Taurus Musings

She is Beauty. She is Fertility. She is Abundance. She is Slow and Steady. She is Taurus.

Here we are in the zodiacal season of Taurus, a fixed Earth sign. Earth signs are associated with the physical world, with manifestation and the embodied experience. Fixed signs are strong, grounded and persistent.

Our incantation for Taurus season is “Frozen Light,” our love song to Mother Nature. The title refers to the curious fact that all incarnate matter on Earth is actually light, but light that is slowed way down, essentially becoming frozen. This conceptualization of matter as frozen light (and inversely, light as matter in motion) originated in the Western World with Albert Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, demonstrating that energy and matter are one. Frozen light is the trees, the mountains, the oceans, the birds, the deer, the lizards, and our precious and imperfect human selves.

The symbol for Taurus is the bull, which is also an ancient symbol of the feminine, with the horns representing both the crescent moon and the fallopian tubes. The life-giving power of women and women's bodies was worshipped in prehistoric times, as was the Earth herself. Thus, amongst our ancestors, the bull was also a symbol of the Goddess.

In modern astrology, Taurus is ruled by the planet Venus, whose archetype is the lover. Venus revels in the manifest abundance of the embodied world- nature, beauty, food, art, romance and sex. She is in love with life itself. This is the energy of slowing down and resting in the sacredness of all that exists in our world. Taurus is permissioning us to deeply enjoy the pleasures of the physical realm.

This is the work of the Goddess. The split between between body and spirit, (earth and heaven) that patriarchal religions created and sustain to this day has led to the exploitation and mutilation of women's bodies, as well as the body of the Earth. When Earth, the body, and the feminine are torn apart from the sacred, it becomes all too easy to exploit and destroy them. When we divorce spirit from matter, we ravage the Earth out of greed. Greed is a distortion of the sacred pleasure Venus derives from deeply loving the body and the land. Pleasure suppressed twists itself into hatred and greed, and most often it is the women and the Earth who lay ravaged as a result.

As we celebrate Earth Day and all of Taurus season, let us surrender ourselves to a great love affair with the natural world and with our frozen light stardust bodies. Let it be this love, this merger with the divine within the natural world, that guides our actions toward conservation, toward restoration of balance upon and protection of planet Earth.

Note: This is the sixth in a thirteen chapter journey through the songs of Somebody Calling, and the zodiacal calendar. Full disclaimer, I am a psychotherapist, I am not an astrologer, so my musings on the zodiacal energies of these songs is that of a layperson. If you are interested in exploring astrology further, I highly recommend the following founts of wisdom: Jessica Lanyadoo Kirah Tabourn Chani Nicholas MaryPat Lynch Alice Sparkly Kat Melissa LaFara Jessica DiRuzza Richard Tarnas Zamboni Funk If you are interested in exploring the underworld of your own psychic terrain with a spiritually grounded psychotherapist, you can learn more about me and how I work here.