Phoenix and Ashes

But to do that, to be able to step beyond this Middle Earth and into the rest, she would have to do a lot of work. She had once thought that preparing for the examinations to get into Oxford was hard work. This would be ten times harder. She was going to have to go completely beyond what she had always taken as "the truth" into a whole new set of truths—and then believe in them. Well, no one said it was going to be easy.

She got up and ran through her usual chores in an absentminded fashion; her hands and body did the work, while her mind repeated some of what she thought she was beginning to understand from the books.

It might have seemed odd, but amid all those philosophical musing, she did not forget to wash all those cotton shirtwaists and linen skirts she had brought down from the attic, nor to put them up—well out of sight of the bedroom windows—on lines in the garden to dry. It seemed very strange to be doing all these intensely common and practical things while her head was buzzing with alchemical esoterica.

And as she worked, she kept remembering links to the symbology of even the most ordinary things—as she scrubbed, she was also thinking. Water, is the Sphere of Emotion; although there are emotions associated with all the Elements, they all have more strength here in Water. Especially the nurturing ones—that's the Light Path, though, the Dark Path is the emotions that destroy, like a flood washing everything away in its path. And Water is mutable—solid to liquid to gas and back again, so it represents change, while unchanging Water, the Dark Path, is stagnation. And nothing can grow without it, so it also has an aspect of growth, but too much water can kill, so there's death. It can purify and pollute. It can fill or drown. The alchemical creature is the Hippocampus, showing the links among Water, Air, and Earth. Water is hard to control because it's hard to contain, not as hard as Air, though.