fixed – Chelsey K. Shannon

“I hate myself right now!” Not words anyone relishes saying, but words I imagine everyone has felt at some point. Even if, when you’re saying them, you feel uniquely tragic, impossible to reach.

I said this about myself in the car earlier this week, in a fit of pique and insecurity and dread. August and I were setting out for a mutually long day. Later on, I was going to speak publicly about a self-published project of mine, a zine in which I write on, among other things, loss, power, violence, place, time, and identity, including those aspects of my own that lend me shame, confusion, contradiction. To write this was one thing. To stand by these words and attempt to sum them up in front of people was another. In past attempts to distribute the zine, I’d felt the same angst fermenting to self-directed antipathy. Any confidence was being swallowed by ambivalence—about myself, my project, my belonging, the latter being one of the hearts of the zine itself. Still, why couldn’t I just be excited? Why couldn’t I be happy to have this zine, little book, really, in my hands? Why couldn’t I let my enthusiasm spark likewise in others? Why do I have to overthink and -feel everything?

“Why is it whenever I try to do something with this project, I have some kind of episode!” I yell-cry-cry-cried to August, whose gentle touch on my shoulder prompted my raw admission which, in turn, broke my surliness into tears (“the water’s runnin’ free…”). I was craving some resource, some strength—from within or without myself, it wasn’t clear.

“Maybe today you can just embrace the ambivalence, and let the rest of it go,” she said.

Letting go seemed impossible, yet what I hated was how impossible I was feeling. Poisonous pen posed, dying of need inside. But still, there was a bigger transformation I was resisting: to let die my armed “dreams” of perfection, my dueling fears of and cravings for soul-exposure like illuminated scorpions skittering to the dark. I met my first ever in scorpion Arizona this summer on a trip with my friends, in the bathroom of our VRBO. It was smaller than I expected. Plucky, but softer looking, more crushable. I let it drink my shower water off the tiles in the dark.

Scorpio has a reputation of ferocity, and that is not misplaced. But scorpions love the darkness because it protects them, and water because it’s what sustains.

Were my ill-timed tears also about survival? Could relinquishing truly be the way?

This season, because of where and how Scorpio resides in my natal chart, I’d expected a creative harvest. I expected strides on my memoir project, shattering emotional insights. I expected renewed fortitude to drill down into the old story of my mother, Amy, my primordial Scorpio, a major subject of my memoir and emblem of my wounds.

These are now the final hours of this year’s Scorpio season. Turned out, I didn’t want to do that. What I wanted was to rest. What I wanted was a dark, warm, quiet room. What I wanted was to bathe. I stewarded necessarily, unclogged my shower drain of shedded hair and honeycomb wax. We had the kitchen sink looked at by twin brother plumbers born under the sign of Scorpio, and one of them tattoo-proud of that.

Then there’s the newer stewardship of getting myself to the gym—an Amyan activity, to be sure. I shadow her ghost while lying there on the bench of the reverse leg curl machine, feeling slightly sickened by those last four reps, but then: the triumph of fatigue. When I stand, I feel sturdier than I’ve felt in years.

The movements I choose are measures of self-healing. My knee that’s ached with every step of the last decade is slowly gaining the support it needs, and my right foot slowly relaxes, re-levels itself in turn. My slackened hamstrings remember their edges. Then there’s stretching later, when the fatigue of the workout gets reconfigured as a delicious pleasure.

At the panel I attend before the one I’m on, Marian Moore reads her poem about her mother, “My Mother in the Mirror”:

There you are
again,
reflected before me
in the gym mirrors.

And I have just enough
Zen and physics,
Biology and Shinto,
To not
greet your image
with amazement.

What is time anyway?

