nature's zodiac

Nature’s Zodiac employs the wisdom of astrology for the benefit of psychological growth. The following is a brief description of each zodiac sign from a growth-oriented perspective. Each sign must lean into its own evolution while at the same time being weary of age-old habits that can usurp its progress.

Aries

Easily recognized as the hothead in the group, Aries carries a most important evolutionary reminder. Stress has got us where we are today, but it won’t lead us to tomorrow. Because we were able to survive the tundras and the wild beasts that roam the valleys, we are a successful species. But this survival mechanism comes with a price. Because we are so hardwired for survival, stress shuts down our higher thinking. In an emergency, you shouldn’t be able to reflect on some abstract thought, you should just move! Our beautiful neocortex that has grown so large with evolution switches off in these moments, rendering us far less effective with executive functioning. Stress arises when a person perceives a situation as overwhelming or beyond their ability to cope. Yet feeling like you can cope is not about being invulnerable or free from stress. It is about having the confidence, skills and support systems that enable you to navigate life’s ups and downs with a sense of effectiveness and adaptability. Such a sense is the true spirit of Aries, a spirit closely aligned with nature and evolution. This sense is the natural birthright of agency; an individual’s capacity and ability to act independently, make choices and exert control over decision-making. Agency is personal empowerment made strong by the theme of intentionality, autonomy and responsibility. This is the real ‘warrior’ energy that doesn’t need a battle, just a vertical perspective.

Taurus

Anyone who has ever experienced the uncanny naturalness of a Taurus knows the extent of this earth’s sign’s restorative vibes. The earth goddess is alive and well in Taurus, encouraging wellness and ease of being. This sign is the homeostasis at work within us all, managing life in an ongoing symphony of checks and balances. The interconnectedness is unfathomable when it comes to such complexity. The body astounds with its innate knowledge. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio points out that homeostasis is not just about surviving but also about thriving. You may also have encountered a Taurus in your day that seemed unnaturally comfortable with being stuck in a rut. Survival seemed acceptable enough, warranting no further inquiries into methods of thriving. This is Taurus’ merry go round trap. When the status quo, or the baseline becomes the goal, the future and its magic recede into obscurity. The Taurus sinks deeper into the mud of the mundane, devoid of nature’s real spirit. The fascinating and intricate flow of homeostasis invites its owner to invest more in a private stock. The body offers feedback at all moments, and a good body owner can capitalize on such feedback. They can employ imagined scenarios to generate feedback and then take pragmatic steps towards a worthy goal. They can also ease into their own unique naturalness and find a far more real connection to their own rhythms when they begin to sense the magnitude of possibilities that lie dormant within.

Gemini

This silver tongued air sign understands the persuasive pull that wit and charm have on others. There is a fresh and spontaneous ability to forge connections and create things anew. Associated with youth, Gemini encourages a playful ‘twinning’ with other things, thoughts, people and scenes. From these twinships a whole brain is encouraged to awaken, which is where Virgo comes in but more on that later. Gemini is the germinating, generating vibration. Out of this comes that, which leads to this, and on to that. The ferment of discovery, of beholding things as emergent and new is what drives Gemini and keeps it playfully in step with nature’s forward evolution. Problems arise when the spirit of discovery takes a back seat to dogma. One can become a convict of their own convictions and sit in a prison cell of intellectual prowess. So protective they are of their precious thoughts that they forget to be air signs, in need of other perspectives and standpoints. On another level, Gemini’s can sink into a trivial world, taking “this, that and the other thing’ at one flat level of understanding because they have no impulse to go further with anything, no impulse to generate novelty and exchange thoughts and ideas. Jokes, wit and charm are the tools of the generative trickster, keeping us all one  our toes against the sins of rigidity.

Cancer

Enveloping the trickster rabbit is the Moon. Subjective life envelopes thought and goes beyond it in scope. Cancers sign is a vortex, drawing all experience into a private center of reflection. This reflective center has been called the ego, or one’s private idea of who they are. Whoever this identity is, they navigate the ship. Some egos are created merely by default, letting the pull of the past dictate their identity in full. They zombie step the motions of their life, with a played out soundtrack stale and devoid of fresh resonance. Others might force their egos into something unnatural, serving themselves from the voice of a conscience, which severs them from their larger nature and depletes the ego of its electric power. But some manage to find the sweet spot and listen to their inner promptings. They fall into a feeling that connects their idea of who they are to who they want to be in the future. They restore dynamism to the ego and put romance back in reality. They live through lunar currents, respecting rich subjectivity for what it is: the height of nature.

