The Water-Bearer

What the donkey knows about ground zero

"My ideas are better understood through my work than through my words." TOMO77 (Tony Aguero)

I. How this began

It didn't begin with an idea. It began with two images that arrived unasked for, a day apart.

Yesterday was the painting. Yeinny brought it to me: three crowned figures, a starry sky, a donkey among them. Today was an Instagram reel about wild donkeys digging wells in the Sonoran Desert.

That order matters. First the animal appeared in the painting, silent, standing between three crowns, without my knowing what it was doing there. And less than twenty-four hours later the desert answered.

I want to pause there for a moment, because I think that's the whole matter.

An artist sits down to work. He goes quiet, connects, and brings something down. He doesn't fully invent it. He receives it, and his craft consists of putting it into matter: ink, pigment, paper, form. Then the work hangs on a wall and someone looks at it. And what was folded inside the image unfolds in the one looking, in a language neither the painter chose nor the viewer expected.

The work doesn't end in the artist. It ends in the one who receives it. They're two stretches of the same channel, and neither of them is the Source. We're the riverbed, not the spring.

I didn't ask the artist what his painting meant. I looked at it, and the painting led me to gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Myrrh led me to Mary Magdalene. Magdalene led me to Lazarus and Martha, the dragon-tamer, cast out to sea in a boat with no sails. And back to the Pope in the tarot, and to three religions standing in the same desert. None of that is written in the painting. All of it was folded inside.

Afterward I looked up who had made it, and found a sentence of his that stopped me cold.

TOMO77, the name Tony Aguero signs with, a Costa Rican whose work took shape during his years in Portland, says his ideas are better understood through his work than through his words, because English is his second language. And he says what he hopes for is that whoever looks at his work reflects on how their own conduct impacts their surroundings.

A Central American migrant who draws because the borrowed language isn't enough. And on the other end of the channel, another Central American migrant who writes in two languages, looking at his painting, finding a well in the desert there.

He couldn't say it in words. I put the words to it. Neither of us invented it.

Let's start with the desert.

II. The well

In the Sonoran Desert there are wells no one drilled.

They run up to two meters deep. They're dug into the dry beds of streams that no longer run, and in the height of August, when the water table drops and the stream disappears, they're the only water there is. In 2021, a team led by ecologist Erick Lundgren published in Science what they documented over three summers with camera traps: the wells are dug by wild equids, donkeys and horses, with their hooves. Around those wells, fifty-nine vertebrate species were detected, and fifty-seven were observed drinking. Deer, birds, javelinas, mountain lions. In a stream that had lost all its water, the wells provided one hundred percent of the surface water in the area. And when the well dries up, it doesn't stay empty: the retained moisture is enough for riverside trees to germinate that couldn't otherwise be born in that soil.

The abandoned hole becomes a nursery.

Scientists now call them ecosystem engineers. The same category as beavers.

Until that moment, these animals were filed as pests. An invasive species. A threat to biodiversity. There were extermination programs.

It's worth pausing there, because it's the whole point. For decades we were killing what was repairing, because we looked at the category and not the behavior. And it took someone looking with curiosity at something despised for it to be seen.

There's a second thing that's harder to admit. The donkey doesn't dig to restore an ecosystem. It digs because it's thirsty, for itself, now, because it's dying. There's nothing in its behavior pointing to the fifty-seven species or to the cottonwood that will grow where it drank. Regeneration isn't its purpose: it's the residue of its need.

We're exactly the opposite. We have intention and no structure. We fret, we recycle, we sign manifestos, and we operate inside systems whose waste is sterility. The donkey has a good architecture with no virtue at all. We have abundant virtue mounted on an architecture that does harm while we sleep.

The question, then, isn't how do I care more. It's how do I design acts whose residue is life. That isn't moral. It's engineering.

