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hey y’all,
you might have to read this one in a couple of sittings, because I had some SHIT to SAY.
Continuing on my series of re-envisioning the zodiac in anti-colonial ways, let’s dive into where the north node presently falls, where our souls are craving to bathe and bask: Taurus. It’s Taurus season, baby. AND it’s eclipse season. It’s Eclipse in Taurus season. Today, we’re sitting between the two: processing the solar eclipse in Taurus and preparing for the lunar eclipse in Scorpio.
The principles established in the core elemental manifestations in the zodiac carry through to the second and third iterations in the (r)evolution through the zodiac wheel.
we looked at Aries as the initial fire last month,
and now, Taurus and earth.
Taurus is the foundational expression of earth energy. The truth of Earth. The way one understands Taurus will not only impact how they interpret Gemini as the successive sign, but also how one interprets the following earth signs, Virgo and Capricorn. Detaching Taurus and the land from capital, property and ownership, we can then come to a reading of Virgo that isn’t so extractive and a reading of Capricorn that isn’t so capitalist.
Taurus deals with matters of the earth and, therefore, our earthly bodies. Engaging with this sign as “I exist [Aries], and therefore I need,” Taurus provides sustenance for life. The bodies we live in have needs before and beyond all those we contrive, all that are shoved down our Taurus-ruled throats (a lil medical astro for u). The body is organic. Nourishment is essential for survival. Rest is essential. Shelter is essential. Earth is essential. When all of this is accounted for, our bodies have the ability to feel safe. Safety and survival, naturally, go hand-in-hand. When safety and survival are assured, we have the ability to access comfort.
It’s absolutely human to feel entitled to all of the above.
Venus shows us what and how we love, what feels pleasurable. Venus rules over the sign of Taurus. The moon is how we exist in our body, where and how we find comfort. The moon ~*exalts*~ in Taurus.
In bell hooks’ Salvation: Black People and Love, she writes “self-love is first expressed as the way we tend our bodies.” i like the -first- of it all, because i imagine the self-love cultivated in Taurus as a foundational value on which to launch more complex belief systems.
But simply and somatically, when we tend to our bodies, when we listen to them, our bodies learn to trust us. When our bodies trust us, they’re able to relax. A relaxed body is a sublime experience.
Taurus, the fixed earth sign, is not so active an energy. It’s more so about being than doing. observing, and ideally, appreciating and luxuriating. As a chronically ill person, a person who's experienced years of absolute agony on a daily basis by way of my physical body, it has been a long journey for me to reach a genuine belief in the magic in physicality. Rest has been the most consistent source of support (and I must say, weed and molly helped quite a bit). And baby, rest sublimes. Prioritizing rest is prioritizing well-being at its core: physically, somatically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
The house that Taurus rules in your chart can provide an indicator as to how to cultivate this feeling, this elation, that comes from loving the experience of being in a body. I’m thinking here of somatic pleasure. Doused in this pleasure, we can dive into smells, tastes, feels, colors, textures, the subtle movements, the breath of life.
Bringing my Ecowomanist background to the foreground for a moment…
Taurus lends us the experience of being Of Earth, and our relationship to and understanding of Earth impacts our experience of being in our bodies. Taurus season is prime time to listen to the land around you, to know the land as just as alive as you are, to realize you’re only as alive as the land is, love.
I wanted to name my series Decolonizing the Zodiac, and then a friend of mine directed me to the Tuck & Yang essay Decolonization is not a Metaphor. The thesis is right there in the title, and the essay helped me to remember that the act of decolonization must be literal, must involve removing settlers, removing the infrastructure of colonization, and returning stewardship of the land to indigenous peoples. Anything else is a farce that perpetuates and reforms, therefore strengthening(!), colonization.
My naming of the series was a Gemini-type action. I was just saying shit that i‘ve heard and assumed was rooted in my truth and values. My friend, and this essay, allowed me the opportunity to return to my intentions.
Tuck & Yang brought to my attention that this way i’m wanting to move, rooted in the anti-colonial shit i believe in, is already a framework at least a decade into development: “some scholars have begun to consider the labor of de-occupation in the undercommons, permanent fugitivity and dispossession as possibilities for a radical black praxis. Such ‘a labor that is dedicated to the reproduction of social dispossession as having an ethical dimension’ (Moten & Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 2013), includes both the refusal of acquiring property and of being property” These two: acquiring property and being property link together the violent manifestations of Taurus and Virgo under racial capitalism. In that refusal of being property, refusal to desire and acquire property, choosing resting instead becomes a powerful, generative act.
Rest, in practice, is a state of resistance to a society obsessed with profit and extraction. After years of forced productivity, existential urgency, and unsustainable priorities, I sleep so much now. I rest even outside of my sleep! My body, after years of exhaustion, asks for it, and once I stopped resenting that, my perspective on life changed. My life changed. I feel this is especially true for descendants of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. I’m of the mind that the state of not being of use is an opportunity for existential, transgenerational peace. I believe that an experience of a relaxed body is one of ~my ancestors’ wildest dreams~ and where else would those dreams have sprung if not in rest?
Taurus season is well-spent inspecting our core values. How we cultivate and protect our self-worth, how we desire to speak up for ourselves, assert our selfhood, find security in our bodies, it all comes to our awareness during this season. When rested and relaxed, we are then able to think, speak, and express [Gemini!] these matters clearly. we are able to ground ourselves in honesty and intentionality,
but only if we are honest and intentional,
only if those are our true values.
Without strong values, it’s easy to take on the capitalist colonizer's construction of value as your own.
