Sunday, April 20, 2008

Additional Taurus Entry

When I think of a single recording that I have played over and over again, I think of the Robert Johnson collection. I tried to learn several of his songs over the years, but of course I could never learn to really play them. At the time I was living for playing the guitar and I was a young man still thinking that I was going to be something on the instrument. Strangely, I didn't really know anything about astrology at the time and I was intrigued to learn just today that Johnson was a Taurean. With those spidery fingers and wolfish throat shoutin' and moanin' the blues, I can't think of anyone who created more of a path to follow in blues, rock and folk styles than did Johnson. In a prior post I discussed Aries men as seemingly yielding a tremendous crop of famous lead guitarists. I am not sure how Johnson fits into this, then, as a Taurus. Perhaps it was his connection with the land and dirt of the Mississippi delta that was his fuel for creating his musical fire. Time spent walking down dusty roads at the crossroads is a basic physically grounding act that no doubt resonated in his short 27 years engaged in the creative process. He did really create an encyclopedia of emotional "country" music and it would be a crime not to have him stand as one of the most notable Taureans ... ever. RIP Restin' in the blues.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

No one would call Uma's neck thick and heavy!










If we are to believe in modern psychology and ascribe to the idea of object relations, then truly we can never fully escape our childhoods nor our parents. In essence, our parents taught us how to view the world and they installed “the default drive” of how we were to understand the universe and the game of life. I credit my former therapist with this most excellent concept of a default drive existing inside each of us and essentially directing our actions, emotions, desires, etc. on a kind of autopilot. It is how we know about life. Perhaps after decades of analysis, we can transcend in part our humble beginnings, but we can never have a different default drive put into us. All we can do is learn more about this internal default drive along with its strengths and limitations. Just as the last line of the movie in “Citizen Cane” points directly back to the tycoon’s childhood with the dying utterance of “Rosebud” – so, too, do we all gauge today through some kind of a lens that harkens back to early childhood.

I raise this issue because this month’s column is about the sign of Taurus. My mother is a Taurus and my first long-term partner was a Taurus. Please allow me to skip the Freudian idea here and instead get into discussing the bull, or the second sign of the astrological series arriving after explosive Aries ushers in the spring.

Many of us astrology fanciers probably realize that Taurus is the earth sign’s earth sign. The fixed sign Taurean is heavy, steady and traditional. It is a sign that is rooted in nature and the image of a crazing cow or bull in the month of May as the earth is returning to life is an apt mental picture for the sign. The grazing cow or bull moves exceedingly slowly, which seems weird because there is so much eating of grass to do -- not to mention all that mastication in order to get the required nutritional hit. It would seem logical that any bovine should move extremely fast and get on with eating and digesting. Strangely, though, this is not the case. Instead, the cow or bull will do its slow methodical work and move little in the field while chewing. Slowly it will walk and slowly it will chew ad infinitum.

As far as acting and reacting go, bulls aren’t necessarily that aggressive, but watch out after you have annoyed one because then they can and will charge ahead and with full force. There will be no holding back that solid and massive girth as it lunges forward in order to head butt you via impaling out of their serene pastoral picture frame forever.

I would not be surprised if I was the taunting farmhand falling victim to the above dynamic with my Taurean mother. She had and has a habit of talking at people instead of listening and responding. She will also read whole sections of books or newspapers to you regardless of your interest in the topic. She will lead into this with a Victorian-age tone: “One should know and study these things.” This does not make for fun conversation; much of the discussion time is spent waiting for a pause from the Taurus. And this drives me, the double Libran son absolutely crazy. To me this habit seems akin to the bull’s charge. Action has been initiated and it is a one-sided action that must move into completion and the lancing of the enemy. The bull begins its merciless charge and it will not change direction until its mission is complete. When my mother goes off on one of her morality or societal dysfunction criticisms, no one will deter her from delivering the entire speech. Do you think that anyone could have stopped Taurean Hitler in the middle of his master race and eugenics oratories? I think not. And as we know, Hitler was an Aries / Taurus cusp – truly a driven boorish archetype with the square moustache and all. As the world knows, Hitler was not silenced until he was cornered in his bunker and he supposedly destroyed himself. This is the point at which his Taurean charge was silenced hopefully forever.

I think of a Gemini as having improved on this sort of behavior. The Gemini changes direction a hundredfold within the course of any action or reaction and is rarely goaded into any kind of a charge. There is movement within micro movement all with any number of changes in direction of the Geminian side stepper.

What to make of this? Well, though there is that difficult obstinacy to the Taurean, there is also an enjoyable steadiness to the bull. Just as May flowers begin to emerge from the ground, so too, can the Taurus be counted on to slowly bloom to action or to thought process completion. The keyword here is slowly bloom. The one clear astrological rule in my eyes is that you can never rush a Taurus – it is just not done. Eventually there will be a noisy and toxic outburst that will measure high on the Richter scale, which may result in that full out emotional charge.

The companion of the Taurus needs to be able not to race ahead, but to simply hang along with Taurus and to notice the beautiful scenery.

Taureans have natural beauty that helps them with the above because the rest of us can sometimes simply gaze into the earthy beauty of an Uma Thurman or a George Clooney and forget about having them take some course of action that we wanted them to take. This doesn’t work all the time, but much of the time it does work quite well. And what does it matter anyway? You can’t get a Taurean to move if they don’t want to, so it is best policy to just give up on the whole venture. It makes no sense pushing forward when a Taurus is standing in the way of a particular action’s completion. If they are allowed to think about it some, maybe some movement will then be possible.

How to recognize the Taurean? Well, there is solidness in the neck to be sure. This doesn’t mean that the Taurus neck can’t be thin, graceful, etc. but there is sturdiness there. A Taurean also feels somehow grounded and generally there is a lack of any frenetic activity in their demeanor. Generally Taurus people enjoy nature in some capacity and it is not impossible to see the bull alone in its pasture taking its sweet time gazing at the flowering meadow. This very act can be an apt metaphor for beauty itself – the beauty of settled inaction.