Blue Hand

Kin 7 is Blue Hand with tone 7, and the sign returns every twenty days. Someone born on 26 July 1992, for example, is kin 247, Blue Hand with tone 13, Cosmic.

The nature of the sign

Manik is the hand that makes things. Everything human beings have ever built, mended, carved, played, written or healed has passed through a pair of hands, and this sign carries that whole inheritance.

I call it the transformer of skill, and the transformation is the interesting part. A Blue Hand arrives willing to not know, to be clumsy for a while, to keep going until the hands learn what the head cannot teach them. The change happens in the doing.

So Blue Hand is the craftsman of the twenty, in the oldest sense of the word. The person who gets better at something for forty years and is still interested.

Who you are

You are practical and focused and you like the physical world. You learn by doing. You can read the theory and you will, but nothing goes in properly until your hands have had a go at it.

You take pride in your work and you notice detail. You are patient with the long road to being good at something, because you understand that there is no short one. You are not satisfied with a poor job, from yourself or from anyone else, though you are kind when you teach.

You have a feel for how things work and how to fix them. People bring you broken objects, and sometimes broken plans, and you turn them over in your hands and see what is wrong.

Strengths

Competence. Real, earned, visible competence, the kind that other people can lean on. You see what needs doing and you have the patience to become the person who can do it.

You are also a natural teacher of the practical kind. You remember what it was like not to know, and you can hand a skill to someone else without making them feel small for lacking it. In my experience the best mentors I have met are nearly always some version of this sign.

Challenges

The shadow of the craftsman is the job that is never finished because it is never quite perfect. A Blue Hand can polish a thing past the point where polishing helps. Learn when good is good enough, and ship it.

The second shadow is judgement. You hold yourself to a high standard, and it is a short step from there to holding everyone else to it and finding them wanting. Other people's mistakes are not a personal insult. Let them be clumsy for a while too.

And the third is forgetting why. A skill is for something. When the craft becomes the whole point and the people it was meant to serve drop out of view, the work goes cold, however well made it is.

In love and work

In love you show up and do the work. You are not a poet and you will not pretend to be one. Your love is in the shelf you put up, the dinner you cooked, the car you fixed before anyone noticed it was making a noise. You need a partner who can read that language, because you are not going to translate it very often.

You like the simple physical things and you are comfortable in your own skin. Closeness for you is best unhurried, with nothing else competing for your attention. Your friendships are long and built on respect for what each of you can do.

At work you belong wherever expertise matters and results can be seen: the trades, medicine, engineering, music, art, healing, teaching. You drift toward passing on what you know. You struggle in places where quality is not valued or where you are stopped from getting properly good at the job. Give a Blue Hand the time to master something and get out of the way.

Your sign across the tones

Every Blue Hand also carries one of the thirteen tones, and the tone changes how the sign is lived. The Thirteen Tones page covers each one in full.

With a low tone, 1 to 4, the apprentice is picking up the tools. Tone 1 Blue Hand knows which craft it is here to learn. Tone 2 feels the gap between what the hands can do and what the eye can see, and lives with it, and tone 3, in the library's own example, brings a burst of energy to the long work of getting good.

With a middle tone, 5 to 9, the hands know what they are doing. Tone 6 Blue Hand has the fine judgement of proportion that separates a decent maker from a good one. Tone 7 brings an artist's feel to the work, and tone 8 asks who the skill serves and whether it is doing them any good.

With a high tone, 10 to 13, the craftsman is ripening into the master. Tone 11 lets go of every flourish that was only for show. Tone 12 builds a workshop full of other people's hands, and tone 13 Blue Hand, the kin 247 example above, has the kind of mastery that looks like ease and is still, quietly, learning.

Across the traditions

Blue Hand sits in the blue family, the five signs that transform what the white signs have refined. If you know your Western chart, you will find a kinship with Virgo and with the sixth house, the parts of a chart that deal with craft, service and daily work, and the Western Astrology section covers both. The Chinese Astrology section describes the hard working animals in its own terms, and the Vedic Astrology section has nakshatras devoted to the maker and the healer.

What have you been learning long enough to be good at, and who could you teach?

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

Related pages
Blue Night · Blue Monkey · Blue Eagle · Blue Storm