Exalted Venus Baby

Because today is the first Friday (Venus Day) with Venus in Pisces, I wanted to write to you about our illustrious, laughter-loving queen (-the orphic hymns) in the sign of her exaltation. Despite the doom and gloom of second winter in New York, we’re getting to “the good part” of 2022’s astrology. I feel obligated to take advantage of this dreamy star-scape. But I must be honest, it took me forever to get to writing this, and I almost didn’t write anything at all. Instead of working on this missive, I chose to read, to take a nap, to call my mom and talk about Elizabeth Holmes (again), to cover my body in lavender scented shea butter, to file my nails and bathe my cuticles in oil, to map out the transits of early 2023, to do another tarot spread, to mope around the house about the hurdles I must cross to be a better and more effective and more visible writer.

To know about “good transits,” and lack motivation to act on any of them, leads to a kind of cosmic FOMO. But in many ways, what I did I instead of writing was its own kind of prayer to Venus in Pisces—especially the oiling of my cuticles, tbh. It was only after almost 8 hours (an entire “working” “day”) of this intellectual tossing and turning that I was able to churn something out to honor our girl Venus. My thoughts on Venus in Pisces are distilled as best they can be (for now) into a series of vignettes.

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I was born with Venus in Pisces. But it’s not just any placement in my chart, it’s my ascendant ruler. So, yes, I am Venus in Pisces. It’s easy to describe Venus in Pisces as big feels, high art and fairytale romance. In many ways, those takes could be true, but I know they are not my experience. My life embodied through this placement is difficult to describe. I almost gave up on trying to describe it to you. But last night, as I wandered through my local bougie organic market, with no grocery list (when have I ever written one?), in search of just the right ingredients to make a meal that would satisfy my hunger in the immediate future, but also express the truth of my refined, continuous cravings, I realized I can only describe this placement through how I was living it in that present moment. My flustered grocery trip provided a working definition, or at least a series of possible containers for a placement that is impossible to hold. Venus in Pisces is frustratingly inscrutable because she is so messy.

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At the market, I gathered all the ingredients to make a BLT salad from a recipe I found while languorously browsing the archives of Bon Appetit, searching for “rainy night” dinners to make comfort myself on a gloomy day. But as I squeezed every not even close to ripe avocado in the store, I forced myself to admit defeat. This was a recipe built for summer, for fresh tomatoes and nights too warm to heat the oven. I simply could not conceptualize this salad with the disgusting, synthetically textured, probably grown in chemical hell cherry tomatoes available in the produce aisle. No. This salad was meant for the bliss of summer heirlooms. I mourned the loss of my craving while still holding space for its genius, and slowly walked back through the store to put the bacon, the romaine, the mayo, the chives back where I found them.

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To talk about Venus in Pisces, I must talk about disgraced former President Richard Nixon. This probably sounds random to most of you, but for those reading this who are familiar with “the early work,” you know that he used to be kind of my muse. I wrote a play about Nixon in undergrad. Though it was called Wright/Nixon and featured Nixon, his dog Checkers, Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller as characters, the play was actually about me, and also the human impulse to snoop. I was trying to relate Nixon’s crimes to my own feelings of FOMO and paranoia, draw parallels between Watergate and my bad habit of looking in places where I shouldn’t. I wondered if Nixon, like me, was snooping less because he needed dirt and more because he just needed to know. The line that I remember getting the biggest reaction and laughs, was when I, in a direct address to an audience member said, “You see. The thing is. I know everything about you.” I took a beat, and then added, “And I’m bored.” Longing is both the antidote to and the consequence of dissatisfaction. Richard Nixon also had Venus in Pisces. What we forget about planets in their exaltation is that they have a long way to fall. Rising, evaporating water is hard to see with the naked eye, but everyone experiences the rain pouring down.

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After scrapping the BLT salad idea, I decided to follow my heart and just get a frozen pizza. But as I wandered through the freezer section, I couldn’t get the bacon off my mind. I started doubting my ability to choose the right thing to eat. I pondered my options, and paced back to the pasta aisle. Maybe this was actually night for tortellini tossed into a soup with some bone broth, ginger, garlic and kale. Maybe it was a night to just embrace my inner lazy girl and buy a jar of the most expensive arrabiata sauce allegedly made fresh by a verified Northern Westchester Nonna, bottled near by hometown. But the bacon! The avocado! The idea of fresh heirlooms! It was all still on my mind. OK. What was I actually craving? Cheese. Fat. Vinegar. That’s what I’m always craving. But what if I could be craving more?

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Exalted planets, like Venus in Pisces, can act entitled. The Sun in Aries, the Moon in Taurus, Mercury in Virgo, Mars in Capricorn, Jupiter in Cancer, and Saturn in Libra are the other exaltations. We call them “honored guests” and its true that they are deserving of attention, of love. But when you’re beloved everywhere you go, how do you know if you’ve found the right place?

A long time ago, I was consumed with a crush on someone who eventually became (kind of) my first love. I was in agony over this love: wrote hundreds of diary entries, thousands of text messages, and an entire thinly veiled webseries about it. (It was 2012, ok?) In the throes of my discontent when I wasn’t sure if xxxx liked me too, I cried about it to my friend Joe, a Sagittarius, who in his own way, gives the best advice. (My favorite line of his, “People are who they are, and you can’t take anything they do personally.”)

As I sobbed, Joe turned to me and said, “Is this about xxxx in particular? Or could you love anyone like this? Because if you could love anyone like this then maybe a relationship isn’t worth it for xxxx.”

At first, I was mad at Joe. Of course it was about xxxx. I needed xxx to love me. But in that moment, I also thought of all the other loves, unrequited or unexplored or fully formed from the past. I sighed and told Joe that if he wanted the truth then yes, I probably could love someone else like this. This is the agony and the ecstasy of Venus in Pisces. What makes us compelling lovers and also what gets us into trouble. Pisces makes infinity easy. But easy infinity isn’t always what we need.

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Most days I want heavy whipping cream straight from the cow and honeycomb straight from the hive. The disappointment of a store bought salad dressing disturbs me. But I want to be clear: Venus in Pisces is not, in my opinion, snobbery. Because Venus in Pisces usually chooses, after considering every other option in paralyzing intuitive and emotional detail, the frozen pizza. I forgot the bacon, and chose the frozen pizza. But before I bought it, you know I thought about whether xxxx, my first love, would also choose the frozen pizza and whether he’d like to have some with me. I smiled when I realized he would. This pure imagination (some would say delusion) is the gift and curse of Venus in Pisces.

The pizza was delicious, btw. So was the side salad I made with a miso dijon vinaigrette.

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The only thing worse then being caught without an umbrella is having no plans on a gorgeous day. That’s the gospel of Venus in Pisces. The world is absolutely saturated in beauty, but still, what if there’s more? 

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