“No one can say why those seven billion billion billion atoms have such an urgent desire to be you. They are mindless particles, after all, without a single thought or notion between them. Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life.” Bill Bryson.

Every transaction is a mutual transformation. There can never be a transactional relationship which does not involve payback. Tranquility is always insecure; assertiveness is always aggressive. The hardest thing in life is to demand someone else’s respect, if that is indeed harder than losing something you no longer deserve. Do give your best, but never hope for the day it will be enough, and never rate competitors in terms of their compromises.

Oh yes, peasantry has taught the Moon a thing or two! He is in the frame of mind in October-November to wonder what the Judge has hauled him before the Court for this time. Why does he have to be wrong to prove her right? And besides the scrutiny of her decisions, is she accountable, like the hoi polloi, for who she is? Actually, she’s a hard bitch, isn’t she? She will even admit it, on your deathbed, but even there it will be your neediness which justifies it. She never apologizes, but does express regret. You would think it a game, if it were not so serious, or perhaps you would believe it to be serious, if it weren’t so transparently a game.

Human life is lived on the bank of the one river flowing through every village. Piss in it, and someone downstream will be mystified by your poison. Stealing water will get you murdered. Water levels measure identity and constrain growth. Nobody, not parsley, sage, rosemary or thyme, is blessed in marriage on dead grass. Little sister, don’t you do what your big sister done. Though scientists persevere with histories and models, and politicians perfect their manufactures of our fear, the river rises in birth and in death distils an ocean somewhere beyond our experience.

We who know these things in our water are riders on the storm, and like the cackle of the wicked witch on her broomstick, the body of this knowledge has a sound: rectitude. The relationship between life and light during the billions of years before the evolution of sight lacked righteousness, but it was right. The slaughter of indigenous people and the theft of their country was not righteous, but in the fight for survival of the banished there is no righteousness, only rectitude.

And so way down there through time and space you go about your business, taking every opportunity to promote equality, diversity and inclusiveness, and the only doubt you harbour about your righteousness is, are you right? Are you empathic? Are you real? Are you authentic? And evenly distributed among you are riders on the storm, the emptied of righteousness, the guilty of every blasphemy, the old, who could perhaps reassure you, but they don’t speak any more. What is there to speak about? Your hope? Your dream?

So while I might writhe under the justice meted out by the Sun in Libra, and while I certainly resent the righteous ignorance of the jury, there is no getting away from it, the offence against me is rectitude, mine.