Every year in grade school, Valentine’s Day filled me with a particular dread.
Like Charlie Brown waiting at the mailbox, I worried: Would I get enough cards? Would anyone forget me? Would the popular kids get more than me? Would the cards I made be set aside by their recipients with barely a glance or, worse, with derision?
Looking back, that childhood anxiety reflects the astrological difficulty of Valentine’s Day–it occurs during Aquarius, the sign of the collective, of how we measure up in the group. Love reduced to a tally sheet.
But this year, Venus, the goddess of love, has just entered Pisces, right before Valentine’s Day, offering a different kind of love entirely.
James Hillman, a double Aries, also had Mars and Jupiter in Aquarius in his astrology chart. This was perfect for the firebrand intellectual who spent decades challenging Jungian orthodoxy, building archetypal psychology, and winning arguments.
But he also had Venus in Pisces. While I was reading The Life and Ideas of James Hillman: Volume III: Soul in the World by Dick Russell I came across passages that reminded me that he had this placement. And as he aged, something shifted.
“The fires that now blaze,” he told his friend Wolfgang Giegerich, “are more for the aesthetic and sensuous than the ideational. These days I often awaken with lines of poetry rather than with ideas” (p. 450).
How many of us spend our early years leading with our Mars and Jupiter energy–ambitious, combative, ideological, building, preaching, and proving? And then life asks us to grow into something softer and more Venusian?
Hillman called this shift “thinking in a thingly way,” which means staying close to the actual texture of things rather than pulling away into abstraction. “Remember, O human, O Cartesian man,” he wrote, “that you are an animal, and in this remembrance, you will see and find the world animated, alive, sensate and imagistic” (p. 450).
Venus in Pisces thinks with things rather than about them. Not analyzing the flowers but actually bringing them inside and letting them transform the room.
Russell quotes his wife Margot McLean describing Hillman’s love of flowers: “He was convinced that flowers actually wanted to be picked and brought inside, not only for their own sake but for how they affected and transformed the space to which they were brought. They liked all the attention.”
When I was out shopping on a cold January day I spotted some flowers in the store and, inspired by what Hillman said, bought them. That’s thingly thinking. Not “flowers symbolize Venus in Pisces,” but simply: these particular flowers want to come inside.
Maybe that’s what Valentine’s Day is really asking of us–not the tally sheet of cards and candy hearts, but the thingly act of love: noticing what wants attention and giving it.
Sometimes the most profound act of love isn’t a card in a mailbox, but the simple, quiet act of bringing the flowers inside because they want to be there. And in that remembrance, we find the world–and ourselves–fully alive.
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