I yelled. I cursed. I think I probably stomped my feet. I was already in a bad mood; I’d spent the morning moping about some problems I’d had with checks that hadn’t arrived, or which had arrived and promptly been lost, and spending twice as long as I’d planned at the hair salon because I’d forgotten it was a “color” day. Now I was behind in my work, feeling broke, and would have to spend time I didn’t have on cleaning up syrup. Tallying my grievances against an uncaring universe, I stamped my feet some more, sending the cats running for cover.
Then, I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon scrubbing maple syrup from tile and wood floors and hosing it from the sidewalk. But this morning I hit a few residual sticky patches in the living room, and while I was still grumbling about my newly adhesive shoes, a website problem came up – just minutes before an out-of-town friend was scheduled to arrive for a visit. I was ready to sit down on the floor and have a good cry.
I’m not a sun sign Scorpio, though on the days when my Moon/Pluto square acts up you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Such emotional drama; so much throwing of crockery and swearing! I’m pretty intense to live with.
Fortunately, I married a guy with the Moon in Taurus. Taurus’ super power is the ability to deflect tension and drama. My Taurus mother was particularly adroit at countering my tantrums and emotional firestorms with patience and humor. She liked my husband the moment she met him, perhaps sensing that here was someone to whom she could pass the torch, who could talk me down from the occasional emotional ledge without being intimidated by my … shall we say, passionate nature.
And bless him, he’s very good at it. Without getting excited, he offered to help me with the website problem. He cracked open his laptop, but before he’d gotten very far, an easy fix had already occurred to me. Something about his stabilizing presence always calms me down enough to think clearly, so that the obvious solution has a chance to present itself.
If Taurus could be distilled and bottled, the manufacturers of Xanax would soon be out of business. Before you get the wrong idea — because Taurus is forever being compared to things like rocks, and they don’t always take it as a compliment — I mean this as a tribute to the Bull’s calm and steadying influence. When Taurus walks in to a room, the level of melodrama plummets. Situations that previously seemed impossible to resolve suddenly seem completely under control.
Taurus brings with it a degree of confidence and practicality that simplifies what’s overwhelming and demystifies all that is vaguely terrifying. Taurus would have laughed about the trail of maple syrup, settled the visiting friend with a cup of tea and a friendly cat, and calmly diagnosed the website problem. There would have been no flapping of arms, no dramatic cries of victimization. Things would simply have gotten done, with no fuss.
This has been a really intense Sun in Scorpio season. It kicked off early, on October 5, 2012, when Mercury and Saturn moved into Scorpio. When the Sun entered Scorpio on October 22, it immediately set on a collision course with Saturn, making even the smallest tasks feel absurdly difficult. We sometimes forget that Scorpio’s traditional planetary ruler is Mars; it’s a fighting sign, and for several weeks, nearly everything has felt like a dramatic struggle. But as we move toward the Full Moon in Taurus, with Taurus’ Venus ruler in even-handed Libra, maybe the tide is slowly beginning to turn in the direction of calm and sanity.
It has for me, anyway. In the end, I decided that the reason I was feeling so overwhelmed and victimized by trivial things was simple: I haven’t been sleeping well, and I was just plain tired. So I set aside my writing for a little while and took a nice, long nap. When I woke up, I got out a cleaning rag for one last go at some maple syrup residue I’d found on the living room floor. I checked my email and found that the checks are, as they say, “in the mail”. I calmly cored the last of the tomatoes from our garden for tonight’s marina sauce. With these small, homely tasks, performed methodically and serenely, I cultivated my own inner Taurus – and regained my balance.
© April Elliott Kent. All rights reserved
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