This New moon in Taurus Wants You To Live Your Questions
What do you want your life to taste like?
“I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet”
New Moon in Taurus will be occurring at 9PM (BST) Sat 16th May
There’s a part of you that knows what it wants. It knew the moment it could grasp things with its small hands and taste its favourite food. There is an area in your life where your taste is refined and dripping with sensuous groove. These desires have been living in your throat, waiting for you to greet them and ask them questions. How do you like your toast in the morning, and are you a coffee or a tea person? Taurus’s insistence on the physical senses is not minuscule or infantile; it’s where the rest of your life begins. If you can name your food preferences and not be swayed by others, then you can sit anchored in your taste for how you want the larger infrastructure of your life to feel. We are living at a time where many people are returning to earth-based practices and embracing animism, which is wonderful, but I fear we are getting lost in another binary. It’s either I am grounded into the earth and into the body and the mind is of no importance. Or I try to figure everything through mind alone. Let’s start with the former.
the body is both a complicated and simple organism. It digests what it is fed. But it also has its own needs and preferences, and we need critical thinking to interrogate if our desires are a mimicry of what we were fed that wasn’t our choosing or if it’s rooted in an ancient yearning that the body was born into this world tightly holding. Critical thinking utilises the mind, but it’s reflexive in nature. It requires curiosity, a flexible ego and intuition to question your own thinking. That is a mind making discoveries and not in a state of trying to control outcomes beyond its remit. But what is critical thinking without feedback from the sensorium field of the many layers of the body?
What I love about astrology as a cosmological framework is the dialectical component of how zodiacal archetypes do not just succeed one another linearly and take over from their preceding sign. Yes, Gemini gives language to the desires that Taurus was yet to name as Taurus governs the throat and neck, so many of our desires and needs live in this grey zone between the unconscious and conscious. Between the lump in our throat that tightens like a noose around our necks, and the accidental word vomit (Gemini) when we realise that our own desires have betrayed us. They grew legs when we were too busy denying them, and ran out of the baby crib walking backwards with a bunch of cattle. You ask them how they got out, and they respond, “ How can I walk when I was born yesterday?” Does this story sound familiar? This is Hermes in the greek pantheon as a newborn growing legs, leading Apollo’s cattle away from him by walking backwards.
This is the archetype of Mercury, Gemini’s ruler, the wordsmith and trickster. Gemini uses words to breathe life into the desires that Taurus was too stubborn to admit. The bull is sometimes too grounded, lacking the fuck it energy that Gemini revels in. Yet, they need each other. Yes, we need to name our desire, give it language and form, but we also need to live them. Taurus wants material proof, through the body, that our lives mean something. This is where the linear succession of signs to the next sign doesn’t work. When we get to Gemini, it’s all words and no action. It’s all curious exploration but no grounding into what can materialise into form and can hold us in moments of uncertainty. I am not strictly talking about material possession; I am talking about values. When you skim the fat of ideals and schmoozy philosophical ideas, what three things do you value? I will be generous and let you have four. Values are simple, yet they hold the antidote to most of our confusions, dilemmas and mental gymnastics. It’s a place that the body naturally arrives at when all the mental noise is turned down. The conversations between the neighbouring zodiacs are a dance; it’s a being-with; we all bring something tasty to the dinner party to make a delicious meal. Every ingredient is vital for the final dish. Yes, I am indeed hungry as I write this, not just for food, but for a world where our desires don’t feel so taboo. Where we are allowed to build lives that prioritise the natural rhythms of our bodies. Where it’s not a luxury to take a midday nap or a 5-day menstrual leave. Where we don’t have to be hit with a chronic mental or physical illness before we take our bodies seriously. To live inside your body and move according to its ever-changing rhythm, you need to ask it intelligent, probing and interesting questions. Don’t search for the answer. Trust your body, which is an extension of nature, to live into the answer.
