Taurus 14°(corresponding to May 3, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

I think I wanted to go somewhere different on the theme of belonging but found myself stuck in the same sort of head I’ve been in lately regarding my past which is in so many ways unresolved. I think I wanted to talk about a different angle.

It is no secret that, besides my career as an author, advisor, astrologist and sometime alchemist (alliteration not intended but welcomed), I producer theater and performance and run a festival I founded on Cape Cod. I put on a lot of group shows and I often invite artists to participate. People tend to rely on me for that perhaps, but sometimes it would be nice to be asked to participate in other people’s doings. But I’m never asked. Which is fine for the most part—I’m used to it; I suppose people don’t assume I’d like to be the participant and not the producer from time to time.

Still, given the choice of being a leader or a follower slash joiner, I would always pick the former as I’ve always done. It’s part and parcel of being a cardinal sign, perhaps I’m always initiating. I’m always on the front lines. I’m always spearheading, but it often feels like an uphill battle. But I’m not hear to complain. I suppose I make things look easy and that I don’t read as someone who would seek assistance. Mostly true, but I would like to sit back and go along for a ride at some point.

For now I just need a little rest before cranking up the machinery again. Failure or falling short are never an option. I might be just writing anything. Perhaps I don’t always have something to say. I think maybe I should stop here.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 13° (corresponding to May 2, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Two Taurus keywords are Value and Belonging. It’s funny how seemingly disparate things find a connection in the astrological houses associated with any given sign. I was just sitting here meditating on how these go together and I’m not certain I’ve come up with anything earth-shattering but I do have random thoughts I could share.

I was never a joiner. There might have been a time that I wanted to be one. Back where I grew up I was a pariah for much of grade school and surely the lowest level of hell aka junior high where I was only popular for a week at school-year’s end when I would be cast in a starring role in the school musical. Otherwise, I was severely mocked—as a matter of fact, in Wyckoff, New Jersey, the local insult was “a mock”; one would say, “Oh, Billy, you’re such a mock.” Seriously I’m not making this shite up. All this to say that I didn’t even try, though I longed, to fit in, until well after going to high school at the age of 13. If anything, I defied the whole concept of fitting in—careful not to join any band of underground newspaper editors or the a/v club or anything even mildly subversive.

If you’ve read this Blague before and no anything about me I led a sort of adult life from a very early age, specifically in summers where I drank at bars and smoked pot and even had (a form of) sex on the beach from the time my age reached double digits. So that when I returned back to “normal” suburban life I felt that I was in cognito, a sort of Clark Kent, without the bone structure or muscle tone, pretending to live as a child going through rights of passage that I had already been speeded through arguably prematurely. So I hung out with people two or three years older than myself. Not like pot-heads did. Remember pot-heads. They were their own counter culture. And a girl or boy would enter high school as a freshman but he or she might have been one of those kids that lived a pot-head lifestyle with absentee parents and older siblings whose houses always seemed a bordel with sticky floors and broken screened backdoors and mutliple siblings all taking care of themselves like they do on Shameless; such that said “child” would enter high school and already be hanging with pot-head seniors in a designated location—in our high school it was “the wall”—although there were two walls: one wall where the popular mainly senior population plopped themselves like gods of a pantheon on a concrete dais; and the other wall which separated our outdoor courtyard from our playing fields which were a good six feet below the courtyard such that crouching and smoking bowls somehow went unnoticed? Well, in the late 1970s early 1980s they did. I’m off track. I’ll get back…oh right…Value and Belonging.

So, I never cared about belonging. I had no natural belonging in my family, my one sibling being a hostile nightmare that tried to make me feel that I didn’t belong and then again I didn’t want to belong to my family, really, because my father struck me as a Neanderthaal for the most part, despite his good qualities, and my mother, though genius, was too weak to leave and take me with her which would have been my fantasy. To me: belonging would have been she and I playing out some Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore fantasy which would have made for a much better reality than liviing with my mostly horrible father and my only ever horrible sister. But you know, my mother never had to work. She had summers alone. She had house cleaners and frozen food you popped in the oven and a new Buick every other year so she wasn’t going anywhere. Again with the digression.

