So, my birthday is right around the corner and I'm old enough to have a pretty good idea of who I am, even if I'd like to deny it sometimes. Although originality was deemed highly desirable in my upbringing, I've come to learn that I'm not all that different from most other people.In my wanderings as a Backcountry Ranger on the coast, it was easy to track other hikers in the sand. When I knew there was a hiker travelling ahead of me, I would sometimes deliberately try to take alternate routes, to avoid previous footprints. I would climb over car-sized boulder fields, choose less obvious routes, pull myself over headlands, look for the challenge I thought others would avoid, given the choice of an easier route. Always at the end of the self-imposed detour, I would land in the other hiker's footprint. Left boot into left bootprint. Next time, I'd try the same idea, hugging the tideline, walking on the slippery, exposed kelp, sometimes dipping a foot in the undulating tide. Still, half a mile later, there's the inevitable foot print.
In Search & Rescue (SAR), one senior Ranger was the best at finding people because he understood that lost people follow the same routes time & again. If your last known location was Point A, he would look around point X. Something about the terrain draws lost people in undeniable ways. In one search with this Ranger, I was flown into a lost hiker's last known location. Within minutes of debarking from the helicopter, I landed in the hiker's bootprint! Soon, we found signs of camp. A little later, we lost his trail and found ourselves looking up an impossibly steep slope, covered in loose rock. The other alternative was to head downstream, through dense walls of Devil's Club. We explored up-slope a bit and through the wall of thorny shrubs, until darkness set in.
I looked up that slope and knew in my gut that given the choice of a thorny wall or an open slope, the hiker had gone up. The next morning my gut feeling was confirmed as the senior Ranger, flying over the Park, sighted an SOS spelled out in rocks on the other side of the ridge. The lost hiker had gone up over that treacherous ridge. Straight up 1,000 feet. The route made no sense and, its only conclusion was to end up at the top of a 300' waterfall dead end. But, I knew if it was me without a map and compass, I would have made the same decision and climbed up to that ridge.
And yet, when I look up traits of my sun sign, "Scorpio" online, I'm a bit shocked at how well it describes me. From the first hit http://www.astrology-online.com/scorpio.htm:
Determined and forceful
Emotional and intuitive
Powerful and passionate
Exciting and magnetic
On the dark side....
Jealous and resentful
Compulsive and obsessive
Secretive and obstinate
From the next http://zodiac-signs-astrology.com/zodiac-signs/scorpio.htm:
Scorpio in a Nutshell: Scorpio is the astrology sign of extremes and intensity. Scorpios are very deep, intense people, there is always more then meets the eye. They present a cool, detached and unemotional air to the world yet lying underneath is tremendous power, extreme strength, intense passion and a strong will and a persistent drive. Scorpios have a very penetrative mind, do not be surprised if they ask questions, they are trying to delve deeper and figure things out and survey the situation. They always want to know why, where and any other possible detail they can possibly know. Scorpios are very weary of the games that other people try to play and they are very aware of it. Scorpios tend to dominate and control anyone that lets them, or anyone that they find weak. The person that a Scorpio respects and holds close to them is treated with amazing kindness, loyalty and generosity. On the outside, a Scorpio has great secretiveness and mystery. This magnetically draws people to them. They are known to be controlling and too ambitious but only because they need control for this makes them feel safe.
Again, here's my boot landing undeniably into the bootprint. If there are 6.6 billion people on this planet, and (for argument's sake) 1/12th of them are Scorpio, then I am exactly like 550 million other people on this planet. Not so original, after all.
My husband's birthday is tomorrow. He is a Libra/Scorpio cusp. Libras are:
Romantic and charming
Easygoing and sociable
Idealistic and peaceable
On the dark side....
Indecisive and changeable
Gullible and easily infuenced
Flirtatious and self-indulgent
On sharing this information with him, he also saw a tread under his hovering foot. His astonished comment was "But what about free will?"
I don't typically read horoscopes and certainly don't base any of my decisions in life on these things, but it is quite interesting that the personalities in this household seem to match our sun signs.
