Taurus 3° (2° to 3°)

Sabian Symbol: Natural steps lead to a lawn of clover in bloom
Symbol wording: Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala (1973)

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The Essence

1. We are each both passive and active, an agency where spiritual energy meets material life, and the exchange runs both ways.
2. We grow by exerting ourselves toward our own nature with humble, trusting determination.
3. Self-realization comes from spontaneity and restraint together, like wild clover growing inside a manicured lawn.
4. Who we are is largely a matter of choice, built from countless small selections made since birth.
5. Attaining optimism as an everyday condition may be among the most helpful things we can do.
6. The danger is silly idealism, an indulgent disregard for practical, everyday reality.
7. Since we expect and appreciate good things, good things tend to come toward us in turn.
8. Hopefulness holds two things at once: a specific desire, and the trust that apparent failure is temporary.
9. Hoping for wellbeing already sets us walking toward it, while fear tends to steer us the other way.
10. The core lesson of earthly life may be this: stay both optimistic and adaptable.

The Image

The picture is Natural steps lead to a lawn of clover in bloom, and the first thing we notice is how modest it is. There is no temple at the top, no view of the sea, no treasure. There is a slope with stones set into it by weather and time, forming a rough stair that no mason planned, and above it a stretch of grass speckled with white and pink clover heads, with bees working among them.

Each part does something. The steps are natural, which means the route upward has been given by the land itself rather than imposed on it. They are uneven, some high, some shallow, some wobbling a little when you put your weight on them, but every one of them can be climbed. The lawn at the top is cultivated ground, and the clover is the part of it nobody sowed on purpose. Gardeners have argued for generations about whether clover in a lawn is a weed or a gift; it keeps the grass green in dry summers and feeds the soil, since clover, like other legumes, works with bacteria in its roots to fix nitrogen from the air. The wild thing growing inside the tended thing turns out to be what keeps it healthy.

So the image holds three ideas together. There is a destination worth reaching, there is a path you can manage one step at a time, and there is a meeting of order and spontaneity at the place you arrive. None of the three is enough alone: a goal with no path is a daydream, a path with no goal is a treadmill, and arriving somewhere wholly controlled leaves us with a lawn that nothing wild can enrich.

Think of someone learning to walk again after an operation. On the first day, the corridor outside the hospital ward is the whole world, and reaching the window at the end is the goal. A week later it is the stairwell, then the garden bench, then the bus stop. Nobody in that position climbs by gritting their teeth at the summit. They climb by picking the next step, trusting that a bad day is a bad day and not a sentence, and noticing the small flowering things along the way. That is hope as a practice rather than a mood, and most of us have lived some version of it, even if we did not call it hope at the time.

Jones assigned this degree the keyword hopefulness, and the image shows what kind he meant. Not the hope that waits for rescue, but the kind that has a wish, finds a route and keeps putting one foot down after the other.

Within the larger structure, Taurus 3° is phase 33 of the 360 and the third step in the seventh group of five degrees. After the spring of the first degree and the storm of the second, we come out into the fresh, rinsed ground where something can grow.

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The Archetype

The archetype at work is the ascent toward the garden. Gardens have stood for the good life in many traditions, and the English word paradise comes, through Greek, from an old Iranian word for a walled enclosure. What matters for us at this degree is that the garden is reached on foot. It is not a reward handed down from above but a place you arrive at by walking.

That makes the archetype an image of agency in partnership. We are not the sole authors of our lives, since the slope, the weather and the stones were here before us. Yet we are not passive either: we choose where to put our feet, and over years those choices add up to a person. Each of us has been selecting since birth, a preference here, a refusal there, and the self we now inhabit is in large part the sum of those small selections. That is a hopeful thought, because it means you can keep choosing.

The clover adds a second lesson. A life that is all planning becomes a sterile lawn, and a life that is all impulse becomes a field of weeds. Growth happens where the two meet: deliberate effort that leaves room for what arrives unbidden. When we live this degree well, we keep a direction and stay open to surprise, and we treat setbacks as uneven steps rather than walls.

Lived well, the archetype produces a steady, creative optimism that reaches into every corner of ordinary striving: the job application, the difficult relative, the vegetable patch, the savings account. Such people are good company in hard times because their hope has practical feet. They expect good things, notice them when they come, and in that noticing seem to invite more of them.

Lived badly, the same energy floats off the stairs altogether, and you may not notice it happening. Hope becomes fantasy, an indulgent refusal to look at the bill on the kitchen table, the symptom that needs a doctor or the relationship that has already ended. This is the idealism that mistakes wishing for doing. It feels optimistic, but it is closer to avoidance, and it leaves you standing at the bottom of the slope dreaming about clover.

The Taoist Current

The Dao De Jing is suspicious of grand leaps and fond of patient increase, which makes it a natural companion to this degree. Chapter 59 of the Dao De Jing praises restraint, the sparing use of energy that a good farmer practises, and says that such restraint means preparing early and steadily accumulating virtue. A life built that way, the chapter says, has deep roots and a firm stem, and it can last. The hope we meet at this degree is of that kind: rooted, unhurried, built from strength you have saved rather than spent in bursts.

Chapter 64 gives the most famous version of the stair. A tree too broad to wrap your arms around grows from a tiny shoot, a tower of nine storeys rises from a heap of earth, and a walk of a thousand li starts under your feet. The same chapter warns that people often fail when they are close to finishing, and advises being as careful at the end as at the beginning. That is the uneven step near the top, the one you trip on because your eyes are already on the lawn.

