You, Venus

Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus"

Bright Venus, in your

reflection I know myself

naked heart, bold rose

Morning Star Venus is back. I'm not sure how long she's been there, but I spied her yesterday morning when I peeked through the curtains as I got up before dawn to feed my sweet kitty.

Brightest heavenly body after the Sun and the Moon, Venus lives half of her life as Morning Star and half as Evening Star. I am most familiar with her as Morning Star, and for a good deal of last year she rose in the eastern sky out my bedroom window in the dark predawn each day and it became a ritual when I got up to look for her. When it was clear, which was most often, it was not only reassuring to find her there but uplifting, inspiring even, a feeling coming over me not only of being connected with something greater, but something holy, something eternal. When she disappeared, when I peeked through the curtains and the unblemished sky was a blank note, it surprised me the loss that I felt.

But now she's back, bold goddess of love and beauty~and so much more~you whom I fell hopelessly in love with when I first laid eyes on you in a picture of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” Utterly captivating. And unlike any other painting ever~other than Starry Night of course~I dreamt of seeing you in person. A pipedream, really, like one day I’ll fly to the moon, one day I will live solely from a heart blazing with love, one day he will call again.

But then, there I was, a perfect spring day in the vibrant Firenze, home of the David and the Renaissance itself. My youngest daughter and I had walked along the Arno River and stood in line at the Uffizi where we were entertained by a comical street Cupid. In the door, up the stairs, and before I knew it we were standing before it, before you. Larger than any painting I had ever seen, over five feet tall and nine feet wide, its beauty though expected, was staggering. The rich colors and textures, the movement and detail, the vivid imagination. That was the day I lost myself to you for good. With your tender innocence, your wholly unexpected vulnerability; the way your whole body tilted slightly as if blown by the breeze itself; how tentatively you held your feet~thick like an infant’s~on the half shell. And how the wind tossed your strawberry hair into those swirling ripples. Then pink roses, pink roses! that floated as if by magic all around you.

Sometimes, like yesterday morning, you are accompanied by the delicate crescent moon, also rising. Those mornings I stand agape at your brilliance. You and the moon together like that, our two most powerful symbols of the feminine. Not as in femininity, but as in The Feminine, the profound yin principle, the necessary~though completely lacking in our world~balance to the masculine's out of control yang dominance. The Divine Feminine, without which we will not survive; our precious Earth, which holds me as I gaze, in such heartbreaking peril.  

(Your birth story says it all. Born fully grown of the foam of your father's severed genitals, if there is not a symbol there, then there are no symbols anywhere ever.)

To think of Venus simply as the goddess of romantic love as we do is not only to diminish her, like we do all women, but to diminish our very experience of her. As though she, as though we, as though love or passion or intimacy or affection or sweetness or grace or pleasure or beauty or cherishing~all her gifts to humanity~could ever be so one dimensional. Though she is that, too, vexing goddess of romantic love, and I have known her intimately in that guise, including her darker side, experienced with the loss of love.

In The Goddess, Christine Downing calls Aphrodite~Venus' Greek counterpart and basically her identical twin~creatrix, a life force, and the "giver of life." Born of the sea, water being the element of emotion and feeling, she is, at her foundation, the goddess of feeling. Still, I am surprised that as I write about her, I find myself not merely thinking about her, but feeling her. Feeling her always in relation with something other, her divine gift to us, intimacy, be it with her essence, with a lover, a rose in the garden, a beautiful painting or poem, my daughters and granddaughter; love, loss, life itself. As you flood my entire being I am seeing just how long you have been my companion, how since childhood and young adulthood you have not only enlivened me, but given me such thirst for life. 

They say planets don't twinkle, and maybe that's true. But except for those few days every nine months when Venus travels behind the moon to switch it up between morning and evening and back again, she is so bright she is practically effervescent. Day in and day out she shines, since the beginning of time, and for billions of years into the future, until the universe collapses into itself, or explodes, however it will come to an end, whether we are still here or not. I see you, sweet Venus, only goddess to ever be portrayed naked and so wholly vulnerable. But even more, I feel you, and I take seriously your invitation to move from head to heart, to walk and live and love exposed and vulnerable, holding nothing back, however long it may take, however long I shall live.