And there's a technical detail that reads like a parable: the donkey digs down to the water and stops. It doesn't dig deeper just in case. It doesn't dig twenty wells to lease them out. The depth is calibrated to the thirst. We lost that sensor long ago, the one that says here, enough, and that's why our holes no longer fill themselves back in. His is reversible in a single season. A mine isn't.

The difference between him and us isn't consciousness. It's speed and reversibility.

III. The one who stands its ground

There's a second thing donkeys do that almost no one associates with them. Ranchers have known it forever, and it's also written down: in 1989, the Texas Department of Agriculture presented a paper on the use of donkeys to guard sheep and goats, and estimated that some eighteen hundred producers in the state had them in service at that time. In producer surveys, most rated them as acceptable or better at deterring coyotes, though the percentages vary by sample.

They aren't trained for it. No need. The donkey comes factory-installed with an aversion to canids that seems to come from its history on the African steppe, where wild dogs were real predators. It has sharp hearing and good eyesight, and very rarely misses anything.

But what matters is what it does when the threat arrives, because it's exactly the opposite of what a horse does.

The horse flees. The donkey plants itself. It stays still, turns, and faces what's coming head-on. And if it decides it must, it charges: brays, rams, bites the neck or chest, turns and kicks. It doesn't calculate probabilities. It goes.

Now three facts that strip this of anything cute and make it interesting.

The first: it only works alone. The manual recommendation is one donkey per pasture. Put two together, and they bond with each other and stop watching the herd. The only exception is a jenny with a foal, who protects as a mother. In other words: vigilance and belonging compete. The animal guards as long as it doesn't have its own, and the moment it does, its own become the whole world. There's a parable in there that each of us will have to read with our own life in hand.

The second: it isn't protecting the herd. The manuals say it plainly. The donkey doesn't deliberately defend the goats. It defends its territory and defends itself, and it doesn't even patrol. The goats simply happened to be there, on the right side of the line.

Same thing again. In the desert it doesn't dig to regenerate: it's thirsty, and the nursery is the residue. In the pasture it doesn't care for the livestock: it guards its ground, and the protection is the residue. Two different behaviors, the same structure. It's no longer a nice reading of a single finding: it's a pattern.

And the third, so as not to romanticize: there are donkey sanctuaries that oppose this use, and they have arguments. Donkeys are also attacked by coyotes, dogs, bears, and big cats, and stories of injured or killed donkeys are more common than stories of victorious ones. Against heavy pressure or larger predators, no one recommends leaving it alone. It isn't an invulnerable hero. It's a brave animal that also gets eaten.

And yet the rancher keeps it there, generation after generation, for one quality alone: it isn't impressed. There's nothing in the coyote's repertoire that intimidates it, because the donkey doesn't negotiate with what it sees. It looks at it.

Seen from the ground, that's called courage.

Seen from up on the saddle, it's called stubbornness.

IV. The one who saw first

In the Book of Numbers there's a hired seer named Balaam, contracted to curse a people. He's riding his donkey. On the road, the angel of the Lord blocks his path with a drawn sword, and the prophet, the professional of the invisible, sees nothing. The donkey does. She stops three times. Three times he strikes her. On the third strike the animal speaks and tells him she just saved his life.

Balaam then sees. And he changes the sign of his mission: instead of cursing, he prophesies. From his mouth comes the phrase that will open everything else: a star shall rise out of Jacob.

That's the star that centuries later the Magi will follow.

And that's why, when in the Catacombs of Priscilla, in the first half of the third century, a prophet pointing to a star appears next to the Virgin and Child, the early Church had already sewn the seam we have to rediscover by stumbling. Archaeology doesn't consider it settled: the Vatican's own source identifies him as either Balaam or Isaiah. But the logic is the same either way, and if it's Balaam, it closes on itself: without the donkey there's no angel, without the angel there's no star, without the star there are no Magi.

Perception is below. In the one carrying the load. Not above, in the one riding. God speaks through the mouth of the beaten animal, not through the mouth of the paid prophet.

