerians you know in your world.
What, therefore, will you offer up to An Abhainn in thanks for the clear heart you are receiving?
Go raibh mile beannacht ort.
A
Completed on the 18th of May 2025 at 17:00 BST
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