A Happy Venus Leads the Pack

5.30.06


When we make it back home after our latest misadventures in The World Out There, we get to kick off our shoes and put up our feet and quit scrambling to fit everyone else's expectations of us.

We are no longer the stranger in a strange land, sucking in our untucked tummies and pausing to readjust our stance whenever we remember 'they' could be watching. We exhale, and drop the absurd self-consciousness. We are who we are, hemorrhoids and all.

Planets are like this, too. They each have zodiac signs in which they're terribly uncomfortable… and then they have their 'home' signs, where they are free to be most fully themselves.

Yesterday morning (May 29), to our collective boon, Venus came home to roost in Taurus, one of her two most favorite zodiacal zones. (The other is Libra.) And when the planet of beauty, money and love is happy, we can't help but catch a contact high.

Ah, Venus in Taurus… so instinctively at ease in her body, overflowing with fertility and sensuousness, naturally gorgeous in un-Photoshopped curves and nary a touch of makeup, rosy with the flush of good living. The consummate inspiration, she spends her days posing for painters and sculptors, her nudity kissed by a luminous lack of shame. She is smooth, but sturdy… sacred, but carnally fleshy… queen of this Earth's bountiful harvests.

Venus has been making headlines lately, featured prominently in my last two postings. First, she squared Mars. Then, she trined Pluto. Formed from her sweltering location in flamin'-hot Aries, both these aspects lit her wick for excitement, passion and impulsive movement. Now that she's in Taurus, it's time to comfortably settle into the warm contentment of touch, taste and all the rest of it… without that wild urge to keep endlessly angling for more.

Venus in Taurus (which lasts through Jun 23) invites us to enjoy the basic pleasures our planet has to offer—a delicious market-fresh meal, a full-bodied glass of vino, a picturesque sunset, a movingly vivid vision, a relaxing rub from a loved one… or at least one who's lusted for. She's notorious for her eroticism, after all, and nobody knows better than she the location of 68 hidden erogenous zones dotted across uncharted inches of our bodies. (And a sixty-ninth, for good measure.)

As we savor these blissful facets of being-in-our-bodies (and Lord knows, it sometimes gets itchy in there!), the connection to our innate creativity blossoms and blooms. As an arbiter of artistic beauty and value, Venus in Taurus draws out the shapeliness and dignity of form in all that surrounds us. She helps us see the transcendence in a tree, a rock, a stream, a cloud.

Venus's entry into Taurus is only the first of the week's three sign shifts… the overarching effect of which essentially refigures the tone of our current day-to-day life. In other words, next week will be profoundly different than last week—and this week's the transition.

On Saturday (Jun 3), we witness the other two personal planets also moving into new signs: Mercury into Cancer, and Mars into Leo. Mercury in Cancer is the mind of a poet, making sense of the world through evocative symbols and a rich emotional affect; nothing dryly literal here. And Mars in Leo holds the optimistic drive of a budding superstar, theatrical and grand in gesture; nothing blandly understated here.

Together, the combined influence makes the next few weeks a fantastically fruitful time for artists and creatives of all types. Venus in Taurus: connection to, and appreciation of, the love and beauty in our world. Mercury in Cancer: a mental orientation toward the more sensitive, feeling-driven aspects of life. Mars in Leo: the confident push of self-expression, as an act of zestful generosity. What a winningly artful mix.

The productive time is now: Invest your hearts, heads and hands with the divine gift of creation. For it to come into you, all you've got to do is ask… then open.

Make art. Make dates. Make love. Make babies.

And while you're at it, make a delectable dinner for yourself… and who knows who else.