Hour of the Dragon

The secret self

Those born in this double-hour carry the Dragon as their hidden hour-self, the private creature only the closest people meet. The clock remembers it like this:

• Born in the Dragon hour, your secret self is larger than the room lets on. There is a weight to you, a heat the room cannot quite explain, even when the face you show is modest.
• The mid-morning animal in you is a visionary in the literal sense. You see the building before the ground is broken. The gift is scale; the work is telling your own fire from the fire others lit on your behalf.
• Your hidden hour is the hour the mists rise and the rain comes. There is weather in you, a private grandeur that does not need to perform itself but is felt anyway. Spend it on the work, not the watching.
• Inside you is a pride that can become a wall. The need to be admired can curdle into a need to be unchallenged. Let one person see you small and ordinary, having a regular breakfast; it will not diminish you.
• The Dragon mid-morning is generous in scale and tender about the few it loves, in ways they are not always told. Your secret self would burn a thing down rather than be diminished by it. Aim that fire with care.

More on the Dragon

Mythic from the start, even the quiet Dragons. There is a weight in the room, a heat the room cannot quite explain, a sense that something larger has just exhaled in the corner. The Dragon does not have to try to be seen. The Dragon often wishes, in private moments, that it could simply be small for a day and have a regular breakfast. The expectation that arrived with the birth never quite leaves, the family stories, the high hopes, the assumption that this child would be the one. You will hear about luck, about grandeur, about charisma the size of weather. All real, and all a kind of inheritance with a tax. The Dragon spends a lifetime figuring out what is its real fire and what is the fire other people lit on its behalf.