Okay I had no self esteem as a child. And nobody really telling me how great I was on the homefront. My mother would tell me I was smart but she eyed me with a desire to perform plastic surgery. I think she was happy my junior year of high school when my neighbor friend drove me to school in his open topped Jeep with the “roll bar” the concept of which was put to the test when, Jeff yelled “I think we can make it” gunning the Jeep from the side street leading to the entrance/exit of the school with school busses, full and empty, coming either way only to find he didn’t (make it) and we got hit by a school bus and the Jeep did indeed roll over and when we were upside down for that split moment I (thankfully?) banged my head and face into the roll bar—people said the roll bar saved me that if i hadn’t hit it i would have been crushed underneath the rolling car because, remember the dates, nobody is wearing seat belts—such that I emerged with a gashed head, amnesia and a broken nose that needed immediate repair…once I remembered who I was.

I imagine the glee my mother would have secretly felt. She had the excuse to bring me to a plastic surgeon (an at least locally famous one with twelve children a half dozen of whom I knew by sight and a few I was friendly with) and “repair” the damage. But she had other things up her sleeve. That will have to wait for another Blague, perhaps the next one, because I’m talking about Value and Belonging. Am I talking about it here? Am I saying that my mother would have a stronger sense of belonging toward me her son if she could alter my face a bit surgically. I might be saying that. But it isn’t what’s driving me. Must keep on theme

Value and Belonging. So imagine you’re me. You’ve already been through something of a ringer by the time you enter high school. You have secrets. A sort of secret life maybe. You’ve been mocked by the preppies in pink and green, LL Bean duck boots and you could give a shit. You have two art classes back to back first and second period. Typically you wake and bake so you’re super chill and detached. Yes, you’ve continued to at least be “featured” in every musical and experienced waves of recognition. And still the “middle management” of your school is married to you’re being not only “a mock” or or worse sling you’re already bullet proofed against, knowing full well, if push came to shove, and somebody called you out to physically fight, you’d be more afraid you’d kill said person with the strength of your pent up secret than if they gave you a fat lip or bloody nose. Meanwhile you’re just the weirdo trying to keep his head down, not a pot-head, but smoking a lot of pot, hanging out with adults in your spare time, going into New York, to clubs, getting drunk on champagne poured into bathtubs, having Chinese food in the village, seeing Broadway plays in matinee, and not giving a shit. Until one day…somewhere during the last few weeks of your junior year in high school…you’re like..

Fuck this. I’m missing out. I’m in high school. I’m not only my outside cached world. I’m here. I’m here now. And here and now totally sucks. I am not Valued. I don’t Belong. Something needs to be done. And so I did it. I was online in the crap cafeteria chosing some semblance of something I could call food—I was already “this person” when it comes to diet—and exiting the line, instead of finding some remote corner of a table where I could sit alone and read without having anything thrown at me or anything stolen off my tray (yes i was that lowly guy), I beelined for the elite table filled with the uber pantheon residents of the wall. There were no football players. Here, there were soccer stars, all swarthy, and not all cheerleaders but only the select upper echelon of cheerleaders who were raised by hippie single mothers and, though they ran the squad, they weren’t “of” the squad. These were the untouchables. In New Jersey, at this time, when everyone was prepped out and listening to Bruce Springsteen, this bunch, like me, was not. We drove our cars up Skyline Drive to find rare records by Buffalo Springfield and the Doors. Stuff I later found out after: I walked over and plopped my red tray down and wiggled my bony ass into a space between this supposed god and goddess and I just started eating my lunch. And they scarcely noticed. That was the best part, learning about Value and Belonging. It was as if they didn’t notice I hadn’t been there alll along. And I listened to them talk, admittedly self-conscious, and then suddenly one girl, making a point about something that happened in class earlier, punctuated by saying, “Billy knows, Billy was there”. As if somehow I had entered into this scene, yes, seemingly unnoticed, but right on cue.

