The Venus Scorpio Transit, the Ouroboros, and Living in Buoyancy

Venus entered Scorpio on September 10. And this year, she does not simply pass through. She descends. She moves into Scorpio, turns backward, returns to Libra, then enters Scorpio again in December before finally leaving in January. Even astrologically, there is something serpentine about this transit.

A descent. A return. A circling back. A completion. An Ouroboros. The serpent devouring its own tail. For me, that ancient image has become one of the most powerful symbols of this moment.

The Ouroboros, the serpent or dragon eating its tail, is not simply endless repetition. It is life feeding life. Death becoming nourishment. The end returning to the beginning. Nature continually releasing what has completed itself so something new can emerge.

My biomimicry studies introduced me to this same pattern through nature’s adaptive cycle: growth, conservation, disruption, reorganization—and growth again. Nature rarely moves in a straight line. Neither, maybe, do we.

Myself, along with many others, believe that this Venus transit in Scorpio is asking us to undergo a dismemberment and re-memberment: to allow identities, beliefs, defenses, and inherited structures to come apart so that something more authentic can be assembled from within.  That is very different from destruction for its own sake. It is regeneration. And this is where the Great Mother keeps entering the conversation for me.

The Void in the Heart

I have been feeling the Great Mother as an immense creative presence pressing toward the human heart. Not always gently. There are moments when this energy feels almost too large for my nervous system to hold. I have had many sleepless nights in the past few weeks.

Keoni Hanalei in his recent conversation with Emilio Ortiz, describes a physical void at the center of our hearts. I see this as no-thingness, the void, the space before creation, a place waiting to be inhabited. While Venus brings tenderness, compassion, beauty, and self-love. Scorpio brings depth, surrender, death, sexuality, power, and rebirth. Together they seem to ask whether the heart can become spacious enough to hold something far greater than our personalities alone.

Increasingly, I experience the Great Mother not as someone “out there,” but as the deep generative ground of  all Life itself. If She is the Alpha. We are the Omega. Source entering form. The Great Mother wanting to be in relationship with the human. Wanting to enter the void in our hearts.

Naphsha and Ruha

The Aramaic teachings of Yeshua have given me another language for this.

Neil Douglas-Klotz describes Ruha as the great breath—the living breath that moves through and connects life—while the individual embodied self is our naphsha.

In his description of Yeshua’s world, breath, body, nature, and spirit are not cleanly separated. The individual breath participates in a much larger breath. Our flesh itself is understood as spiritual, embedded within nature rather than apart from it.

I have begun to picture this almost as:

Ruha : Naphsha

Alpha : Omega

Lemuria (Mu): Atlantis

Shakti : Shiva

Great Mother : Human

Not opposites. A relationship. The Great Mother does not erase the individual. Ruha does not swallow naphsha. The larger breath comes into conversation with the particular life. And perhaps this is what rebirth or resurrection or awakening really is. Not merging into an undifferentiated Oneness. But becoming fully ourselves while remaining connected to the Source from which we arise.

Douglas-Klotz uses the Aramaic word melta to describe something much richer than the traditional translation in the King James Bible as “Word.” It carries a sense of breath, vibration, expression, and relationship with what surrounds us. I see melta as Venusian energy.

My own notes take that further into a question: What conversation wants to complete itself through us?

Between the seen and unseen. Between Source and self. Between the Great Mother and the human heart. Between Ruha and naphsha. Perhaps completion is not arriving at some perfected state. Perhaps completion is conscious relationship with self, other and the Source of Life.

The Coiled Serpent

This is also where the Ouroboros meets Kundalini.

In yogic traditions, Kundalini is commonly symbolized as coiled serpent energy at the base of the spine—Shakti, dynamic life force, rising toward Shiva, consciousness.

I see the serpent coiled upon itself and connect that imagery with the Ouroboros. I also see something important: powerful energetic experiences require grounding, preparation, and discernment, otherwise they can be incredibly destabilizing.

The energy rises. But perhaps it is also descending. Heaven toward Earth. Source toward matter. Great Mother toward heart. And humanity reaching upward to meet Her. This is not simply ascent. It is sacred marriage. The Alpha and Omega touching. The serpent completing the circle.

Buoyancy

In speaking about this merging of Alpha and Omega, this completeness, and living from the heart, Keoni Hanalei talks about buoyancy. I love that.

Not escape. Not transcendence. Buoyancy. The capacity to live within density without being consumed by it. To feel grief without becoming only grief. To encounter suffering without hardening. To hold power without dominating. To inhabit matter without forgetting spirit. To be fully human without losing relationship with the Ruha, with the Great Mother.

This, for me, is where Venus becomes essential. The Great Mother may be immense. Scorpio may take us into the underworld. But Venus reminds us that transformation need not happen through violence toward ourselves. We can meet depth with tenderness. We can meet shadow with radical self-compassion. We can allow the old skin to fall away without despising the self that once needed it.

Perhaps Venus in Scorpio is inviting us to practice a kind of loving dismemberment. To release what is finished. To retrieve what has been lost. To re-member ourselves around a deeper center.

Joy as a Civic Question

This may sound far removed from my professional work with cities. Increasingly, it does not feel separate at all. My work on Joyful Cities begins with a question central to biomimicry:

What conditions allow life to flourish?

I am interested in cities not simply as buildings, roads, economies, and infrastructure, but as living systems of relationship. What allows people to feel rooted enough to participate? Safe enough to remain open? Connected enough to contribute?

What allows ecological systems, communities, institutions, and economies to exist in reciprocal relationship rather than constant extraction? Perhaps a joyful city is, in its own way, a buoyant city.

Not a city without density or difficulty. A city capable of holding them without losing its aliveness. A city that can absorb disruption, reorganize, regenerate, and remain in relationship.

A civic Ouroboros. Not trapped in endless growth. Able to renew itself.

The Return

Venus will return to Scorpio again in December.

I like that. The work is apparently not meant to be completed in one pass. Neither are we. We descend. We surface. We reconsider. We return. Perhaps that is what the Ouroboros has been teaching all along. Completion is not an ending. It is the restoration of circulation.

The breath moves in. The breath moves out. Water rises. Rain falls. The serpent devours its tail. Ruha enters naphsha. The Great Mother enters the human heart.

And the human heart, in turn, gives Her something She cannot experience without us: particularity. Touch. Grief. Laughter. Relationship.

Perhaps this Venus in Scorpio passage is asking us to become a little more permeable to that conversation. Not to disappear into the Great Mother. Not to control Her. But to become sufficiently grounded, tender, and sovereign, so that we can meet Her. And perhaps buoyancy begins there.

Not when we escape the weight of being human. But when we discover that we can inhabit our humanity so fully that the deeper current begins to carry us.

Alpha becomes Omega.

Ruha meets naphsha.

The Great Mother meets the human heart.

And the circle remains unbroken.