Venus- "You can't take it with you", so do what you love!

I was recently asked to talk on a panel at my Astrology meet up group about Venus and specifically my Venus. As I was running through some thoughts about the nature of Venus a very old, very true cliché came to mind, "You can't take it with you". I believe this thought came to me because a friend who is like a brother to me had just been diagnosed with brain stem cancer, my husband and I were in the midst of setting up life insurance policies, I was sad and I was feeling my own mortality. I guess death was certainly on my mind. It really puts life into perspective and can reveal our attachments to who we are, who or what we have and makes us think about how we are living our lives. 

 

Venus is about love, beauty, relationship, luxury and possessions. Most of us are quite familiar with this Goddess and all her pleasures as well as her pain.

Venus is the ruling planet for Taurus and the second house on the Astrological Mandela. This house is the area that focuses on our desires, special skills, value systems, personal sense of worth and our earning power. And how many of us equate our worth with what we have? Or what we do?

                                                                                                                       

The energy of Taurus is to work slowly and diligently to discover our true gifts and create beauty and abundance in the physical form. Whether it is a rose garden or a fortune 500 company the mission is the same. However the intention is what’s important and at the root, pun intended, the deeper lesson is to learn to live without attachment to the physical. This is the duality of Venus.

My Venus is in Pisces and sits in the 10^th house of career and reputation. I spoke at the panel saying:

“When Venus is in Pisces it is “exalted” meaning that it is considered to be acting in its purest form. People with this placement are said to be capable of deep and profound love and have a special understanding of the interconnectedness of all things and life. They are hopeless romantics and have an idealistic view of partnerships. The desire is to merge on a spiritual, unspoken, mystical level. There is also a seductive mystery about them and a unique charm that allows them to passively attract the object of their affections. With a vivid, seemingly divinely inspired, imagination their creative expression can range from other-worldly themes to fields of performance because of the natural ability to inhabit the emotions of others. This can also be dangerous if healthy emotional boundaries are not formed. They can easily be taken advantage of or steered in the wrong direction.”

And through 40 years of life experiences, looking for love in all the wrong places and some hard learned lessons forcing me to see the reality of life, I believe I now understand my Venus. In this position for me it has manifested as a lover of the interconnectedness of all things and a hopeless devotion to revealing the beauty, mystery, and goodness in all life and people. Along with this came a lot of uncertainty and confusion about how to make a career for myself out of that. This is also the nature of Pisces.

For many years I wanted to be an actress and creatively inspire people that way, which could be one manifestation of this position. I’d be rich, loved and adored and teaching people on a grand scale. Well, that was a bit of a fantasy and it was self serving to a degree. And since it wasn’t happening in the way I imagined anyway, I surrendered. I put it all down, left the restaurant business, where I felt like a total loser and decided to get a ‘real job’ for a while. And just for fun I also decided to take a deeper look into an old love; Astrology. After a few years of study and a whole lot of self discovery I realized that what I did didn’t define me or my worth. I do that all on my own. I also discovered the truth of another cliché, “Nobody will love you until you love yourself”. So I looked long and hard at the things I did in my life to keep me feeling unworthy of what I desired. And without getting too deep here I had a few powerful, enlightening experiences that changed me viscerally and I could not be the same after. I am worthy.  And then it dawned on me that I could possibly make a career out of what I really loved.   

Almost immediately after this my life cracked open. I got married, we bought a house, had a baby and I was given every blessing, wish and dream I never even knew I wanted, or rather, never thought I was worthy of having. All along my Astrology knowledge grew, I was doing readings and assisting others in their own journeys and working on a way to reach further and do more. My true Venus was becoming realized.

Getting back to her, I was reading a recent article where an Astrologer named Dana Gerhardt was talking about her challenges throughout her life to discover what she was supposed to do for a career and how she ended up doing what she loved. She had a reading many years ago and asked this very question. She was less than impressed with the Astrologer’s answer. She discovered through her journey and then study of Astrology herself that Venus is a major key to this process. This was new information to me and now makes total sense. There are many places in a chart that an Astrologer can look to show a person what possible vocations might suit them, but looking to Venus can reveal a person’s true calling. 

 

She writes, "Venus, the Goddess of love, the brightest planet in our heavens who determined the course for many an ancient civilization can well guide our course, too. Venus is the Empress in the Tarot, surrounded by the fertile Earth while wearing a crown of twelve gold stars. Her gifts are imagination, creativity, and abundance. She doesn’t care what we’re “supposed” to do. She promises that we’ll be fruitful if we simply listen and do what we love.”

And this is the card for my year. If you are following my horoscope experience posts you can see how this seems ironic and yet divinely timed, that I would be asked to look closer at Venus and simultaneously having experience in my life that also call me to her attention.  

Dana also made a wonderful point about readings which I totally agree with. This is also the reason why I prefer that clients not record our sessions. She writes, “Successful sessions are collaborations. The chart serves as flint to ignite the rich mix of experience, imagery, emotion, energy, and mystery that the client brings to the appointment. It’s not the Astrologer’s words that give readings their transformative power; it’s what suddenly lights up inside the client.”

There is still a lot of skepticism around Astrology, but that is healthy. My dream is simply that people look before they judge. Astrology is not a belief system, it is a science, a study, and there is always more to learn and new ways of looking at things. That’s the great part about it I think. It can be immensely validating and supportive and yet you still have free will.  It is the map, but not the terrain. She says it best, “I don’t believe in Astrology. I believe in life, in archetypes, and in the capacity of people to write better stories for themselves.” And I again agree.

So this sounds all well and good but when you, or I should say, when I, look into my son’s face or snuggle up on the couch with my husband in our beautiful home I can’t help but feel totally attached to my life, what I have and who I am. And the only comfort in dying is that I will finally have all the answers to the mysteries I’ve spent my life studying. That thought is kind of exciting. But for now I am totally content with not knowing and appreciating this life right now. “Carpe Diem!.” “Life is Beautiful!” "Happiness is a choice." When you’re enlightened all clichés are true!

So the talk went really well and I learned more about myself as I tried to teach others, which is always the case and one of the reasons I love to do it. We also spoke about the upcoming Venus retrograde beginning May 15^th through June 27^th. A retrograde is a time for review and reassessment. Another Astrologer on the panel, Rachel Lang, gave a wonderful analogy about the benefit of all retrogrades. She said, “Think of it like a bow and arrow, the further back you go with the bow, the further forward you can shoot that arrow.” So perhaps use this time to look into your own life from a new perspective. Who are you? What are your gifts? What’s really important to you? How are you living your life and since you can’t take it with you anyway, are you doing what you love?