So I made myself belong? I didn’t know I didn’t belong. Others assumed I did already. When you come from a family of shifting sands it’s very hard to know where you stand in a landscape of people who maybe have been on teams all their lives or they don’t come from dysfunctional families but from familes where twelve siblings all love and respect each other or they don’t feel downtrodden so they have no understanding of those who do and perhaps they don’t even view themselves as some sort of pantheon but that’s something others put on them and they are as easy, as a group, to infiltrate as any, provided you have the confidence. Because it was confidence that plopped me down at that cafeteria table and yet that was the last time that plopping was interesting. I’m still friends with many of those high school characters. Turns out the most loving people live at the top. It’s mister/mistress in between you have to look at for. I write on this subject all day. Must shut myself down.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 12° (corresponding to May 1, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

The sign of Taurus rules the ages 7-14 when we can be at our most vulnerable. I would venture to guess that most molestations occur to people during this span of their life. My “experience” surely did, pretty much right smack dab in the middle. As relates to my personal experience, I don’t embrace the word molestation. Although the other individual was older than me it wasn’t by all that much. It’s similar but different, I think, from having been abused by someone undeniably adult. Though any kind of sexual experience that is imposed upon a person who is as yet not of sexual age, therefore lacking the mental ability, never mind the physical equipment, to cope with it is not to be excused; I have always considered myself relatively lucky in the scheme of premature seduction in that the so-called perp was still, relatively, a peer; such that “our little secret” still managed to smack of something between friends that we are simply not choosing to tell our parents who were off somewhere doing something fueled by alcohol no doubt—at the beach with a cooler, at the track, out to a fancy boozy lunch, on the golf course—leaving, as you unfortunately did, kids home alone to fend form themselves. Besides, and I’ll get flack for admitting this, I actually found it fun at the time; blissfully unaware of how this might be sending me down a path of self-loathing, fear and making me prone to any number of floaters up and out from Pandora’s box.

The fixed sign of Taurus, as I’ve said, is associated with the garden and the dichotomy of innocence and temptation. We know the biblical line; but the Greek mythological landscape in which these archetypes live is that of Arcadia, wherein the nubile nymphs and flower gods provide temptation to even the highest ranking of gods—divine noblesse is no match for a lecherous mind and constitution. My own Arcadia happened to be the Jersey Shore where I was forever left to my own newly deviant devices at the very same moment that I was becoming obsessed with mythology and magic. I had more crushes on divine beings than I did on any real people my or any age. I fancied myself emerging from silken pools filled with immortalizing liquids and expending my natural energy running nearly naked along untrodden paths; when in fact I was simply awaking before anyone else in my jam-packed beach town to swim in the calmer waters, close to the jetty, the ocean pink from the gumdrop Sun emerging from it on the horizon, running along the water’s edge wiped clean of footprints, fueling my fantasy of total privacy and blissful isolation. I would recite incantations in my head to Apollo and Dionysus, to whom I would also make invocations dressed in robes I made out of old curtains. Not sure if I learned this trick either from The Sound of Music or Gone With The Window. Either way, I was watching way too much TV. But not in the summer!

In the summer, I entered into a fantasy bubble, much the way I would have done at two years old, entering into fairy worlds by crawling inside empty duvet covers or other wrinkles in quotidian reality. But at the age of ten or eleven, I would be ripped away, in June, from summers spent with the kids I went to school with, never having the kind of summer-bonding experiences others did when they returned in September with matching tans and inside jokes. I went to the beach each June where I didn’t really know anyone but a casual acquaintance or two I’d meet on the beach. Mostly I lived inside my own head with no parental guidance at all. One day I walked to a movie theater and sat and watched the same film four times in a row. It was hot. The theater was air conditioned. They had soda and popcorn and nobody missed me. There was a certain beauty to those anonymous days; nothing really costing more than a quarter or maybe a dollar or two for the movie, easily affordable entertainment on a weekly allowance of two to five dollars; and of course there was always change looking within the tobacco flakes at the bottom of my mothers’ myriad handbags.