My answer: time is a probe, an oracle. It is a morass of feeling, recollection, and instinct. It is grief. Anger like caves. “Slippery beginnings.” Transformation, the nymph shuttering off its first skin. Sullen hurt, grizzled rue. Desires, raucous. Boundaries, staunch. Sacrifices, willing and otherwise. Revenge fever dreams. The sublime mystery of the turn. Thirst like there’s nothing but this night is what you’ll find contained below. And, in some cellar of you.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite videos was Ferdinand the Bull. Growing up in pastoral Spain alongside feistier bullocks, who dream of one day facing matadors in the ring, Ferdinand just wants to chill and smell the flowers.

“Sit…in the quiet…and smell the flowers.”

This, despite growing to be the biggest, strongest bull of his cohort. When the time comes for the bullfighters to come looking for the fiercest match, Ferdinand is happy to keep to his solitary, flower-flocked tree instead of showing off. But then, a twist: just as he settles in for a good smelling session, a bee stings Ferdinand’s behind, sparking a tantrum of pain the scouts mistake for ferocity.

So, Ferdinand is hauled off to Madrid. Unpersuaded, he declines to enter the ring—until a fan in the stands tosses the impatient matador a bouquet. That gets the bull’s attention, though still not in the way the matador wants. For, just like on his home hillside, Ferdinand buries his snout in the flowers, paying the bullfighter’s incitations no mind. Denied his due battle, the once-martial matador is reduced to tears of desperation. But exposing his chest in beseechment—along with it a flower tattoo for a sweetheart named Daisy—earns him only a big, juicy (and literal) cow lick from his would-be foe.

To me it seems no coincidence that we have a bull here repping the value of slowness, peace and quiet, shameless indulgence in nature’s beauty—and equally shameless indulgence in one’s own prerogative. A charming if thirties-weird study of pacifistic stubbornness, Ferdinand gets his way not just through refusal, but through staunch commitment to his own pleasure. When the short closes, he’s right back on his hillside and, the narrator assures, “very happy.” (“Took my heart to the limit, and this is where I stay.”)

(Is it embarrassing to like a song by the Black Eyed Peas? I feel like it is.)

Sensory, tactile, and abundant, Taurus—i.e. the Bull, if you didn’t catch that—is more embodied and pleasure-loving than my Midwestern Catholic upbringing shaped me to embrace. Images of abundance were articulated, and swiftly undercut, most archetypally by the Garden of Eden, that paradise flirted with and swiftly lost to a destiny of arid toil.

The illustrations in my children’s Bible put the contrast quite vividly. As if to freeze the Old Testament’s progression into brutality and punishment, I’d take the book from my dad’s hands and linger on the beautiful: the lush plants, the newly named animals…and the ubiquitous fig leaves covering Adam and Eve’s goods.

“What’s that?” I asked once. “Be fruitful?” I knew what fruit was, of course. But how would that apply to people, as a directive?

“Have babies,” he answered gruffly. “Procreate and populate the world.” He moved the conversation along before I could press on the meaning behind that word, fruitful.

It’d be a mistake to brand Taurus as the sexual sign. To name a few others: Libra, like Taurus, is ruled by Venus, the planet of love, romance and attraction, among other things; within the verve of Aries lives a robust libido; Scorpio rules the genitals and especially hidden or taboo sexuality; and Cancer and Leo are both associated with lineage. What makes Taurus’ relationship to this domain of life special is its emphasis on fecundity—whether as the fruitfulness Old Testament God was demanding, or the flowering of pleasure at large. It’s pleasure that may or may not be strictly sexual but is always grounded in the Earth and the physical. There can even be a sense of friendliness with the corporeal (“Other times I smell like a city garbage strike”).

Easygoing and balanced—down to earth, you might even say—Taurus also has a Venusian knack for putting people at ease. Versus the airier airs of Libra, Taurus’s touch as more to do with, well, touch, among other intimate senses: well-composed, tasteful meals, a beautifully comfortable living room, a gracefully straightforward manner of being. An old Taurean roommate of mine would make me an artfully arrayed spinach salad whenever she made one for herself, a simple yet nourishing gesture that quite honestly wouldn’t have occurred to me, from my end.

