Uranus in Taurus: Finding the Courage to Just Be
Taurus is one of the most difficult signs to understand, so most people conflate it with the second house of money and decide that Taurus is about trying to earn enough money to finance a do-nothing lifestyle. It’s a stereotype that I, as someone with a Taurus sun, find infuriating.
I’ve heard it theorized that astrologers struggle with Taurus because it is so simple. Taurus is the place in ourselves where we participate in the things that humans share with animals. It is the part of us that loves good food, a soft bed, protection from the cold.
In many parts of the northern hemisphere, Taurus season is one of the most comfortable times of the year. Here in Oregon, it is warm enough during the day for shorts and sandals but cold enough at night that snuggling under a comfy blanket is profoundly soothing. It’s as if the physical world is trying to help us learn how to work with Taurus energy.
Right now, everyone in the world is experiencing a moment where Taurus’s energy is in the spotlight. It is Taurus season, the time when the sun is in the sign Taurus. This period in April and May is always a time when Taurus is in focus. This year, the focus is especially strong because Venus, Mercury, and Uranus are in Taurus at the same time as the sun.
Mercury and Venus will make this passage quickly and move on to Gemini, but Uranus is one of the slowest moving planets in the solar system. We are a couple years into Uranus’s seven year tour of Taurus.
Uranus is a force that disrupts the status quo and forces you to confront the ways you’ve painted yourself into corners in life. It can be a difficult planet to work with. Clearly, this planet read its Sartre because Uranus transits condemn us to be free, releasing us from the things that are holding us back, whether we want to be released from those things or not.
“Now I Just Sit In Silence”
The last year has been extremely Uranian for me. In technical terms, Uranus has gone from squaring my moon to squaring my ascendant in quick succession. It’s one of the reasons I’m teaching a class on Uranus. I want to share what I’ve learned about Uranus from my experience.
I’m moving across town as I write this, and I’ve spent a lot of time driving back and forth between my old home and my new one. The route has gotten so familiar by now, I can practically do it on auto-pilot, so I spend the drives listening to music and thinking about nothing in particular.
One of the songs I’ve been listening to the most on my drives is “Car Radio” (video) by Twenty One Pilots. It’s about the experience of having your car radio stolen and being forced to sit alone in silence and how you can be your own worst company.
I’m going through a Twenty One Pilots kick, so this song has been coming up in my auto-playlists a lot, but I didn’t really start to pay attention to it until I found myself in the exact situation described by that song. My phone wasn’t working, but I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to connect to my car’s bluetooth until I was already on the road, and it was too late to fix it, so I ended up spending the drive listening to “Car Radio”—a song about a broken car radio—playing very quietly from my phone’s speaker.
I’ve been around the astro world too long to ignore synchronicity like that, and I knew from experience that being forced to sit in silence and think about your life for ten minutes is a classic Uranus in Taurus experience.
The Silent One is one of the archetypes Steven Forrest assigns Taurus in The Inner Sky. A Uranus in Taurus transit might use silence (Taurus is the Silent One) as a tool to disrupt the status quo (Uranus) to make room for change.
One of the things I’ve learned is that Uranus will sometimes give you a warning before it’s about to blow something up. You will experience a very small disruption that is a taste of the kind of disruption you need to have. If you heed the warning, you can sometimes make the needed change happen in a positive way. If you don’t heed the warning, the change will come for you regardless.
Knowing this, I was determined to do what I could to heed the warning and embrace change.
Today, I decided to replicate the experience of sitting in silence on purpose. I left my phone in my bag and made the drive without music as a way of listening more intently to what the transit had to say.
This is the part of the story where I’m supposed to talk about the monkey mind chatter that filled my head while I drove in silence. That’s what supposed to happen when you do anything meditative, isn’t it?
That wasn’t my experience.
Instead of experiencing silence as a vacuum my chattering mind rushed in to fill, I found that silence wasn’t an empty place at all. In the place of sound, I found a kaleidoscope of feelings and sensations—the feeling of a belly full of lunch, the feeling of worry tightening the muscles in my jaw, the solidity of the steering wheel in my hands. Silence forced me into a wordless participation in the physical world.
This is the complexity astrologers are looking for in Taurus, I think, the thing we dance around when we use words like “materialism” and “security.” Taurus is being fully present in the moment, through the body and the heart, in a way that has no need for words.
Dogs Are the Best Taurus Teachers
I’ve been writing on Instagram lately about how my boyfriend’s dog Nala is teaching me about Taurus.
As I’ve been writing this today, Nala keeps coming to my office and looking at me expectantly, ears up.
At first, I thought she was coming to visit me, but it quickly became apparent that she wasn’t really interested in me at all. She is my boyfriend’s dog, and she loves him with a single-hearted devotion that has no room for lesser affections (except, possibly, food).
So, I’ve started telling her, “He’ll be home soon.” This seemed to be the response she’s waiting for because she immediately turns tail and runs back to the blanket on the couch that has been her spot since we left it there a few days ago and stares at the door.
It’s a common assumption that Venus rules Taurus because Venus and Taurus are both concerned with money, but this isn’t true at all. Venus likes money. It will happily spend all of your money on pleasures, but Venus’s connection to Taurus is no less about relationships than Libra’s is.
Taurus is an earth sign. It is grounded in the physical world. Taurus relationships are grounded in silent presence. Taurus is snuggling on the couch with someone watching a movie and eating popcorn together, while Libra might be satisfied with a movie watching party with internet friends, as long as there is a space for chatter and commentary. Taurus is the feeling I imagine Nala has when my boyfriend comes home, the security and belonging that comes from the physical presence of someone you love.
The Taurus Revolution
There has been a lot of fist shaking and beard wagging about the way relationships have gone digital over the last year because of the pandemic. This change hasn’t been all bad. It has done a lot to build communities of connection between people from different parts of the world.
It has been a wonderful opportunity. My inner circle on Patreon includes people from North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Trying to find a time for a workshop that is good for people in Los Angeles, London, and Seoul is a challenge I’m delighted to have but never thought I’d face.
The digitization of human connection has, however, created a situation where having Taurus relationships can be a revolutionary act.
Sometimes, meeting needs for presence is literally against the rules. A person might break quarantine rules to be there physically with a loved one who is hurting. Other times, the revolution is a quieter resistance to a culture that increasingly wants us to spend every waking moment with our eyes glued to a screen.
I am not advocating for any action in particular, only observing that these types of rebellions are classic examples of Uranus in Taurus in action. They are actions that place individual needs for embodiment over the dictates of a society that rewards a strictly virtual existence.
As a species, humans like to emphasize the ways in which we are different than animals, but Taurus is the place in the zodiac that reminds that we exist in a physical world. We have bodies that need care. We are creatures that need to express love for ourselves and each other by caring for our bodies and the physical world.
Evolutionary astrologers like to say that the planets come to the place in the sky where we need them the most. Right now Uranus is in Taurus because we need a revolution of silent presence.
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