So with summer arriving I feel nauseous. It might be the fact that the whole of my childhood existence was ripped away, not a single shred of it remaining. Relations all dead or estranged, the towns and houses of my youth left in the dissipating fog of memory dating back some thirty, forty years, now. I don’t have Proustian remembrances, I have waves of nausea. Is it the same nausea I felt in the first moments of being urged to do things beyond my ken? Is it trauma of these having been terrible times resurfacing in my viscera. Or is it a result of being flung so far out, as if on the tilt-a-whirl or spidey rides of my summer youth on rides in Asbury Park to which I would ride my bike, increasingly, ten or twelve or fifteen miles from where I lived or worked in Belmar, Spring Lake or Sea Girt as a young teen, still alone, nobody knowing if I return directly home from my evening restaurant shift or if I drive further toward Asbury to enter a seedy landscape of bars and clubs where nobody checked your age upon entering to drink endless Cape Codders, mostly for free, because the feather-haired bartender with the turquoise rings would give them to you and any child brave enough to enter into such a place at the age of fourteen or fifteen. I had such an education. Most folks I encounter have no idea. The lives I lived before I even had a drivers’ license. Thankfully, that life was led mainly if not primarily as an observer. And the bubble in which I kept myself was pretty secure. Trying to see myself through the eyes of….what was turquoise bartender’s name?…he went on to open the Raspberry Cafe in Ocean Grove? Oh, well, it will come to me…trying to see myself, say, through his eyes, I must have seemed like some kind of sexually confused autistic Holden Caulfield. Better known as, well, Holden Caulfield, only small and without the patch of grey hair.

Then again my nausea might just be garlic which I’ve had these past few days but not for a long time before.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 11° (corresponding to April 30, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

It would seem that every person I pass on the street is more qualified than Trump. Why are the so few who run for the highest office in the land so wrong for it compared to, well, just about anybody. How did this happen. Is it really just money? Or is it related to sanity. Especially on the Republican side. Is having a screw loose a prerequisite for candidacy? Or, okay, people that are already in politics. Why isn’t Al Franken the next president. I mean we got lucky with Obama but I still think he’s a certain kind of crazy in that, if he didn’t have an outsized ego, he wouldn’t have grabbed for that brass ring. He is the unruffled king (Leo) far more than the teflon Bill Clinton (Leo) was. Obama, it seems, plans to pride himself on having lasted all eight years with out going ballistic over anything. Trump can’t last eight seconds without doing so. Surely there is something in between. Obama’s stealthy and above-censure moves, after all, have seen him quietly launch over 500 drone strikes. I’m not arguing the validity of having done so; but it is very much in keeping with his persona, characterized as it is, by having a cool remove.

Drone strikes, as opposed to conventional military strikes involving people in pilot seats or behind tanks or on the ground, are arguablly less humane because the human conscience isn’t that directly involved. Nowadays we train thousands more remote drone pilots than actual ones. If we’re not seeing the collateral damage and the thousands of innocent people, women and children included, being killed, it doesn’t emotionally register, we don’t feel it. And if we are emotionally responsible for the killings than we are that much more densitized not only to war but to human life in general. Surely that will seap further into mass consciousness. Drone pilots, in effect, are not very different from children playing video games, only what they see on the screen isn’t the be all end all, it is an abstract of a grim reality. We detach, we detach and yet, what? We want more attention. We want the greatest number of hits and clicks and followers in an on-screen world that is a representation of our lives, not the one we’re actually living. This two-dimensional reality is more than just concept fodder for science fiction novels, we are becoming less dimensional, not more so, as human beings.

We act differently in the two-dimensional world. We are more black or white. We make blanket statements that inspire pointed reactions. We get into online battles with people over politics or social concerns. We say more than we should, perhaps, behind the safety of our black and white screens. If we later were to bump into the individual we met earlier on the laptop battlefield, we might hem and haw, retract and reposition, because there is more nuance to human interaction in the flesh. There is chemical reaction that might inspire more empathy or other forms of kindred spiritedness that might prevent you from attacking or blocking as you do electronically. Even though, a generation ago, the notion was floated that”we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” we have done the opposite. We are creating a wilderness of wires and fibers and satellites and other muscle and sinew of isolation. And yet, what do we most want from this virtual non-dimensional world—every possible shred of fandom we can amass; and why is that? Money. We want more money. We want all the money. It isn’t enough to have the accolades alone unless they monetize. And that is all fear. Fear, fear, fear.