There is a sweetness to Taurus—after all, fruit is the child of flowers and pollinators. Biologists cite the evolution of the angiosperm, i.e. flowering and fruiting plants, as a critically calorie-rich precursor to the animal kingdom en masse. Hundreds of thousands of years later, angiosperms are the crux of human agriculture and husbandry practices. From the substance of flowers blossomed languages, cultures, sciences, gender, economies, religions, colonialism, arts, and all other constructs that humans have wrought on this world, to varying degrees of great harm and good, since the first angiosperm bloomed (paywalled, but look at the picture). Advancing along the astrological wheel, Taurus is understood to build on, stabilize, and cultivate what Aries has stirred up (“I’m only watering the seeds you’ve sown”).

Kool & the Gang’s “Fruitman” makes me think immediately of the late Mr. Okra, New Orleans’ own fruit man who passed in 2018, honored still by Wikipedia page, picture book, and song. I’m fortunate to have heard his calls when he came down my street calling out the almost elegiac, running recitation of his wares.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But first, as whoever sat down and scribed the book of Genesis knew, first, there has to be a garden.

In her oral life history Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story, Onnie Lee Logan begins her tale with a luxuriant description of her family’s gardens when she was young:

We had so many of us we had three big gardens. String beans, butter beans, turnip greens, English peas, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, okra, ever’thing. Tomatoes, three or fo’ different kinds of squash. Everything that was plantable we planted. I’d be havin to name every kind of vegetable there was to name what all we had. We had a peach o’chard. Peaches, pears, plums, preserves, and jelly. We made our own syrup. Syrup would last for a month way over the time we had to make syrup for another year.

Like I said, sweetness in abundance (“Hello, my baby…”; “that sugar, babe, it melts away”).

As a girl, Logan’s father felled an oak tree, chiseled a deep hole into its stump, burned it, sanded it, and in the end had built his family a pounder to winnow the rice that they also grew. On some days, they could simply work with the wind, which would effortlessly separate the airy chaff from the rice: “A windy day is when we beat enough rice could last you—you know how you could keep rice—forever.” All the earthy fecundity of Taurus combined with its resourceful sensibility—not to mention its delight in ease when it’s available, and equal comfort with force when it’s not. Regardless, Taurus will have its way.

As a midwife of many decades, Logan knew more about that fruitfulness business than most. While matters natal are classically Cancerian, Logan repeatedly wonders at the design of the human body, which makes possible the miraculous process of birth: “You see what I mean?” she asks. “Ain’t God beautiful? Make me wanna scream on how it all works.” Required by the board of health to destroy her patients’ placentas, Logan began using them to fertilize her own fruit trees: “A million, million placentas. A million placentas is buried in my backyard. […] I had the biggest peaches you ever did see.”

The body, and its ability to build new bodies, whether of flesh and blood or wrinkly pit and golden fruit, is indeed beautiful, and mutualistic stability between living beings is indeed within Taurus’s realm.

For Taurus’s less flattering sides, think no further than Homer Simpson (or sundry other old-school, thick-headed sitcom husbands with their anal yet self-sacrificial Virgo wives). Homer’s connoisseurship of life is endearing in his sweet or silly moments, but turns destructively single-sighted when all he cares about is having his own way. For Taurus, this can manifest as avarice, possessiveness, fear of spontaneity or change, or plain old pigheadedness.

Lianne La Havas’s conclusive tune picks up on Norah Jones’s observations of the gentle monotony of living and of self. La Havas roots deeper, claiming a stability through self.

Suggested activity pairings:

Manicures and other makeup application
Painting a piece of furniture or doing a fabric-based project
Cooking and/or enjoying a luscious treat or meal—consider the pleasure and fun of a themed dinner party
Shopping for textiles, cooking ware, or other such lasting household items
Making or updating a budget
Lounging in the park or in a freshly made bed, appreciating through all the senses

Happy Taurus season! May you be sweet as giant peaches while you hold your ground like a bull—and don’t forget to find that quiet hillside within yourself.

more soon 🌙 !