And notice what the gift consisted of. She did nothing spectacular. She planted herself. She refused to move forward. Exactly what she does in the pasture when she smells the coyote, and exactly why the rancher in Texas keeps her there. Balaam struck her three times for being stubborn. She was saving his life.

Christian tradition placed her at three doors of that story: under Mary on the way to Bethlehem, under the Holy Family in the flight into Egypt and, this time actually in the Gospel text, under Jesus at the entry into Jerusalem. The first two aren't in the Gospels; they come from the Protoevangelium of James, from nativity scenes and a thousand years of painting. And that makes them more interesting, not less: when the collective imagination had to choose who carried the Child on the road, it chose the donkey three times. The Magi appear once and leave. The donkey is there at the beginning, the escape, and the end.

And there's a word that explains it all. In Hebrew, donkey is chamor and matter is chomer: two words built on the same three consonants. Linguistics only registers the kinship; it was the mystical tradition that turned that closeness into a reading. When the king enters Jerusalem riding a donkey and not a war horse, he isn't saying matter is to be despised. He's saying it's to be ridden. Not denied: driven.

Christ didn't come to take us out of the world. He came to teach us to cross it.

V. Three crowns and a newborn

The painting is called The New Born. It's from 2022, by TOMO77, the alias of Tony Aguero. Red and black on white, within the palette that became his visual signature. He describes himself as an illuminator of apocalyptic times.

And there's something worth knowing before looking at it. What looks like it was carved in wood or linoleum isn't: it's what the artist calls hand digital etching, every line drawn by hand at full scale on a digital interface, imitating the physical precision of the old craft. In other words, a contemporary object presenting itself as a relic. Which, in a piece about three ancient religions and a molecule, isn't a small detail.

Three crowned figures standing in a red landscape under a starry sky.

The one on the left wears a miter: Rome. The one in the center, a crown topped with a crescent moon: Islam. The third, a crown of vertical spikes that reads equally as a menorah or as the radiant crown of the magoi: sages or astrologers from the East, historically associated with the priestly traditions of Persia and, from the Jewish perspective, outsiders to the covenant. Matthew doesn't say they were kings, doesn't say there were three, and doesn't specify where they came from.

Three hierarchies. Three religions of the Book. And none of them is blessing: one points to the star, another holds the staff, none looks at the viewer.

The staff has a double helix of DNA engraved on its shaft. Above, a Sacred Heart crowned with thorns within a sun.

A serpent coiled around a pole raised in the desert so that whoever looks at it may live: that's Moses's Nehushtan, and it's the image Christ identifies himself with. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up. So in that staff there are three layers in a single stroke: bronze serpent, cross, double helix. What's raised to heal the people is no longer an object of bronze. It's a molecule.

The newborn of the title doesn't appear in the painting. The whole hierarchical apparatus stands around something that has already been born and that we don't see. The star the finger points to is at the right edge of the paper, half spilling out. The destination doesn't fit inside either.

It's worth remembering what the Magi bring. Gold for the king. Incense for the god. And myrrh, an embalming resin, the substance a corpse is prepared with. The cradle gift already carries the burial inside it. And thirty-three years later myrrh reappears exactly where it belonged: John tells us Nicodemus brings it, mixed with aloe, to prepare the body. And the women arrive at the tomb with spices to anoint him, which is why Eastern tradition will call them myrrh-bearers. The substance given at the crib is the one that returns at the tomb. The three gifts are mineral, vegetable, and mortal.

And below, uncrowned, there are three creatures: a donkey, a hare, and a red being with a mushroom head. The donkey's ears and the hare's are indistinguishable. They're the only ones looking straight ahead.

VI. The hare, or how a resurrection gets dated

The hare isn't a lunar decoration. The hare is Easter.

