ONLY CONNECT: Days of Grain
New Moon in Taurus
Welcome to ONLY CONNECT, a monthly series of micro-essays on new moon energies and related thoughts by friend of the letter, Moselle.
Today: M’s notes on our new moon in Taurus, exact Sunday, April 27th at 3:30pm EDT. The Sabian symbol for this degree (7°) is a sleigh without snow. Those with personal planets in the fixed signs (Taurus, Aries, Leo, Scorpio) - especially at/near 7° - might want to pay particular attention…
xo HG
Exiting two months of eclipse season, the Taurus new moon waves hello this weekend, on Sunday April 27th, like an unexpected piece of sheepskin padding — padding for when you may not have expected to land. Taurus is a sign of physicalization, what happens when knowledge collected in a drum of steam can finally set or merge with matter, earthen feedback. Out of planning and perceiving, into real-life’s ruddy humus.
The ground, the base of great nature, awakes rich in mineral information. Stocks to trade, crops to watch, geographies to transit. Relations both corrosive and fecund. How is this information channeled: through those beanstalks swinging up and round your ankles — material variables and values. The vines of family, loved ones, social codes, anchor you in flight as you maintain, interior-wise, a vertical axis between poles below and above. The beanstalks have a kind of stochastic logic, an order, amid the chaos, of: I am confident that someone or something holds me as I climb.
Or rather, ride. One tames the Taurean bull by saddling at a stable, centered position, more noble and steadfast a seat than reaching diagonally for its horns. The bull is Aries instinct in slowed, stately motion. Hearing a sound, he rears his head in one direction; at a different sound, inclined to lumber off elsewhere. Who runs, things, then? Not the bull, but us. His really is a lumbering, just as our reins of desire may touch down from ether with a ‘thud’.
For instance: a new pope, perhaps the last pope, will be chosen soon, a subject not far, in its symbolism, from many minds. As alarms are raised, smoke signals sent up, bells tolled, the heavy simplicity of Taurus serves as a kind of weighted relief. This New Moon, as well as a Taurus Sun, is in a T-Square with Mars in Leo, and Pluto in Aquarius, which are also opposing each other. With such an alignment, like a pulley system of thick rope, all that matters, at present, is what you do by daylight, however much in consternation, sunshine passing over waves of grief. The bull’s ride corresponds to diurnal pacing, to an awareness of, and eagerness to meet, the discomfiture of the world outside.
So easy would it be — so easy has it been — to give up on the world out there, to assent to non-intervention, in trying to forge, within ourselves, a new one. Yet this strategy is now a felled ambition, it has become un-seasonal, not apt, for it is the external that can and will begin to hold much more creation, more peace, more joy. To effort there is to indicate a taste for plenty: for ripened willpower. Taurus evokes our base-level foundations, as far as morals, judgements and how we treat each other. The grazing bull is tall among grass animals like a chummy Hierophant, wise to what’s what and yet inclined to get stuck. In its seventh-degree station, of shy summer feelings early to our doors, it makes me think of fruit juices, shining Ceres, golden grain, but also: a corruption of such bounty by avarice and attachments, Glastonbury rain-boots and people still slinging mud.
The new moon, as always, offers a reset, at a very corporeal level: having to choose one’s own facepalm, to be in mud, making mud-pies, so as to shimmy up and out of it, embracing beanstalk ties, help from nature and friends.
New Moon Ritual
With attention to breath, root into your tailbone, setting up a grounding cord between soil and spine. Roots form at the base of your feet, traveling deep into the ground as a tree’s would, activating an under-earth, inner-earth organic network. Connect into what is called the ‘Intelligence of Nature,’ an energy that can quickly be invited to permeate the body, to be drawn up through the legs, into chest, heartspace, flowing towards the head. On reaching the head, this organic intelligence washes away anxieties, residual impressions of emotion, opening up consciousness as one would petals on a flower. Pausing as it clears that field, a new energy is now invited in, a ‘Spiritual Intelligence’ streaming in from skies above, like a white sunbeam now swiftly rushing down, traversing thought then throat, arms and shoulders to land at the heart, lingering there before crossing belly, hips and legs, leaving through the feet, pouring into earth from which Nature had risen. Now a merger can transpire between those energies and sensations, a union of ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ along a vertical axis, orienting from open heart. Allow the currents of that axis to echo out from your heart and into broader surroundings as a kind of columnar field, a column of radiance for daily inhabitation, to carry with you as you work.
(Adapted from ‘Vertical Axis’ exercise, Atherton Drenth, The Intuitive Dance: Building, Protecting, and Clearing Your Energy)
