Venus Retrograde
manzanita & lichen after a rain
What’s included in this post:
Full Moon Eclipse Gathering: New offering with sliding-scale options
Pisces in Myth: Aphrodite, Eros and the Typhon
Venus Retrograde: Honoring the Dark
Venus Rx with Neptune: Dropping in & Letting Go
One last note before you go
Full Moon Eclipse Gathering
As we all move through this multi-layered flux of cosmic crossroads (Eclipse season + Mars Rx into Venus Rx into Mercury Rx + the epochal shift of Neptune into Aries), I’m thinking about my time with younger kids and how, even when they’ve gotten into a jumbled or tornado state of energy, storytelling has such a magical effect of drawing in, quieting and settling. As an adult, I too definitely feel this effect within myself and within groups where embodied storytelling is the intention — where Story is honored and fed as an intelligent field that we’re always moving within and being moved by. So I want to continue sharing stories here that will hopefully help weave the worried mind into this larger, rooted wholeness.
And then as an expansion of this, on Thursday the 13th from 5-7 pm Pacific, I will be holding a space for us to be together in the unknown. It’ll be an opportunity to share where this astrological moment and its mythic threads have been taking us in our lives and imaginations. Through group contemplation, our personal stories can have a chance to dimensionalize, breathe, wiggle out of old skins, inter-weave and reciprocate nourishment with the archetypal field.
In this newsletter, I’ll offer the myth of Aphrodite, Eros and the Typhon as a place to begin contemplation and to offer some mythic reflection of what’s unfolding for us and becoming available for re-dreaming this season. Also, before the gathering on the 13th, I’ll send a Full Moon newsletter with one or two other stories connected to the Virgo-Pisces axis for more Eclipse context.
I do invite you to engage with these stories on your own first through the self-inquiry prompts offered, as this will open up more ways for the story-creatures and allies to be in conversation with and through *you*.
This is a new offering that I’m now only putting out to my email list, so it’ll likely be quite a small group by intention — which should be nice!
The recommended price is $12, but also there is a pay-what-you-can option that’s welcome for you to use. I’m excited to have accessible options for people to connect with each other and with me, as well as to get to know this work and space.
General Research Division, The New York Public Library. "Les poissons." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1795.
Pisces in Myth
With the constellation of Pisces we find the story of the Aphrodite, Eros and the Typhon.
The Typhon was a serpentine storm-giant who brought devastation upon the world by conjuring storm upon storm up from the underworld. With the “she-viper” Echidna, Typhon eventually fathered many of the monsters known in Greek myth, including Cerberus the three-headed hound of hell, the multi-headed Lernean Hydra, the Chimera.
The Typhon emerged at the end of a world order. When the Olympians (Zeus, Apollo, Hera…) were making a move to replace the Titans (Rhea, Cronos, Gaia…), Gaia and Tartarus created Typhon to hunt down the Olympian gods, so the older gods could hang onto their power and ways of ordering the world and time.
As the Olympians panicked and fled, many of them shape-shifted and escaped in the form of wild beasts. Pan let out a cry and leapt into the river, his lower half turning into a fish, the rest a goat, giving us the extra-ordinary Capricorn goat-fish.
Amidst the pandemonium, Typhon came after the gods of Love and Desire — Aphrodite and her child Eros. According to one version of the story, the gods hid, concealing themselves amongst the poplars, willows and reeds by the bank of the Euphrates until two large river fish (who may be the same or connected to the ichthyocentaurs that assisted in Aphrodites birth from the sea) appeared and rescued them, carrying them to safety.
In another version of the story, Aphrodite and Eros transformed into fish and escaped by diving into the water and tying a cord between them to prevent separation. The gods placed them in the sky as the constellation of Pisces, with the brightest star in the middle representing the knot binding the mother and the son together.
Reflection questions:
Where does your attention or curiosity naturally go in the story?
Where and how does your own inner storyteller fill in the blanks or add more details?
Where does this story take you in your own life or in the present moment in the world? How does this story feel related or relevant now?
What characters do you have a response to? What characters are you curious about? What happens when you hang out with them? What arises from making-art or journaling with these characters or this story in mind?
What themes do you notice?
Can you imagine a version of this story-scape where you can relate to the whole dream ecology from your center? Or from your curiosity? Or from your compassion?
The word “monster” comes from the Latin word monstrum “divine omen, wonder” which, in turn, derives from the verb moneo, meaning "to warn, remind, instruct, advise or foretell". Consider that the word “demonstrate” also shares the root of monstrum. Where does this consideration take you in your contemplations of Pisces?
Learn about how octopus camouflage. What sensations, images, thoughts, memories, dreams come up in contemplation with this aspect of cephalopod biology? Other animals to learn about, with a similar prompt are: dolphins, whales, eagle rays, sting rays, manta rays
What might all this teach you about the Pisces place and planets in your birth chart?
Venus Retrograde
Venus stationed retrograde on March 1st at 4:35 pm. From our earthbound perspective, she seems to have turned, reversing her normal movement across the sky, heading from Aries back into Pisces.