Your life right now is probably an answer to a question you posed many moons ago. I know mine is. I grew up in a cult-like religious/cultural community, and many of my immediate friends were from that community. I had never entered a high street clothing store without supervision in my life until I was 16. I was with a friend from the same community, on our way home from sixth form, we snuck into a H&M for the first time with the license to window shop at whatever clothing section we wanted to. I proceeded to hit my poor friend with — who, like me, was covered head to toe, with no agency over our bodies— “Do you think we will ever get to wear mini skirts like this?” pointing innocently at the lifeless mannequin. I still remember how pale and sickly her face went. I asked a question that either of us could return from. Life could not be the same after that moment. My question escaped from a 16-year prison cell to tell me that my body was not free. That we have to ask the questions now so that one day we can live the answers. I am indeed, 14 years later, living the answers to the brave question 16-year-old me asked. I don’t particularly like miniskirts as we speak, but it took five years after that question to try it on.
When people think about mercurial energy, they think of the wordsmith and the bright, mischievous twinkle in the eyes of a comic or someone who plays with words for a living. But mercury is also a psychopomp. It’s the only archetypal god in numerous ancient myths from around the world that can translate the language of the dead to the living. Mercury walks alongside the parts of us we haven’t even met yet because we have presumed they are dead. And in a way, they are because they were exiled before they could talk. This is the lump in the throat that Taurus feels. The desires that show up as aches and symptoms in the body, as they kick and scream for attention, but their disruption feels rude and personal. Why now, when I have built a life of comfort and stability around pseudo-desires that work “just fine”? Yes, I have mysterious aches, and I feel the occasional envy towards people who appear free in their bodies, but isn’t that just life? Gemini steps in and says you’re asking the wrong questions. Ask: Is this the life I came here to live? Is this the life I ache for every minute of the day to the point of harrowing sorrow for when it’s about to end? Does my life taste delicious, and can I live inside of it completely as myself?
The answers, as Raine says, are not important. It’s the doors these questions open up inside of you that induce metanoia: a transformational change of heart and mind. Mercury oversees alchemy and magic. Questions cast spells over our lives in ways that answers never can. Because once you incarcerate yourself with an answer, you eliminate the abundance of possibilities and fertile space for new life to grow from. The opening Raine excerpt quietly expresses the dialectical interchange between Taurus and Gemini, because this new moon is ruled by Venus in Gemini, which is ruled by Mercury in Taurus. This is a circular configuration, not a straight line. To be fair, nothing about life or astrology has ever been a straight line. This new moon is very queer. Venus is asking loads of questions, and Mercury in Taurus is passing the memo over to the body (moon) so that new seeds of possibility and hope can be planted.
This new moon takes place less than half an hour after an exact conjunction between Mars and Chiron in the final degrees of Aries. Many of us are exhausted and want to raise the white flag. Many of us have been running on fumes, and capitalism loves this. It loves the cortisol and blood sugar spikes and how your hormones and sleep get all fucked up from stress. Then, like a rat, racial capitalism sneaks in and exploits your insecurity and body shames you for cortisol-induced weight gain and tells you through some white skinny influencer on the internet that you “should regulate your nervous system”. It’s a vicious cycle. Never in that rhetoric is your body’s natural intelligence, rhythm and shape honoured. Not to digress, but Taurus is all about the body and within racial capitalism, the propaganda we are fed is that white skinny bodies is what a healthy body looks like. This is less about weight but about the psychological injury that cements internally that stems from these systemic ideologies. Forgetting this can keep you at war with your body. The reality is our bodies are not meant to look the same, not just in comparison to others, but in the course of our lives. seasons change, so do our bodies. We need to ask ourselves, when does my body feel healthy and energised and incorporate routines that affirm this. Sometimes this means doing nothing and indulging in your favourite snacks. And sometimes it’s going on a lovely hike. We are all weary and suspicious about our own bodies. They are so unruly when they refuse to conform to being workhorses or fit in smaller frames. Mars is like a child and will continue touching fire until it burns itself. Don’t wait until you injure yourself to pay attention to your body. A better use of Martian energy in this new moon is to cut your losses. Use your sharpest knife ( Mars rules knives and sharp objects) and cut that bitch in half. Get angry if you need to and scream into your pillow. Then cry angry tears until you get hungry and bored. Then go say hi to a daisy or a poppy in the back street of your neighbourhood, or snack on some juicy mango chunks like I am.
This is a mercurial new moon as much as it is Venusian. In the midst of your busy life, shock yourself with sneaky questions and see the utter deviance that is born. Either way, it’s you vs you. So befriend yourself, live your questions and plant seeds for a juicy life.