It's the animal European popular tradition put in charge of delivering eggs in spring, and that's why in English the feast is called Easter, from Eostre, the goddess of dawn and the east. But that's the surface. Underneath there's something far more interesting, and it's arithmetic.

Easter is the great movable feast of Christianity: the center around which an entire stretch of the liturgical calendar shifts, because Ash Wednesday, the Ascension, and Pentecost move with it. And it floats because it's calculated like this: the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.

Read that again with what we already know.

The spring equinox is 0° Aries. It's ground zero, the first degree that exists, the point where the whole wheel begins.

The full moon is the hare. The lunar animal, the rabbit seen in the moon, the one that appears next to the satellite in every mythology.

In other words: Christianity's central feast, the day of the Resurrection, is fixed by two coordinates. Ground zero and moon. And in my reading, both are in the lower part of the painting, uncrowned: the beginning of the wheel and the lunar animal.

And there's a third element that closes the triangle. The Christian Passover is built on the Jewish Passover, the one from Egypt, the one with the lamb whose blood is painted on the doorframe. The lamb is the ram. The ram is Aries. The whole feast, start to finish, is calculated with a sign and a star.

It's worth saying how it works today, because it's revealing. The Church doesn't consult the sky: it uses an ecclesiastical equinox fixed by convention on March 21 and a paschal moon calculated using tables, not observation of the actual body. In other words, it froze into a table of numbers what began as a watching of the sun and moon.

But that doesn't change the origin, it confirms it. We can argue whether astrology is or isn't a science. What can't be argued is that the liturgical calendar is built from those very materials: sun, moon, equinox, the return of spring. The Church had no qualms about tying the celebration of the Resurrection to the sky. And God, apparently, didn't mind either.

VII. From the Lamb to the Water-Bearer

In the traditional reading of the ages, before Pisces came Aries, and from there comes all the vocabulary we take for granted: the paschal lamb, the ram substituted for Isaac, the ram's horn sounding at the wall, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Then came Pisces: the fish, the fishers of men, the multiplication, baptism by water, the ichthys scratched on the walls of the catacombs. Two thousand years of water surrounding you and holding you up without you doing anything.

And now the Aquarian opens up. This is where the text does something that still amazes me.

When Jesus gives instructions for preparing the last Passover, he gives a very strange one. It's in Mark 14:13 and Luke 22:10, in almost the same words: go into the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you, follow him, and wherever he enters, that's the house.

In that culture, carrying water in jars was usually women's work. A man with a jar would have been unusual enough to be recognizable in the crowd: a sign, not a coincidence.

And what happens inside that house is the institution of communion.

Read through the symbolic grammar we've been following, the Lamb sends them to follow the Water-Bearer to find the room where the bread is broken. Aries sending toward Aquarius. The sign doesn't point backward: it points toward the next house.

And there's no need to turn it into an archetype or borrow symbols from anywhere. It's in the text, in the imperative, said by Him: follow the one carrying the water. What they find by following him is an upper room, already arranged, already prepared, already waiting for them.

The man with the jar doesn't lead to the Messiah. He leads to the house where the Messiah has already arranged everything.

VIII. Ground zero

On February 20, 2026, Saturn and Neptune reached exact conjunction by ecliptic longitude at 0°45' Aries, within the tropical zodiac.

It isn't just any degree. We already know which one it is: it's the same one Easter is dated by. The equinox, the start of the astrological year, the launch point of the whole wheel. These two planets hadn't met since 1989, and in Aries not since 1702. The cycle they opened closes in 2061.

Saturn is structure, limit, bone, form. Neptune is dissolution, dream, spirit without edge.

Chamor and chomer, again, written in the sky. Spirit entering form, at the exact degree of birth. The DNA in the staff. The New Born.

Neptune had been moving through Pisces, its own house, since its first entry in 2011 and steadily since 2012, and finally left it in January 2026. Entering Aries, it left the sea and reached the desert. The water stopped surrounding you. Now you have to dig for it. And Saturn goes with it, which is the brutal and beautiful part of this: the dream no longer floats; now it demands hooves, bone, discipline, work.