Colonization is ongoing, and the stories we’re living out as the descendants of the enslaved, as refugees, as immigrants, (and esp y’all [descendents of] colonizers and settlers) are often colonization stories. But “Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies” (Tuck & Yang).
These foundational differences: creation vs colonization as the basis of how you and your people came to be where you are, change everything when it comes to what you’re able to imagine, who you choose to be, and where you choose to go. At this point, almost everyone on earth lives within an economic structure that views everything as a resource to be exploited, on an abundant planet with maliciously manufactured scarcity, and in beautiful vessels with maliciously manufactured violence waged against them. These present realities can make transits through Taurus sensitive for those of us who have vivid awareness of the violence and/or are forced to live in survival mode with tenuous access to the safety and comfort Taurus craves.
Most astrologers name money, “wealth,” as Taurean. Spiritualists will assert that we must be “open to attracting” these things. That giving these lil pieces of paper your power, time, and energy will provide you safety and comfort, and that you can and should tune into your personal magic and even channel the Earth’s own magic, using the Earth’s resources, to bring money to you. (They’ll usually also suggest that you need to put “the work” in to see results. Hm. Sounds to me like simply selling your labor, but ok.) Some say that feeling uncomfortable with this is a manifestation of a scarcity mindset.
That a “scarcity mindset” is what stops one from “abundance” is just a shitty translation of my earlier assertion that living in survival mode makes it nearly impossible for the body to relax and access somatic enjoyment, something that is always already available to us, regardless of our class status. Scarcity and abundance are not a dualism, like some make it out to be.
Your NN in Taurus reminder that money =/= abundance and lack thereof =/= scarcity
Bringing it back to Salvation, bell hooks reminds Black people, “those who lack material privilege have just as much access to spiritual and moral riches as anyone else.” If anything, I’d argue we have even more access. Poor people are the most generous I’ve ever come across. Material privilege in a colonized world is just another way of saying theft and hoarding, whether personal or familial, and that must be intentionally deconstructed and distributed in order to genuinely engage with tru morality or any type of spirituality i’m about.
My relationship to money has been a lifetime journey: disgust, resentment, fear, desire, reverence, confusion—i’ve experienced them all, and in each place it’s felt true and absolute, but every step I take further towards having absolutely no respect for personal property, even the idea of property altogether, is a spiritual gift. Much of what is deemed wealth is land, and relating to land as if it were something that can be owned, as if it’s not alive, as if it doesn’t hold its own power…it holds you back from the magical relationship that can exist when you acknowledge land as sovereign.
When you give gratitude to the Earth for the food she provides, and not the literally evil companies that manufacture, alter, manipulate it.
When you live in gratitude to the earth for the waterways, rather than the corporations that pollute and extract it before selling it back to you for profit.
What immediately precedes the Tuck & Yang quote above is that “in order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there.” Genocide, the murder of an entire people or a large swath, is documented from the colonized lands of the Congo to the Americas to Australia to Palestine as the first step towards the colonizers accruing ~material privilege~. They—colonizers, settlers—kill the people, desecrate the land, pollute the water, and begin constructing monetary value and the violent capitalist socio-behavioral values that follow.
An “abundance” that’s predicated upon property and ownership is predicated upon death (and the Scorpio side of the axis begins to jump out).
Between these Taurus/Scorpio nodes and the Pluto return, it’s staggeringly clear that the USA is reckoning with its genocidal foundations. Approximately 1 in 300 Americans has died of Covid, and there is essentially nothing in place to slow down this virus from taking another million lives over the next couple of years. There is governmental and societal pressure to continue working, continue spending, amidst collapse. If you’re ever wondering how people stood by while murderous colonizers wiped out the majority of Native Americans, or how your great(+)-grandmas felt comfortable living their daily lives as millions were being enslaved and tortured…you’re living in a similar dissonance right now, babes. Passivity and complicity right mf now is enabling preventable deaths of what will, at this rate, be millions upon millions of people.
Wear masks, bro. Don’t go out if you don’t need to, and especially not to manufactured crowded ass events??? Stay home if you are sick, like tf? Speak out about how it is unacceptable that masses are dying and becoming disabled by the day. Sheesh, what’s scarier than the virus itself is how i can’t rely on the people i love most in this world, and who claim to love me, to do the bare minimum to ensure my survival ?? PERSONALLY, I would like to live long enough to see something beyond the death cult that is colonization and capitalism.
If y’all know shit like this and aren’t already anti-capitalists, i dont know what to do with you. If you are already anti-capitalist, pls for the love of all that is HOLY match that theory with some praxis on a daily mf basis and seek joy outside of these corrupt corporations. and while we are in a pandemic seek joy outside of mass gatherings, get to know your mf FRIENDS and your FRIENDS’ FRIENDS too, let them know how mf DEPRESSED you are, get together and COOK a mf MEAL, DANCE in your mf ROOMS, look at some mf BIRDS in some mf SUNSHINE, SHARE your mf BOOKS, you don’t ALL need to have copies of the SAME DAMN BOOKS fr if y’all don’t start sharing….
Like I swear if y’all don’t stop buying dumb shit and start doing the only decent things money can do rn in this hellscape: 1) FEED PEOPLE and 2) house the people near and/or dear to you
OK I will leave all who made it this far with this:
Remind yourself that the only natural resource you’re 100% entitled to is your own damn self. Start there. Then, consider whatever resources that are inherent to you, especially the abstract resources: your time, your will, your spirit, your love, your senses, your pleasure, your refusal, your discernment, your REST. Value these. Feed these. Revel in the gift that is your self. Remind yourself that no one else is 100% entitled to you at all. Revel in all the ways you can give gifts to your self.
<3 kay