Next week’s solar eclipse in Taurus is a call to embrace your material girl and reevaluate the real world things that are important to you. Hope Whitmore explains the sensual connection to “this Earth” that comes with being born under the sign of the bull. Images: Ella Uzan for IT Israel
I used to want to be any sign but Taurus. I was born early, surely I should have been a Gemini – that butterfly of the zodiac which lands decoratively, makes a perceptive comment, then flies away, on to another party, another shoulder, where it can spread its bright wings gifting the room with a momentary flash of vibrant colour.
Taurus, in contrast, seemed horribly staid. The Bull – clumsy, galumphing, not terribly bright, looking up for just a second before going back to his grazing. Eating seemed far more interesting to a Taurean than most people. Words used to describe us felt heavy, as though weighted they would sink without problem to the bottom on the ocean. Taureans are meant to be ‘squat’ have ‘short necks’ and ‘bull like faces.’ Taureans are reliable, stable, orderly, steady, predictable, slow moving – and that’s okay, because you know, the world needs boring people.
“I’m Taurus, but should have been Gemini,” I would say when asked – as if Gemini was my true inheritance, one I had been cheated of by the cruel fate of being born two weeks early – like a princess inexplicably abandoned on a pauper’s doorstep.
But it was during my early twenties that I began to realise that Taurus has its own beauty, one which while not as ephemeral as that of Gemini, striking as that of Leo, or unsettling as that of a Piscean, has a magic of its own. Let me explain.
My mother and sister are both Taurus, and I remember, aged four, watching my sister, who would then have been nineteen, walking through our garden in a long black dress decorated with orange and green flowers. The skirt fell in tiers from waist to ankle, and below it her sandals glittered with all the freedom of early summer.
This image has remained with me, the simplicity of a pretty girl in a summer dress more resonant than any other. I’ve seen many beautiful creations with ruffles and bows arranged oh so perfectly, but even the most elaborate ball gowns in the V&A and in fashion magazines cannot compete with the ease and naturalness with which Polly moved through our garden in a simple maxi dress.
The beauty of the Taurus woman stems from simplicity, a lack of pretence, an effortless sensuality, a feeling of fitting into her environment.
Taureans, rather than being staid, dull, truculent, are the most sensual of signs, not in spite of, but because of their earthy nature. These children of the spring have a sylvan beauty, one reminiscent of ancient woodland filled with brooks, bluebells, and winding twiggy paths, which may lead suddenly to a clearing in the trees.
Shakespeare, that king of words, and himself a Taurus, knew the power of the forest – realising that this earth and things which grow from it are far from dull. The potions made from plants appear repeatedly in his plays. Juliet enters a death like trance on taking a strange plant extracted by a sinister (or kind?) apothecary. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon and his sidekick, Puck – “that shrewd and knavish spirit … that frights the maidens of the villagery” – cause all kinds of Shenanigans with just a small flower – “once white, now purple with love’s wound.”
Like Oberon, Taureans are children of the forest, we know the woodland paths and can run barefoot over twigs, leap over ditches. We not only “know the banks where the wild thyme blows, where oxslips and the nodding violet grow” – we are their natives, survivors of the forest of Arden. Of the idyllic greenery which once upon a time covered all of Europe – a forest in which rules as we know them did not exist, and the forest law reigned supreme.
My mother, sister and I have a dress we all love. It’s from Biba, and was bought by my father in the early 1970s on one of his trips to London from the depths of the countryside where he and my mother then lived. It’s made from the most delicate burnt orange lace, the colour of fallen leaves on a woodland path. My mother wore it over a cream coloured slip, my sister with a bikini. I have worn it with both, once for a spring barbecue and once for a new year’s party.
The lace is beautifully intricate, but there is nothing fussy about this dress – the line is simple and it is easy to move in, flattering to a female body, skimming rather than hugging, but this too has something of the forest about it, a whisper of summer evening adventures. The colour itself is suggestive of a nymph of the forest nipping from tree to tree, visible to its own kind but ready to camouflage itself should it hear a mortal footstep.
Another famous Taurus was John Betjeman who wrote about “mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells” – a line that has stayed with me, and I think of it on late summer evenings in the countryside. There is something comforting in the rhythm of these words, a feeling of coming home, of security, safety, the familiar, but there is more. Underlying this passage is a sense of magic, a feeling of knowing the outdoors, of being one of its own.
Hope Whitmore is a writer who wanders between London, Edinburgh and Carcassonne, staying with friends and family. She’s not that rooted at the moment, but that’s okay. She likes clothes in natural fabrics which fall beautifully, slow cooked stews and massive salads coated in olive oil. Read more at hopewhitmore.wordpress.com
