By Jeanne Fiorini
I’ve been thinking a lot about The Empress card lately.
First of all, as I write this article we’re sitting smack dab in the middle of the astrological sign of Cancer, cardinal carrier for the primordial element of water. I live in Southern Maine, which is a Cancerian place to live to begin with, but toss in the steamy weather we’ve had all month, along with the presence of the nearby Atlantic Ocean, and we’re currently about as soggy as you can get without actually sitting in a puddle.
The days here have been long and humid, stretching out before us in languid waves. The sun wakes us up at 4:30am whether we like it or not, and releases us around 9:00 pm. In response to this luxury, the greenery around my house has taken on a life of its own.
The forsythia bush sits like a woolly mammoth at the corner of my house, its tendrils threatening to strangle me in my sleep if not trimmed on a regular basis. Perennials have grown extremely high this year; for instance, the globe thistle in front of my house is 58 inches high. No joke - I just measured it for journalistic accuracy. The Empress is in her glory.
While The Empress card is ruled by Venus (and not by Cancer, which rules The Chariot card), The Empress’ collaboration with the forces of nature, motherhood and nurturance is in alliance with the values of home-and-hearth-oriented Cancer. We’ve had both a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse during this particular swing around the Cancerian cycle, heightening one’s awareness of the emotional patterns that lay beneath the surface of consciousness. This heightened sensitivity is especially pronounced if your sun or moon sign resides in Cancer, so with a moon in the twelfth house I really didn’t stand a chance against this Cancer/Moon/Empress triple whammy.
And then there’s the vegetable garden. In its second year of production, things are faring lots better than last year when we had so much heavy and prolonged rain that fungus overran much of what had started out in promising fashion. It’s ALL the realm of The Empress, really: the seeds, the soil, the rain, the bugs, the sunshine, the rodents. All those who work the soil eventually come to understand that a garden’s output will be determined by the manner by which what you’ve planted responds to what The Empress dishes out.
This year The Empress must have had a hankering for strawberries. My little plot yielded so many of the delicious berries that we’ll be eating them from the freezer when company comes in August. (If you care to see the physical evidence, feel free to visit my Picasa webpage: http://picasaweb.google.com/JeanneMaine/HonkinBerries#. Not only were they delicious, they were huge!)
The peas and the lettuce, on the other hand, have had their struggles. Off to a good start, it got too hot too quickly for each of them and they’re now out there hanging on for dear life, hoping for cooler temperatures and some shade. What has been life-giving for the strawberries – and the tomatoes to come -- has not been so good for the peas and lettuce. Indiscriminate Empress.
Finally, there’s the fact that my daughter is pregnant with her first child. Oh my goodness, talk about an Empress’ dream.
Not only are my daughter and I both Librans with water-sign moons (which has made for a lovely and harmonious mother-daughter relationship) we both are numerological “3’s”, connecting each of us to the energy of The Empress. My numbers are “21/3”, the World/Empress combination; my daughter Kate is a singular “3.”
So while we have The Empress in common as a basic ruling energy, my combination stresses the implementation of Empress energy in the world, whereas Kate’s energy is more straightforward and direct. The “21/3” is about finding effective ways to convey and connect the facilitating, nurturing nature of The Empress with other people, places, and things in the world; the “3” is Empress-ing for its own sake.
A family friend who knows nothing of these sorts of metaphysical connections and personality profilings saw a recent picture of the mom-to-be and said, “Has she been waiting all her life to be pregnant and become a mother? I’ve never seen her looking so healthy and so happy.” It’s true. Her happiness has grown in equal measure to her belly; with two months of pregnancy left, if her smile widens any further she’ll have to sprout more teeth.
If there was anything more rewarding to an Empress than to see her daughter overflowing with life and enjoying every moment, I surely can’t imagine it. I’m likely to be a blithering idiot by the time this child actually arrives, so it's good to put thoughts to words while there’s still the capacity to do so.
No doubt about it, a full expression of The Empress surrounds me these days. And The Empress in me is satisfied, content to watch the work of nature as it expands and unfolds of its own accord, rewarding the eyes that seek its beauty and comforting the heart that recognizes its power.