Not to say I blame you for being afraid. It’s what is expected of you. It’s what makes you malleable. It’s what militarizes you. But you should be most afraid of what you’re putting in place to protect you. And get off the fucking computer.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 10° (corresponding to April 29, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

The beauty about this Blague is that I can say anything I want on any given day at any given time. So why do I put it in the category of daily obligations ticking it off my to-do list? Because I’m a Libra? I have a Virgo rising?With Saturn in the 6th House? Probably. But there’s likely more to it than that. It all comes down to feeling propelled or dragged. And the entire object of this Cosmic Blague was to give my self an outlet for what I felt was universally, and yes cosmically, funny about human experience. Blague, in French, means joke. It just so happens to also make a punny sound for this forum. But in order to encounter the cosmic blagues, in life, you have to be living it. And, though I wouldn’t call myself a shut in, spending most of ones day writing is a recipe for isolation. Even my exercise keeps me in a bubble. At 8:40 this a.m. I will walk 7 minutes to Bikram Yoga and have monosyllabic interaction with people I don’t know. Following that, today, I do happen to have a client. But as soon as she has left I will be back here typing away.

I spoke yesterday about affective forecasting which is, in some ways, an energetic Taurus notion, activating the law of attraction in a sense. Expectation is still something that draws things to us, but it isn’t in any way passive. I think it will prove to be an important exercise, if not in the bringing of desired things to me, but in the clearing out of the human mechanism (we all have in us) that either expects or anticipates, longs for or worries about, and does other related type things. It’s a quasi emotional mechanism. It is more accurately, sensual.

I might operate under the notion that I’m a good person. Even when I’ve done bad things it’s either been unintentional or as a result of overemotional retaliation to people who’ve done me wrong—this is an area I’m working on. I’d like to say no-regret, coyote; but the truth is that it will always have been better to walk away and say nothing when others have wronged you (rather than, what I’ve often done, ripped those who done me wrong massive new ones). As a child of Mercury—that Virgo rising with Mercury, in Virgo, on the ascendent—I supposedly have a way with words. Well, that way with words has been known to be used as a weapon of mass destruction. I’m not proud of the fact. But it seems I store all information, good or bad, into the attic known as my brain and, though I am more tolerant than most people, if you super cross me, those toys come flying out of the attic directly at your face. I can always justify (or, let’s be honest, rationalize) doing this; but it would be so much better if I knew I had the ability to reduce people to rubble and then didn’t. In this latter part of my life, this is one of my main goals: To not have to resort to that old retaliatory behavior.

So, akin to the affective forecasting, is the notion of leaving more space between thougths and emotions and emotions and actions. If we are doing the best we can, forgiving those who trespass against us, instead of taking that eye for an eye; and otherwise keeping our side of the street clean, then even if we fail to reach a goal we can shrug it off, can’t we, knowing we’ve done the best we can. But if we think, if only I had tried harder. If only I hadn’t wasted time, worrying, especially. You may have heard me say it before but: If you’re worrying, you’re not working.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 9° (corresponding to April 28, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

I can’t say I slept well. Raising money is hard on the morale. But I decided to try and raise $1K a day for the next 30 days which still won’t cover all I need to collect in time for my performance festival, Afterglow, in September. So that was eating me up a bit. V is for Value. It’s a Taurus word. And I’ve scanned my conscience and my desire to make this festival happen and I keep coming up against the same obstacle which is: I’m not sure if ends will meet. But having said all that I’m going to try what Stella has prescribed which is: Affective Forecasting.

