Everytime I talk with a grand water trine, they are ready to talk about themselves when they are babies. They are excited to do so even if all of the memories are imprecise and vulnerable. They want to talk about themselves as babies even when being a baby was not always the best experience in the world.

You see, grand water trines remember everything. They remember you and they remember that thing that you said or did oh so long ago. They remember when they were very little children. They remember history with their bodies.

Grand water trines are often able to predict what you will say before you say it. They live in their feelings and feelings are responses to the environment—thus, grand water trines are able to, capable of, and responding to you even before you figure out what you are about to do.

I meet a lot of healers with grand water trines. I meet a lot of counselors, social workers, and psychics. I meet a lot people whose friends know them to be the patient one who is willing to sit down and lend an ear on a break up for hours. It’s not just that grand water trines are empathetic. It’s that they act first with empathy. They learn by understanding and they know that understanding is a life’s work.

I think that grand water trines, being water, sometimes take other people too seriously and hold themselves too loosely. They tend to see the needs of other people as these large, overwhelming, and resolute structures that can never change and they tend to see their own needs as infinitely flexible—often as things that always need change. Under this logic, grand water trines often get stuck in the game of diagnosing their needs as deficiencies rather than appreciating their richness. Grand water trines sometimes solve other people’s problems because they have a hunch that they, themselves, are somehow problems.

This is why, as grand water trines have taught me, it is so important to notice the difference between feeling a feeling with someone rather than for them. Feeling a feeling with someone means that you are allowed to have an emotional reaction. Trying to feel a feeling for someone means that you are engaging with the world as if it is your own, private illusion.

Grand water trines are most powerful when they commit to compassion as training, as work, and as goal. I think that this is why, out of all of the grand trines, I see the most people who work in things that relate to their grand trine the most with the water ones. There seems to be something about professionalizing empathy that helps a grand water trine create boundaries around it. But it’s not a necessity. Grand water trines are healers even when they don’t work in professions that relate specifically to healing.

Grand water trine teaches the rest of us that it is possible to trust your emotions so much that you expect them to change the world. There are emotions that take years, even decades or generations, to process. These emotions always know what they are doing.

Water is most powerful when it is given time. Grand water trines are not in a hurry. They aren’t trying to prove themselves. They know exactly what they are doing. They understand that their most important work is both inherited and gifted to the future.

I think a lot of us astrologers, when thinking about grand water trines, forget that what grand water trine has, in leaps and in bounds, is imagination. Grand water trines are past keepers and memory storers but they don’t sit on those memories. They narrate them. Their work is not about keeping things intact, because water corrodes and it distorts, but about telling precisely the stories that future generations need to hear.

Grand water trines don’t work in redemption or in salvation. Their work is in speculation. That’s why they want to hear about what you were like when you were a baby not just once but all of the time. They understand that memory is something that is healed and changed through the passing of time. They understand memory to be but a container for the urgency of the present.