Leo

If there is anything undeniably life-supporting in our zodiac line up it is the sun, represented by Leo. This one source of light is what makes all things visible. This one source of heat is what makes all things live and grow. Children love to include the sun in pictures, with its radiating lines. They are closer to understanding its power of life-affirmation because they do it too. Leo is the sign of the child, the one who says yes to life, yes to the adventure. Anyone who has ever been in the presence of someone who is beaming, or smiling with more than just their mouth knows the physics of the sun, its centricity and upward gravitational pull. The light is so dramatic it can be seductive. Leo can begin to crave an artificial kind of centricity, where they give all of their creative power to the yes and no capacities of other people. They become an unpaid actor to a meaningless script, instead of living the role they recognize as their own. Their natural virtue of child-like playfulness hardens into childish behavior devoid of mature suppleness of wisdom that allows for psychic growth. Leaning into evolution will be about cultivating warmth and vision, affirming what is essential with a whole heart and leaving lots of room for laughter. 

Virgo

The frequency of the earth is 7.83 hz. This is the same frequency of the brain’s alpha waves, which is what happens when someone enters a flow state. The Virgin mother represents an embrace of the earth’s frequencies when one gains some control over their mental flow. When Gemini twins with something of special interest, Virgo sends back feedback from the earth, or the full brain. The key word is special. Virgo communicates through resonance, recognizing what is important and essential to a person so that they can zoom in on it, examine it, and maybe work to incorporate it into their life. When one is in a flow state, otherwise known as being in the zone, they are immersed and focused on a task to the point where they lose sense of time. The deep sense of enjoyment and effortless concentration that accompanies it is the embrace of the earth mother. The resonance of meaning, or recognizing a frequency special to you as an individual can be a powerful and soothing reverberation. The pitfall is that without conscious awareness, Virgo’s reverberating resonance can turn into destructive rumination, where non-productive thinking circles inwardly again and again. Such thinking can be exhausting and morally defeating. As long as the Virgo’s humility endures, we may allow ourselves to feel an embrace of guidance by mother earth, as an individual with a particular frequency that seeks to match hers in ‘the zone’.

Libra

And then there’s the other, the beholden, the thou that presents itself before us. From the other we learn everything. In respecting what the other is, and striving to see a thing or person as they really are, we find a deeper connection to ourselves. The truth that otherness can convey is emergent, renewing and vitalizing. It leads to poetry, understanding, empathy, philosophy, science, love! It all begins with encountered otherness. Libras are blessed with an innate knack for objective relating. To relate in an objective style does not mean to be devoid of emotion, it simply means respecting what you relate to as its own entity. The word respect comes from the root ‘respicere’ which means ‘to look at’. To be aware of another’s uniqueness and individuality is to liberate one’s own. You are free to see others as they are, not as you need or guess them to be. You are free to create more dynamism within yourself by respecting otherness and learning from it. Libra gets into trouble when such objective relating falls forgetful of spirit, and objects become inert instead of charged with poetry. A Libra may get stuck in superficial concerns and petty judgments as they ignore the complexities of otherness and all of the new life that can come from it. For, as the saying goes, l’amour est l’enfant de la liberté. Love is the child of freedom. Reality, with all of its diverse otherness, is inherently romantic.

Scorpio

The novel sparks that otherness can provoke in a person can lead to an awakening of something very special: the secret life. The secret life rises in a person like kundalini or the sap in a maple tree. It preserves our spirited nature by psychic movement, or personalized momentum. It’s the mojo, the magic, the spell, the vibe that gets you going, hopefully in a direction that is productive to your nature. The power of such momentum is like a steam engine, powering a person forward by the contrasts of heat and cold. Suitable input fuels the engine and the steam that escapes through free-flowing synthesis pushes one forward, naturally and from the depths of transmutation, as fire and earth blaze into air and water. The output escapes, like a dancer’s free form movement. One becomes aware that power, like steam, can’t be held. It must move through a person, changing them in the process. All of this movement comes from ones own agency, one’s triumphant independence and right to move forward, like a train. The downside of Scorpio is an amnesia of agency amidst the swirls of emotional currents. Everything becomes meaningless. The kundalini that rises becomes the swirl of chaos in a meaningless world. There is no secret life waiting to emerge, just a nihilistic perspective without a hint of centricity. Luckily such a perspective can shift in an instant. The secret life can then come back into ownership, as an engine that powers one forward.

