When the World Is Burning, Remember What We’re Made Of... Healing the Collective

By Audra English

When the World Is Burning, Remember What We’re Made Of... Healing the Collective.

A unified argument about water, spirit, and why cooling—not fighting—is how we survive

Something is clearly happening in the world right now.

Everything feels hotter.

Faster.

Louder.

More reactive.

People are tense.

Conversations ignite instantly.

Disagreement turns into attack.

And almost everywhere, the instinct is the same:

Fight fire with fire.

Match intensity with intensity.

Outrage with outrage.

Force with force.

But the more I sit with this, not emotionally, but observantly, the clearer something becomes:

Fire is not our native state.

Water is.

And that isn’t poetic language. It’s literal.

Life begins in water, not in fire

Every human life begins suspended in water.

Before breath.

Before language.

Before memory or identity.

Cells divide in water.

Organs form in water.

The nervous system learns rhythm inside water.

Our first experience of safety isn’t light or sound—it’s being held in fluid, surrounded by warmth, motion, and steady pulse.

That matters.

Because it means our bodies don’t learn existence through force or combustion.

They learn it through flow, rhythm, and containment.

Our nervous systems still recognize water as home

This doesn’t disappear when we grow up.

We calm down near oceans, lakes, baths, rain, pools.

We relax listening to a heartbeat—pressure waves moving through liquid.

We regulate through rocking, floating, and soaking.

This isn’t a preference. It’s physiology.

Water provides rhythmic, predictable sensory input. It signals safety to the nervous system.

The vagus nerve activates.

Stress hormones decrease.

The body stands down.

Which tells us something important:

Water isn’t just comforting. It’s regulating.

Everything we experience moves through water

Thought doesn’t travel through bone.

Emotion doesn’t move through air.

Every experience you have—memory, feeling, intuition, sensation—moves through a liquid medium.

Your brain operates in water.

Your heart communicates through water.

Your chemistry travels through water.

So, when we talk about “inner state,” we’re not being abstract.

We’re talking about the condition of the medium experience moves through.

Why spirit makes more sense as distributed through water

We tend to locate spirit in the brain or the heart because they’re dramatic symbols.

But neither functions alone.

Both are suspended in fluid.

Both depend on water to signal, communicate, and respond.

Both fail without hydration.

Water, unlike any single organ, is continuous. It’s everywhere. It’s non-localized.

So if consciousness or spirit needed a physical interface—a way to distribute itself through the body—water is the only thing that actually fits.

Not because water is spirit, but because water is the medium that allows awareness to move.

This reframes a lot. Even stories of emotional shifts after organ transplants make more sense when we stop asking “which organ holds memory?” and start asking “what carries state?”

When life leaves, water leaves

This is the observation that ties everything together.

When a body dies, what leaves first isn’t structure.

What leaves is circulation.

Warmth.

Moisture.

Responsiveness.

Over time, the body dries.

What remains is bone and mineral—scaffold without flow.

Biology explains how this happens. But the pattern is unmistakable:

Life is fluid.

Death is static.

Which suggests something quietly profound:

Whatever animates us is intimately tied to flow.

Water doesn’t remember stories, it remembers states

When people say “water has memory,” it often gets misunderstood.

Water doesn’t remember like a brain remembers. It doesn’t store narratives.

But water retains state.

It responds to temperature, pressure, electromagnetic influence, agitation or stillness—and those effects linger.

That’s a kind of memory: state memory.

And since the human body is mostly water, prolonged emotional states leave impressions.

Chronic stress creates a stressed internal medium.

Repeated calm creates a calmer one.

This aligns with what we already know from trauma science and nervous system research.

The body remembers because the medium remembers.

Hydration, coherence, and what people call “vibration”, how to change our energy to healing of the collective

People talk about “higher vibration,” but a more accurate word is coherence.

When you’re hydrated:

• blood volume stabilizes

• stress hormones decrease

• neural signaling improves

• emotional regulation increases

Even mild dehydration does the opposite:

• raises cortisol

• increases anxiety and irritability

• narrows perception

A dry system is a stressed system.

A hydrated system is a coherent one.

Positive emotional states simply don’t sustain well in dehydration.

Water as a changeling medium

Water is unique because it can exist as solid, liquid, and gas.

Same substance.

Different form.

That means the human body contains a life-sustaining changeling medium—something capable of adapting without losing identity.

If consciousness needed a way to experience limitation, sensation, time, and emotion, water would be an elegant interface.

Not rigid enough to trap.

Not diffuse enough to disappear.

Responsive.

Conductive.

Adaptive.

The zodiac noticed this long before modern language tried to explain it

The water signs have always symbolized exactly what water does:

• Cancer — safety, holding, emotional containment, protection

• Scorpio — depth, transformation, regeneration rather than destruction

• Pisces — compassion, unity, dissolution of “us vs them”

These aren’t arbitrary traits. They mirror water’s function: to hold, penetrate, dissolve extremes, and transform without annihilating.

Astrology didn’t invent this symbolism. It observed it.

As within, so without: why the world is burning

Here’s the bridge most people miss.

A dysregulated body behaves the same way as a dysregulated society.

When nervous systems are overstimulated:

• logic shuts down

• empathy collapses

• perception narrows

• aggression feels justified

Collectively, we are overheated.

And the instinct—to fight fire with fire—only adds fuel.

Fire fed by fire doesn’t go out.

It spreads.

Why water is the only thing that actually works

Water doesn’t fight fire by arguing with it.

Water changes the conditions so fire can’t survive.

It cools.

It absorbs heat.

It spreads without aggression.

It moves together.

A single drop won’t stop a wildfire.

But enough water, moving collectively, absolutely will.

That’s the part we keep forgetting.

We are not meant to be fire

Fire has a role. It initiates change.

It brings light.

But fire does not regulate itself.

Too much fire evaporates water.

It dries systems out.

It leaves ash and rigidity behind.

That’s true in nature.

In nervous systems.

In societies.

The world isn’t falling apart,

It’s overheating.

What “fighting fire with water” actually looks like

This isn’t passivity. It isn’t silence. It isn’t giving up.

It looks like:

• regulating your nervous system before reacting

• refusing to add heat online

• choosing compassion without losing boundaries

• prioritizing coherence over being right

It looks like becoming unavailable as fuel.

Fire needs reaction to survive.

Water gives it none.

The conclusion everything keeps circling back to

Life begins in water.

Experience moves through water.

Spirit makes more sense as distributed through water than localized.

Inner state alters the medium.

The medium shapes perception and behavior.

Too much fire destroys water.

Enough water, together, cools fire.

So, when the world is burning, the answer isn’t to burn with it.

The answer is to remember what we are made of.

Not flame.

But flow.

Not destruction.

But coherence.

Not fighting each other.

But cooling the world together—drop by drop, wave by wave—until the flames no longer have anything left to feed on.

“When everything is on fire… remember, you are water.”