With this turn, it feels to me like gravity became heavier, but in a way that brings a richness of color. The sensation of extra weight draws my awareness down from the mind’s flight and proclivity to fancy, to the bottom of the throat and the bottom of the heart. And then from this place, there’s a shorter distance to inhabiting the pelvis and the bottom of the feet.
An earthbound descent to root, seed, soil, humus, humility.
An urge to lay down flat on the Earth and actually sink into her body, bowing to the mysteries of the Dark Goddess.
“From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.”1
At another time in our lives, maybe pre-Mars Retrograde in Cancer (December 6th - February 23), we may have had the energy to approach the dark and the underworld journey as a kind of search-and-rescue mission for lost parts of ourselves or lost parts of our culture. As a mission to reclaim something that felt precious to us that we couldn’t quite articulate, that felt kept hidden behind closed doors, separate from us, held captive by some intolerably un-reachable other.
We may have taken our headlamps, pick axes and assortment of mining tools to get at the truth of the matter, to the heart of the situation, to the gold. This may have played out externally through a relationship with a person, place, vision, dream job, etc. And it may have unfolded internally through Doing The Work, digging into the depths of our psyche, excavating and examining and dismantling old patterns.
This way of going-straight-down-and-in has value and has its place — although, by using “gold-mining” language and metaphor here, I know that I’m presenting it with an internal recoil. As Venus begins her descent, I feel my nocturnal creatures recoiling to the different ways that we approach the dark with our Daytime injunctions and agendas, with the solar intention of making the dark light, getting the mess in order, making the mortal immortal. As patterns examining patterns. Rather than surrendering to be inside, honoring and living fully within the mystery of Love on Her terms.
“Come, Inanna, enter.”
When she entered the first gate,
From her head, the shugurra, the crown of the steppe, was removed.
Inanna asked:
“What is this?”
She was told:
“Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect.
They may not be questioned.” 1
As a person who lives on land that reverberates with the echoes of water cannons blasting gold from the mountains, the use of mercury to bind gold into amalgams, the crushing of ore by stamp mills and the shaft-mining that happened during the California Gold Rush Era, I do feel a heightened somatic sensitivity to being approached by another (and to approaching myself) with that gold-mining posture of ~getting in there~, of symbolically and literally rushing to the gold. Rushing to the repair, to the understanding, the revelation, the answer, the insight, the integration.
There’s a huge pressure on us that’s built into modern society to skip over the step of actually being inside the dark, inside the uncertainty, inside the unknown, inside the blankness, the nothing-happening, the no-promises-of-how-this-will-all-turn-out, but taking the next small step aligned with your heart of hearts anyways.
What if we shifted our perspective from rescuing or reclaiming something lost in the underworld … to the perspective of Hades actually rescuing us?2 What if the dark saves us from encapsulated identities, hierarchies and humanity-as-separation? From 24-hour light and Day brain-ing?
Sleep is a time and place where all heroes can fall, as leaves on the ground, returning to Mother Earth and Mother Night.
Yet more than ever we struggle with sleep and with deep rest. I hear a crying out for the season of blessed rest and renewal. And yet, we’re living in these times of overwhelm. If sleep is elusive, that makes sense.
So what do we do? And how is rest possible?
How does Venus in Aries, in a place of battle and impossible endeavors, do her job of bringing us rest and restoration in the Self?
I don’t really know …
I mean, yes — I’d say that Venus Rx in Aries during Pisces Season asks us to tend and nourish the nervous system as we embrace uncertainty, to keep pendulating around the edge of our comfort zone, from action to rest, inhale to exhale ….
But also, I know that’s a vague answer. It’ll be different for everyone. I don’t know how exactly this process of restoring our natural rhythms of breath means or what it looks like for each of us in our lives, moment-to-moment.
Generally, I believe it involves solitude as well as gathering together in art-making, music-making, dancing, singing, weaving, praying, role-playing, playing, cooking meals, star-gazing.
In these spaces of genuine play, the state of not-knowing can be experienced as benevolent. It can help us un-crinkle a furrowed brow and rest our vision, allowing the the outer world to blur and come out of resolution, out of the confines of our clearly defined boundaries, certainties and plans — which then also allows something inside of ourselves to come undone, rest, be restored and restory-ed by our deeper natures.
The places in us that apprentice to the Night know this well. Ereshkigal, Madea, Hecate, Nemesis … these witches know their worth. They are unworried (though they may send Worry after us.) They know they offer sacred guardianship to the human heart through concealing Love’s wider patterns from the penetrating gaze of solar and sky gods, attending to the rhythmic arts of concealment and revelation, unraveling and re-weaving, chaos and cosmos, in-breath and out-breath, life and death as the heart-beat and equalizing force of Love.
~ * ~
… Sigh …
Inhale.
Yet again, what do we do?! Life continues. Crises continue. Decisions must be made. Actions taken.