The principle here is to expect the best regardless. Those of us who grew up the children of immigrants, if a few generations removed, not to mention Catholic, will be familiar with the notion of preparing for the worst. Not to have too-high expectations lest they be dashed and we disappointed. The proverbial other shoe dropping, Murphy’s Law et al. All just excuses to drink I imagine, being fundementally Irish. In any case, it’s the wrong way of going about things. There is nothing to be lost from expecting the absolute best in fact. Indeed, energetically speaking, we are happier in the meanwhile, between expectation and result, no matter the result. My mother used to split the difference; she would say: Expect the best but prepare for the worst. She was on to something. But apparently preparing for the best might be better. So, on that note, I’m going to expect to make my budget for this non-profit festival I love because it is a worthwhile thing I’m doing and it deserves people’s attention and support.

www.afterglowfestival.org/sponsorships

www.afterglowfestival.org/donations

And anyway, I will admit it: I am something of a magical thinker. And it has mainly put me in good stead. There have been downsides to it. But for the most part it has allowed me to live a pretty enchanted life. And for that I am grateful. I suppose I’m grateful to myself for not having to work for anybody else since….hmmmm….when was the last time I worked for anybody? I can’t even remember the last job I had where I had to punch a clock. Even when editing magazines, like we did at Wallpaper in London, it was in an exalted position and as an independent contractor of sorts. I had a work visa for a very short amount of time. I love London. It might be my favorite city all told because it has everything New York has and then some. It depends on what you want from a city I suppose. It changes for me year to year But I’m such an empath I can imagine myself everywhere. Except when I totally can’t.

I like the idea of having a number of little places around the world to hop to at will. So far I live quite in keeping with that ideal even though I really don’t own anything at this juncture in my life. I’m taking a break from ownership you might say. It’s nice not to have the responsibility and it will make owning homes and more possessions more fun when it does cycle back around. But I’ve prided myself on never being a materialist, but perhaps that’s been to a fault. People tell me I should pay myself, even, in working on the non-profit festival and producing but a) there hasn’t been enough money to do that; and b) it seems beside the point. I’m afraid that if I were to want a salary from the non-profit it might change how I do things. Also, I’m pretty unabashed in my approach to fundraising and I think I can be that ballsy because all the money goes to the cause and to the artists.

Okay I feel a bit better for having written this one.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 8° (corresponding to April 26, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Sometimes you just have to do everything. That is to say, in a world where we pick and choose our priorities, there are moments in life when doing it all is the most relaxing choice. Yesterday (five minutes ago) we talked about standing back and assessing all the plans and projects in your life as beds in that fixed-earth Taurus garden; and yes that is exactly how it is that we must view not only what’s on our plate but the full scope of all we possess. We will be told what needs doing by meditating on this bed or that. It isn’t linear, you see. We don’t power completely through one project, always, creating perfection and then move onto the next bit of business—yes, there are exceptions if we have a deadline imposed by an outside source, entity or authority but, let’s face it, the expectations of others are far easier to fulfill than our own, especially, if we are perfectionists living in an otherwise second-rate state. But when it comes to our own self-started and -made projects and plans, what’s the rush? Why not prepare the soil, plant the seeds and then sit back and see what takes and what needs redirection, cultivating, editing, etc.

We must let time be on our side in this—it is, after all, one half of the unfolding. It facilitates our ability to bloom without struggle or slightest hesitation. Fear. That is the factor. Fear. Of not having enough. That is the consequence, if we heed the allegory of the garden, of giving into temptation. Temptation to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The tree that makes us second guess—are we good enough. Self-consciousness sets in near the end of the span of human life ruled by the sign of Taurus, 7-14. It is then we are suddenly aware of our nakedness. Adam and Eve in their blissed-out, insouciant Garden are undeniable metaphors for our human existence at that time in our life when we are budding toward sexual maturity, unaware, perhaps ourselves, but typically not unnoticed by certain snakes in the grace that might be egging us on to take a bite out of sexually mature life. In the Greek mythos, Taurus is represented by the nymphs and nubile flower gods who are likewise unawares of the attraction they invite until its thrust upon them. And typically it’s not a pretty ending to the story.

