This nature absorbs. Sit such a person next to someone in grief and they will feel the grief, precisely, without being told of it, and will not be able to set it down at the end of the evening. Crowds, hospitals, angry households and pitiless news all leave a residue. Solitude is therefore not a preference but a necessity, and the retreat that others read as antisocial is closer to a nurse coming off shift. Given a quiet day, this person is restored remarkably quickly.
Compassion is instinctive and undiscriminating. Help is offered to whoever is bleeding, including those who will make poor use of it, and the offering is genuine. Comfort given here is wordless and effective: sitting close, saying little, somehow knowing what is wrong. Imagination is the other great resource, and it needs an outlet. Music, drawing, prayer, fiction or long swimming will carry it; deprived of any channel, it turns to dreaming, to drink, or to a private world entered a little too often.
The costs are drift and porousness. Boundaries are difficult to hold, so other people's needs arrive with the force of commands, and this person may spend a decade sustaining someone who was never going to improve. Unpleasant feelings are escaped rather than examined. Moods move like weather, unpredictable to their owner. What helps is structure imposed from outside: fixed hours, a room of one's own, one honest friend authorised to say plainly what is happening and be believed.
What It Gives
- ◆wordless emotional understanding
- ◆deep compassion
- ◆rich imaginative inner life
- ◆restored quickly by solitude
What It Costs
- ◆absorbing others' distress
- ◆escapism under strain
- ◆boundaries that will not hold
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
Cast Your Birth Chart