In late July 2026, the North Node entered Aquarius and the South Node entered Leo. First time in about eighteen and a half years. On August 12, a total solar eclipse in Leo opened the chapter.

And now look at where each one entered.

The south node, what's released, entered Leo. The solar king. The anointed one. The one. The north node, where we're heading, entered Aquarius. The collective, the network, each one. The one carrying the jar.

No need to force anything. In the technical language of that axis: the figure of the mediating sun-king is released, we walk toward the distributed. Systems that serve more than the individual. Ways of contributing that decenter the ego without erasing the gift.

And Aquarius, it's worth saying, isn't a water sign. It's air. In Aquarius, water doesn't fall from the sky: someone carries it. Someone brings it up.

The Savior was the sea. What's coming is the water table.

It was below the whole time.

IX. What we leave running

I suspect the question what do I do each day? is a bit of a pious trap. The moral consolation prize. What moves the needle isn't what I do while my attention is on it, but what I leave operating once I'm no longer watching: the structures, the contracts, the systems that keep running on their own, the residue of my acts.

The donkey left a hole. That's the only thing it left. And it was enough.

There was no intention, no merit, no discourse. There was a thirsty animal, a hoof, and an exact calibration between what it needed and what it took. Fifty-seven species that didn't dig drink from that, and from that grow trees that had no right to exist in that soil.

And a warning, so as not to romanticize: the same well can sustain the donkey and the mountain lion capable of devouring it. The same water sustains the one who gives and the one who devours. It isn't a kindly system. It's a system where nothing is wasted. Generosity there isn't sentiment: it's geometry.

The ones who already knew wore no crown. The hare, the mushroom, the donkey. The ones who saw first.

Now it's our turn to learn to dig.

Myriam V. 

Credits. The work discussed is The New Born (2022), by TOMO77, the alias of Tony Aguero, a Costa Rican interdisciplinary artist whose work took shape during his years in Portland, Oregon. His work addresses human behavior, capitalism, and the migrant experience. He has exhibited at StolenSpace (London), One Grand Gallery (Portland), La Luz de Jesus, Subliminal Projects, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of Costa Rica, and the Saatchi Gallery. Reproduced with the artist's permission.

A note on the layers of this text. I'm distinguishing six levels here, because they don't all carry the same weight and the reader deserves to know which one they're reading.

Scientific and documentary evidence: the wells, the species, the percentages, and the germination come from Lundgren et al., "Equids engineer desert water availability," Science, 2021. The material on guardian donkeys comes from Murray T. Walton and C. Andy Field, "The Use of Donkeys to Guard Sheep and Goats in Texas," Fourth Eastern Wildlife Damage Control Conference, 1989; from the bulletin "Livestock Guard Dogs, Llamas and Donkeys" from Colorado State University, 1999; and from Jan Dohner, Livestock Guardians: Using Dogs, Donkeys and Llamas to Protect Your Herd, Storey Publishing, which is where the management recommendations and the observation that the donkey protects its territory and not the herd come from. The objection to this practice is taken from Little Longears Miniature Donkey Rescue.

Biblical text: Numbers 22 and 24, Zechariah 9, John 3 and 19, Mark 14, Luke 22.

Iconographic tradition: the donkey of Bethlehem and the one from the flight into Egypt, the title myrrh-bearers, the boat of Provence, and the identification of the prophet at the Priscilla catacomb.

Astronomical fact: the planetary positions and dates, and the mechanics of the equinox and the lunations.

Astrological interpretation: the meaning of the signs, the nodes, and the ages, which is a symbolic grammar and not a causal mechanism. There's no consensus on when an age begins or ends.

Personal reading of the work: everything I say the painting means. It's mine, not the artist's.

I offer it the way a well is offered: for whoever is thirsty.