The apparent behaviour of the Milky Way  may afford astrology a globalist understanding of how the constellations and seasons fit together in the interpretation of identity, and a matrix to make sense of an astrology which actually looks at the stars, but here in the South the head of the Bull reminds us that there is more to life than ideas.

Late Summer, when Taurus is most prominent in the evening sky, is when growth reveals its catastrophic potential as bushfire. The bush is not only our source of oxygen: it is made of wood! Taurus disappears into the Sun as Regulus, the basilisk known as the healing archangel Raphael, urinates on us from his evening possum perch in the northern trees of the law. Like it or not, Taurus is the last roll of the dice of theory, the dawning recognition that conflict and disaster cannot be mitigated by the legislation of wishful thinking, but must be understood as implications of the materiality of existence. The most persuasive voice of rationality right now gives intellectual form to a spirit which can no longer be suppressed, the experience that we are not from everywhere, but rooted in somewhere. Our national and global citizenship fails to locate us in country! Populism is the battle-ground of top-down and bottom-up thinking.

The Moon in Taurus will precede the Sun into Lethe, the Hades river of forgetting, and forge a path through the difficult terrain of love, the instinct of the heart. It’s all too easy to lose one’s head altogether in there!

And so what is to be done with one’s roots? Which is the greater delusion, that form is a product of mind, or that mind is a product of theory? Can we include strangers in our space if it has no boundaries? Can we fortify boundaries which exclude emptiness? Now we need a Spanish fly to manage Moroccan snails. Will an Indigenous Assembly antagonize or placate the invaders who keep muscling nativity aside with their foreign ‘countries’? Is there any future for rational community? Can harmony between different instinctive origins be attained within multicultural global society, or will the programming of robots suffice in an internet of things? Will our only freedom be to do nothing? Is obedience of the wilful the best we can do?

If you imagine that when you die, what you know will live on, that your emotions, connections and experiences will be eternally reincarnated in other lives, other identities like yours, other components like you, then I probably can’t reach you. But there is another you. If you’re listening, Canberra, listen to the wondrous voice you are mistaking for mine, but which is entirely of your hearing and nobody else’s, as an echo of your creation. What you know and your knowing exist in parallel universes. Of the two, only your knowing is real. The world you know will be obliterated by your cessation to know it, so cease not while you live and breathe! This alone is ‘country’, the personal geography of intention and consequence, error and resilience, hubris and humility, hope and gratitude, hunger and pain. We want our country back!

What Regulus is thumping a paw to: