Grief Spells for Taurus Season: Tasting Rain, Blazing Open, and Resurrecting the Sensuous

Our Lady Peony - Digital Collage

Dear Shapeshifter,

“This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready

to break my heart…

The flowers bend their bright bodies,

and tip their fragrance to the air,

and rise,

their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness

gladly and lightly,

and there it is again ---

beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.” 

-Mary Oliver, Peonies

In the northern hemisphere, the star adorned bull has led us to the luminous part of the year, Venus-ruled Taurus season, the Jewish month of Iyar, Chodesh Ziv, or the month of radiance, shimmering light, and blooming. Spring ripens and the world greens and flowers. In our yard, the peonies and roses are in various stages of budding and blossoming and falling apart. This is the season of the Celtic Beltane, the Roman Floralia, and countless other celebrations of the return of sunlight and plant life – a reveling in and mirroring of the beauty erupting around us. Across cultures, this time of year is brimming with themes of abundance, fertility, and “beauty the brave, the exemplary, blazing open.” 

Grievers know why beauty is brave, why holding eagerly, so much softness, why being damp and reckless in our blazing open, is brave. That there is no Spring without a collective breaking open - of seeds, of soil, of buds, of the skies. That there is no Spring without rain. That grief, far from being out of place in this season of vibrancy (when there is so much collective loss), “is the sound of being alive.” (Prechtel).

Grief is a Life Bringer

The story of grief as a life bringer shimmers in the stars that form the sky bull’s face. This v-shaped cluster of the brightest stars in the Taurus constellation is called Hyades, after the Greek nymphs known as the “rainy ones.” In their wild grief for their brother Hyas, the Hyades former selves were destroyed. In this wreckage, the Hyades were transformed into the stars whose tears bring the rainy season. Their grief, with all its thunder, brings renewal to the world each Spring when the bull gallops across the sky and moves into the sun. 

The rains of Spring are held and recognized as sacred life bringers across cultures. Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz said “the rain at this time is a refuah for diseases that have no cure” and that we should go out into it, allow it to fall on our heads, and open our mouths, taste, and swallow this rain, sensing ourselves in connection to the sky, meditating on how this rain “came down from heavens, connecting to nothing until reaching your mouth” (Nefresh).  In tasting the Spring rain, perhaps we can feel our connection with these grieving stars and sense our own grief as a life-bringing.

Because Spring is a resurrection. And a resurrection can only come from the soil of love and grief. Ancient stories reflect this: yearly the bereaved goddesses Isis and Inanna resurrect their beloved to create new life with them, and this is why Spring comes. Venus weeps over slain Adonis and cries out for him to live again. He emerges as anemone, resurrected from the place where her tears, his blood, and the soil mix. Selene creates the Peony to reflect the radiance of the moon for those who have lost their way in an underworld of grief. Persephone escapes from the land of the dead to bring the life of Spring and to reunite with her grieving mother Demeter. In Celtic tradition, Samhain and Beltane are both times when the veil is thin. 

These understandings reveal that it’s not just Fall that is a potent time for connecting with our beloved dead. They hold out the possibility that our loved ones may also dance among us in new forms each Spring, and far from being intangible and unperceivable ghosts, their forms call out to all of our senses. How can we welcome them?

Celebrating sensuous and erotic power

Grief and Taurus season teach us about the sensuous: slowing down, surrendering our attention to beauty, and sensing the world and ourselves in ways that are not only sacred, but also directly confront colonialism, capitalism, and empire (major Shabbat vibes!).

Ideas of “the stubborn ox” or the “lazy taurus” emerge from an animal that resisted (and still resists) the plow and extraction, of their time, energy, bodies, relationships, and of the earth. Grief and Taurus can teach us about this kind of daily fugitive resistance. As Yoalli Rodriguez says: “Grief is a politics of refusal to an imposed time that doesn’t allow us to feel… you are also being fugitive from modern impositions of only thinking or centering the rationale of the human.” 

In asking us to feel deeply and into relation with the ecosystems around us, Taurus season and grief can drop us into an awareness of what we most desire, and disrupt the alienation from our bodies, lives, and longings. In Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde writes:

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings…And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many facets of our oppression as women…Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.”

This season we might ask ourselves with more courage, what feels right to us? And the sensual Taurus tells us that not only our grief and longing, but our pleasure is sacred too. Taurus invites us to savor every drop of it. As Chani Nicolas shares: “Don’t just smell the roses — feel the soft give of their petals between your fingers. Pay attention to the trees. Sink your feet into the dirt…”

In becoming this present to our ecosystems, we may see grief allies and lovers in the faces of Rose, Peony, Motherwort, Hawthorn, and many more, and remember that humans have never done grief and death alone, as a species or as individuals. Like the flowers call to pollinators and the Peony calls to ants to nourish them in exchange for protection, we can see that in all their shimmering adornments, our ecological communities are waving to us too, reminding us of our erotic entanglements.

Adornment as a Spell for Embodiment

Some of the first spells and prayers created by human beings have been made with garlands of flowers (Strand and Finn). Cross culturally, adornments have been worn on those sites of greatest “sensitivity and vulnerability” (Schrei). We have ornamented our ears, noses, wrists, neck, eyes, fingers, and toes to heighten, bless, and protect our senses, to come deeper into our bodies and the world. And adornment is a theme in Spring festivals -  from wearing nothing but flowers in the Roman Floralia, to flower adorned dancers decorating the Maypole in Beltane celebrations, to the adorning of images of and altars to the Virgin Mary during May Crowning traditions. 

But I didn’t grow up inside those traditions. Instead, queer community (including the flowers themselves) has taught me the most about adornment as a sensual, magical, and erotic embodiment practice, about living in ways that create space for grief in pleasure and pleasure in grief. One student in the tears of the gods class described the Peony as a gorgeously exuberant drag queen and it made me wonder how we can be more like the Peony, or more like their partners the ants. This season of adornment, may we craft all the spells and find all the ways to nourish, celebrate, and protect queer community, pleasurable embodiment, and brave beauty where it exists.

The blazing faces of Taurus season remind us we don’t have to choose between tending to our pleasure and grief— but that they are entangled, like all of us. They invite us to embrace our ability to feel as we find ways to mutually protect and nourish one another, to adorn our senses in ways that allow us to savor each ephemeral beauty and pleasure we taste this season, and to be blazingly beautiful together. Like the rain bringing Hyades, grief not only has a place in the celebrations of spring, grievers and their untameable love are THE bringers of celebration. “Grieving is how flowers bloom.” (Bayo Akomolafe)

Yours,

Mara June

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