Sagittarius

There’s only one sign in the zodiac that seems to represent direction. The upward tilted arrow represents the aim of the archer who is a centaur, half human half horse. As a human she has the capacity to set intentions, aims and establish beliefs. As a horse she has the unbridled instinct to run free, to be strong and go a distance. These two themes are linked in one archetype, suggesting that living with intention is the road to freedom. Ruled by the enormous gas giant Jupiter, which ancient myth equated with Zeus, the god of lightning, Sagittarius represents the larger than life quaking of the spirit. Enthusiasm strikes like lightning, prepping the earth for more fertility. What would our world be without the zest of spirit. What if our bodies were forever split from the buoyancy of enthusiasm, or the power of belief to transcend limitation? It is near impossible to picture. The expanse of spirit lies in the most quantum corners of our biology yet blends us seamlessly with the expanse of the cosmos. Laughter can serve as cosmological lightning, prepping our earthly bodies to profit from the riches of spirit. This sign must be weary of belief systems that take them away from the authentic guidance of their larger selves. A charismatic cult leader can lure a person away from themselves as an extreme example but so can an unhealthy ego. All of Sagittarius’ aiming becomes less on target with an ego that doesn’t serve the higher guidance of the self, ones’ larger nature that grows, produces and loves. 

Capricorn

Like the centaur, the serious and steadfast sea goat is a fictional hybrid of two different creatures. The goat is capable of scaling great heights, but the fish belongs to the ocean, a rich mystery of ancient memory. The tenacity of Capricorns drive must grapple with the songs of the sea, the leanings of the soul. When the thing worth striving for is recognized, a most healing contractile force crystallizes and guides one more securely into a satisfiable authenticity as they follow a calling. This calling, or vocation need not be a career. It is anything of great importance that one feels a desire to commit their time to. Such commitment and seriousness of engagement paradoxically leads to great feelings of freedom. It is in the strive that one is most alive. The strive is the most contractive expression of the grand expanse of being. Capricorn’s distilled essence is like a diamond, beautiful and unbreakable. Like no other sign, Capricorn can embrace solitude as a means of reconnecting with their inner selves and their sense of independence. IT is only when these moments of solitude go unrecognized as creative opportunities for self-discovery and growth that the Capricorn can sink into a lonely mood of despair and adopt a world-view that is lackluster and near devoid of spirit. Good thing they are inherently pragmatic so that they may recognize non-productive nature when they say it.

Aquarius

Known as the water-bearer, Aquarius is the sign of the future. The water that it bears is a conscious awareness of feeling with a mind that leans into what’s ahead. The genius of this sign is in recognizing feelings, or memory, as power supplies. It is through feeling and responsiveness that we have evolved over the eons to know what is good and what is bad for our existence. But existence itself is a decided direction towards the good. The mindfulness of Aquarius has to do with the present day effect feeling has on our forward drive. Sometimes it empowers it and sometimes it impairs it. The mechanisms of our psyche are up for study, on an individual level. Through mindful awareness we can hack our own systems for the betterment of our individual evolution. Camus said “With rebellion, awareness is born.” Ruled by the planet Uranus which rotates in the opposite direction of the others, Aquarius is associated with Prometheus, a rebel who stole fire from the gods. Prometheus means foresight. The gift of foresight is the gift of evolution. We can rebel against the automatic emotional triggers that keep us identified with old wounds and blur our executive functioning brain. We can calm our nervous systems creatively and then look ahead into a domain of possibility. Aquarius’ downfall is that it can be so detached from the powers of feeling and forget to use this skill creatively. Instead, a void of emptiness sets in, along with depersonalization and a lack of enthusiasm for living. In these times, they simply need a good shake-up that reminds them who they are: humans, with nature’s gifts of evolution at their fingertips.

Pisces

The final sign of our twelve archetypes is the most inward and sublime. Pisces represents the fish that swim in the ocean, the possibilities that swirl in the imagination. They represent the real yet unborn fertile ground of image-making and creating. Goethe commented that “Few people have the imagination for reality”. The awakening that began when the water-bearer recognized the power of feelings in terms of evolution continues into a limitless canvas of imagery. Imagination and connection to music, archetypes, art and beauty has the capacity to generate powerful life-affirming feelings. One does not need to even know what direction they are headed in as long as they can trust the promptings of the most inward soul. A zen-like peace is evidence of the light of nature glimmering from the most inward place, transcending memory into rich and productive narrative in support of a cohesive identity that blazes as sure as the sun. Just because Pisces can be in touch with the most real and robust vibrations of life just by closing their eyes doesn’t mean they should go through life this way. When the fish forget to use their powers productively in favor of blissing out they run the risk of losing themselves to an ideal. The gap between reality and imagination must be highly respected and worked with. The realm of poetry is to be treasured as a reverence for the instant and what might become of it. From this standpoint, the circle may begin again with Aries; something new.

If you want to know more about your special signatures as nature, visit me for a nature reading .