We said that the Taurus chapters are called The Idol (Man) and The Ideal (Woman) both terms being dependent on the attention, attraction and opinion of others. Taurus people will tend to give others what Taurus thinks they want from them. And they tend to be very good at that. Typically, they are imitators, not to take anything away from them on that score. Not that they live the adage that imitation is the highest form of flattery—they scarcely know they are imitating at all. Or if they are, they will convince themselves of the viability of doing so. For, woe it is to the cardinal signs of the Zodiac, the Initiators, who aren’t often widely credited for their accomplishments in pioneering until that precious commodity of Time rediscovers them in hindsight; while the Imitators, typically the fixed-signs of the Zodiac, take the seeds that are sown by cardinal signs and fertilize the fuck out of them, perfecting their efforts down to the last detail, through rigid repetition, though they would have you think they haven’t put in all that much effort at all.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 7° (corresponding to April 26, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

T is for Time. It is a commodity that falls under the rule of that sign’s native second astrological house. We think of that house as consisting of that which we possess. Taurus, fixed-earth (a garden) pointing to our need to tend what we have—”I Have” being the Taurus motto. In the Garden of Eden, pre biting into that Gemini apple of duality, we weren’t aware of this or that, good or evil, clothed or naked, innocent or shame or now or then. We lived in an eternal dreamstate. (When I say we, you know what I mean.) Time, like Innocence, was a precious commodity, apparently, which we didn’t Value until it was lost. I try very hard to slow down Time. Meditation is the surest way to do so—to live inside moments instead of rushing ahead. We want to tick, tick, tick things off our list. Right now, it is not even 4 AM and I am writing this because, I think since I decided yesterday I had to write two Blagues a day through July 4 “to catch up” that I didn’t sleep well in anticipation of the fact that I have other major looming projects. But that’s not how Time works.

In a garden we can’t rush. We can only do what the garden asks of us on any given day. There is a weed that’s cropped up, let us remove it. The soil looks dry, let us water it. It might be depleted, let us feterlize it. This is growing to large, let us prune. This is going to seed, let us cultivate before it does. The garden tells us when it is Time to do what. Now, if we can look at all the stuff—this is a shadow-term for the Taurean materials and attributes we possess, and an apt one, as it blocks the energy of our “unfolding” like the flowers we all are—on our agenda, today, or this week, or this month or year, the projects we are cultivating: It is best to stand back and look at them all as separate beds in our garden; and to only do what is necessary on this day or that to bring them to full fostering.

We don’t rush in the garden. We survey and savor. We Appreciate above all. Ironically, I find that Taurus people are the most challenged when it comes to the appreciation factor. It is their particular plot of metaphorical land to tend. Especially since they naturally possess great talent as a rule, making it all the more ironic. But the Bull can be myopic. They might see, in their minds I, what it is they want to the exclusive, even of what they already possess. In Sextrology we call the Taurus man The Idol and the Taurus woman The Ideal as both share a tendency to be held up in high esteem. But it begs the question: If the Taurus flower isn’t being prized and worshipped for all the beauty it brings, does it nonetheless appreciate itself?

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 6° (corresponding to April 25, 2016)

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Life is hard. Make no mistake. But it is often easier than we make it. When you start to spin: stop, drop and roll with the punches. Do not think ahead. Do not think back. You know the drill about the future and the past. It’s not just woo-woo to stay in the present it’s the absolute answer to everything. It’s what keeps you still, fixed, which is one of the messages of the sign of Taurus whose metaphorical and metaphysical landscape is that of the eternal garden, Eden, which translates to delight, the verb tense of which can be very helpful to employ.

So much of our stress comes from that which isn’t working in our lives. Stop, drop and roll. Don’t try to make things happen, let them. It might not be the them you had in mind but so what. Often, that which we try to make happen involves the attention or participation of others, which, trust me, is never satisfying. It’s a labyrinth all its own, like that of the Minotaur, the embodiment of desire for others. If you love what you do you will do it with or without an audience. The shadow-id side of Taurus is front-loading how you’re seen by others, as opposed to naturally attracting others as a byproduct of cultivating yourself.

We live, in modern times with a sort of amplified soul-sickness, because through the manic manifestation of all media, we are party to everyone seeking, succeeding or failing, to attract attention from others. And it inspires this sort of weird world of comparison and competition. I look up on it as a universal trick being played on us by the mischievous god Mercury, namesake of that tiny planet with whom we’re all familiar due to its retrogrades to which we chalk up all our problems and snafus. Mercury is the god of our mentality, via the sign of Gemini and the third astrological house. And, indeed, he might be running amok in this epoc having his manipulative way with us.