And just to throw some extra spice to an already hot mess(!), as Venus retrogrades (March 1st - April 12th) she’s more likely to be moving our eyes, smiles, invitations, inclinations, sexual responsivities and Venusian-related (e.g. financial, aesthetic, romantic, relational) decisions at the level of the preverbal, the autonomic nervous system, the older patterning and memories held in our cellular waters, beneath conscious awareness and outside the purview of Zeus’ moral codes or laws given from the top of Mt. Olympus.
We’re heading down into Ereshkigal’s world, subject to rhymes and reasons of Love and of Justice that can be truly agonizing in their incomprehensibility (“Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”)
Can we turn away from what Venus is now attracting our attention back to?
Can we turn off what she’s now arousing us to?
Do we know if we want to?
What do we really want in our heart of hearts?
It might not be totally clear here in this underworld place. There may be self-doubt and a forgetting of ourselves here.
But, something we can do, which is powerful enough to prioritize (especially with Mercury now in Aries), is to be exquisitely honest with ourselves in the moment about what’s happening for us — but without personally identifying with and attaching to it. By holding the both/and of it. Our personal experience constellates inside of a relational field, a bigger Story, Dream that lives beyond the edges of our personal vision and vantage.
When we name what’s happening for us with radical honesty and detachment, i.e. with some wiggle room and curiosity around it, it can be a sacrifice/sacred-making to the relational dream-weaving.
When we speak truthfully to ourselves about what something feels like for us, we honor our gut instincts — we allow our instinctual intelligence to return to the table when maybe we’ve learned to put it away in order to preserve our relationships in childhood.
When we speak truthfully to ourselves, we put something down and make space.
We let something die, un-weave and return to the Night, to the rest and regenerative powers of the Dark Goddess.
Night with her train of stars, Birmingham Museum.
Dropping In & Letting Go
Venus can draw towards ourselves the pieces that constellate our heart’s Dream. Venus is the magnetism of feel the glory of being ourselves in body, in creation.
With three passes to Neptune, this Venus Retrograde can draw us to the places where we’ve fallen into the habit of waiting for something outside of ourselves — a person, a dream job, a salary figure, a contract, place etc. — to give us the permission and the felt-sense of safety to really explore the pleasure of being ourselves.
We may feel uncomfortable and unsafe in places that are actually safe to experiment and find out what we enjoy. And, likewise, we may feel comfortable and at ease in places that are actually unsafe to be ourselves. The Venus-Neptune contacts that are happening in Pisces and Aries this month, can foreground this kind of cross-wiring and ask us to drop in, quiet the mental chatter and really tune into what’s here, sharpening our discernment in these places in our lives.
To support such discernment, before going further with reading this, notice where your subtle energy is. Invite a gentle concentrating of that energy within your physical body, whatever that means to you in this moment. Continue scanning and noticing throughout the day what it feels like for you to inhabit your body, refining a sensitivity that alerts you to where you’re at. Notice how your ability to inhabit your body changes, as different parts of you come forward to express and as you navigate different outer spaces. Play with shifting your attention and practicing energetic hygiene to help clear the way for you to keep dropping in. This is especially important now because Aries really is about dropping in and taking your place in the world. Although the Aries place involves epic journeys and seemingly completely and utterly impossible tasks in the world, the conversation between you and the quest you’re on begins in the here-and-now.
In addition to Neptune, Venus is making three contacts to Saturn on her retrograde journey. We’ll be reminded that we don’t always have to take an outer action in response to every confrontation or challenge. Not-doing-something is a valid response to situations that get impossibly sticky with layers upon layers of stick, when we keep throwing ourselves onto the mat with it. But, beware — by intentionally taking the route of not-doing-something, there may be a kind of “all is lost” moment, initiating us into the mysteries of the Dark Goddess, a true grieving and being-with Ereshkigal, a return to our mortality and humanity.
But again, it is when we can speak truthfully with ourselves in this place of uncertainty and not-knowing, that our authentic voice may be re-born from the dark.
“the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own”
- The Journey, by Mary Oliver
One last note before you go
Well, my posts have been long and apparently chapter-ed these days. The south node is in Virgo and I'm experimenting with releasing the urge to pare down the number of words here and letting it all be, knowing that you’re all wise and can do your version of “taking what works and leave the rest” as they say.
Anyways, so that’s happening … and the last thing that I wanted to write here is this:
Your impact on the world is made up by the small moments, where you show up and authentically share yourself, with no big audience, with no big loud feedback for the significance of this moment — and yet, you’re here being you, without a thought about it. This can ripple out into the web in faster and wilder ways than you may ever know.
In other words, the ways in which your presence and Love embodied can create significant change in the world … may actually stay in the dark, in the unknown to you.
You may never know how important that one small moment of humbly sharing your song was, to many people.
So my last note here is you do you — not for the glory of accomplishment, accolades, social acceptance, finally fitting in and finding the external proof that you are indeed beautiful and lovable — but for the glory and pleasure of being yourself and being able to feel those moments more and more fully when they come.
with Love,
Nicole
1, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, by Diana Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer
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