But perhaps it’s all to teach us a lesson. Maybe we need to know how sick our minds and our culture can be in its desperate superficial longing for some semblance of spotlight. Playing tricks, as this trickster god is wont to do, upon our pure Taurean birthright to tend our own gardens of talents and abilities and values and qualities and assets and beauty as it is synonymous with our dignity. Taurus energy is centrifugal, focused inward toward ourselves, most healthfully, from our outer selves of consciousness toward our inner self of private needs, desire to increase intrinsic value, and fulfillment of our latent abilities. But when we extend the outer range of centrifugal force to make the starting point the perception of others, directed toward ourselves, it is a pollution of this Taurus power

So stop. Shut it down. Give others’ thoughts of you no heed and seek not to manipulate them. Yes, market yourself. But only when you feel you’ve something cultivated to put out there. Otherwise keep the focus on yourself. And when you do (Gemini) market whatever content you’ve created as a result of your cultivated talents (Taurus) to sit around waiting for, or judging, the results of your efforts. You have no control over outcomes; and they are never personal. You should scarcely notice, because you will have moved on to another area of your garden needing weeding and screaming for cultivation. That’s all I have to say about that.

Copyright 2016 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Taurus 5° (corresponding to April 24)

Apparently I already wrote a couple of days worth in my word document from whence I cut and then paste here; I remember, now, posting this directly on Facebook, on Mother’s Day, but this was meant to be a Blague as well. 

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click https://cosmic-blague.com/all-things-must/)

Mothers, mothers, mothers. They seem to either be the best in the world or warrant breaking up with them, if you read the gospel truths of Facebook. Mine was a Pisces, which means she was the best and the worst. I grew up in a time when you’d send your 9 year old son to get your packs or cartons of cigarettes, especially if you were borderline agoraphobic, which also meant you had to hide if the doorbell rang at the wrong time even if it was the paperboy just trying to collect some money…again. You might also be alcoholic and pass out at friends’ houses, and when I say friends I mean mine since agoraphobic mothers seem to like to only make friends with the drinky parents of their kid’s friends, even if said actually stopped being friends with them. You might still have to skateboard over and pour your poor mother into her big black Buick and teach yourself how to drive (her) home by simply trying to remember how you’ve seen adults drive in the past—thank goodness for all those 1970s car chases on TV. And then you put her to bed. That was even more terrifying than the driving. Then again you might appreciate the fact that she was sensitive, smart, highly tuned, psychic, spiritual, deeply empathetic and powerful and fancied herself a silver screen starlet, morphing before your eyes in Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Polly Bergen and Gena Rowlands in the course of a single sentence. Or that when asked “whom do you love most in the world?” she would reply “me” unironically. Or that she mainly watched PBS, but for Donahue and 60 Minutes or the occasional mini-series of the Thornbirds derivative. Or that, when I first went to France at nineteen, her bon voyage present to me was a hardcopy of James Joyce’s Ullysses which she inscribed, “From One Irishman to Another In France”. That she knew things. That her PIsces eyes pointed inward toward a soul and even when she was staring right at you, you got the feeling she was staring right at her. The true her. The one that didn’t smoke or drink or even go to AA meetings for twenty-five years or pretend to care about the banalties of life beyond her books and the ubiquitous Snickers bars on which she chewed, on one side of her mouth, the same side from whence she spoke, as Pisces often do, or laughed that huh-huh-huh laugh as if she were simultaneouly still exhaling one of her Salem 100s. The one that loved her familiar—her twenty-five lb. Persian Blue mix, Kerry, who followed her everywhere and mimicked her every move as it lay with her in bed, in the air-conditioning, summers, as she polished off yet another Maeve Binchy, her teeth Snicker sticking together. I would suspect that after herself and Kerry, I might have been a close third. (With father and barkeep: Peggy Leone née Margaret Anna Mary McDonough.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.