Chapter 81 closes the book with a lesson in generosity. The sage does not hoard, it says, and the more they give to others, the more they have. Heaven's way benefits and does no harm. Clover lives out this chapter quietly: it gives nitrogen back to the soil and nectar to the bees, and the whole lawn grows richer because of it.

Read together, the three chapters suggest that hope is not a feeling we wait for. It is the fruit of restraint, small steps and open hands, and it grows the way the clover grows.

The Yi Jing Resonance

Hexagram 46, Sheng (Pushing Upward) places wood beneath earth: a plant rising through soil, slowly and without force. Its image describes the noble person who, with devoted character, heaps up small things until they become something high and great. The judgement is encouraging, telling us not to fear and promising good fortune to those of us who set out. There is no leap in Sheng, only steady growth, step after step, which is the stair in our image.

Hexagram 42, Yi (Increase) places wind above thunder, and its traditional reading is that what is above gives to what is below, so the whole grows richer. Its image asks you, as the noble person, to imitate the good you see and to correct your faults when you find them, which is hope made practical: we learn from what works and drop what does not. The judgement says it furthers to undertake something and to cross the great water.

Together the two hexagrams frame hopefulness as a process rather than a wish. For you, Sheng gives the patient upward push, and Yi gives the generosity and self-correction that keep the push from turning brittle. Both suggest that if you keep moving in the direction of the good, in small and steady increments, increase follows. That is the lawn of clover at the top of the natural steps, earned rather than imagined.

The Philosophical Content

Charles Snyder, the American psychologist usually cited as C. R. Snyder, built one of the best-known psychological models of hope. In his account, hope is not a vague feeling but a way of thinking with three parts. There is a goal, something specific we want. There is pathways thinking, our sense that we can find routes to that goal, including alternative routes when the first one is blocked. And there is agency thinking, our sense that we can start down those routes and keep going. His model is often summarised as willpower and waypower working together.

Snyder's theory maps neatly onto the image, and onto our own attempts to climb. The clover lawn is the goal, the natural steps are the pathways, and the climber's willingness to keep placing their feet is the agency. His emphasis on alternative routes is especially useful here, because a natural stair is never perfect: sometimes a stone has fallen and you have to go round. Hope, for Snyder, includes that capacity to reroute without giving up the destination. He also treated hope as something we learn, which means that if your hope feels thin, you are not stuck with it; you can practise the thinking that builds it.

Gabriel Marcel, the French philosopher and playwright, approached hope from a different angle in his collection Homo Viator, whose title means the human being as wayfarer. For Marcel, hope arises in trial: in illness, captivity, separation, the situations where we cannot simply fix things ourselves. He distinguished hope sharply from optimism, which he regarded as a more detached stance, the confidence of a spectator who expects things to work out. Hope, by contrast, is engaged, patient and bound up with other people. It refuses to treat the present difficulty as final, and it is closely linked in his thought to openness and availability toward others.

Placing Snyder and Marcel side by side brings out the full shape of the degree. Snyder gives us the mechanics: name what you want, map the routes, keep your motivation alive. Marcel gives us the depth: real hope is not a cheerful prediction but a stance taken in the dark, often with and for someone else. The danger of this degree, idle idealism, lives in the gap between them, where wishing has lost both its practical map and its seriousness.

You can use both in your own life. When your hope feels shaky, ask Snyder's questions about goals and routes. When it feels shallow, ask Marcel's questions instead: whom you are hoping with, and which trial you are refusing to let defeat you.

The Evolutionary Astrology Lens

In evolutionary astrology, a planet at Taurus 3° points to a soul learning to keep faith with life through practical, patient effort. The quality being refined is determination of a gentle kind, the willingness to keep climbing without forcing the slope.

Pluto describes where the soul has invested its sense of security and what it has had to lose in order to grow. With this degree strong, Pluto often points to a history of disappointment, where hope was once crushed and the soul learned to protect itself. That protection usually takes one of two forms: armoured pessimism, which never risks wanting anything, or fantasy, which hopes without ever touching the ground. Pluto's polarity point, the sign and house opposite natal Pluto, shows where the soul can learn a third way, grounded hope that survives contact with reality.

The South Node shows the habitual groove. Here it can look like waiting: for the right moment, the right partner, the right sign, so that the steps are never climbed. It can also look like anxious control, a refusal to trust any outcome you have not planned to the last detail. Both keep you at the bottom of the stairs.

The North Node points toward the lawn. It asks for a specific wish, a clear look at the terrain, and the next manageable step, taken today rather than once conditions are perfect. It asks you to expect good things without demanding them from life, and to treat a failed attempt as temporary information rather than final judgement.

The evolutionary payoff at this degree is significant. Those of us who learn grounded hope tend to become steady presences for others, people whose optimism has been tested and has survived. Our expectation of good is no longer naive but earned, and it often draws good things toward us because we keep showing up for life.

The Buddhist Dimension

Buddhism is often misread as a teaching against all desire, but it distinguishes carefully between kinds of wanting. Chanda names wholesome desire, the wish to act, to do something good, to reach a worthwhile aim. It stands first among the four bases of spiritual power, alongside energy, intention and investigation, and it is distinct from taṇhā, the craving that binds us. Without chanda, there is no climb at all, and a practice that tried to remove it would leave us sitting at the foot of the slope, calm but going nowhere.

There is a well-known exchange in the early texts in which Ānanda, asked how desire can be used to abandon desire, points to a simple example: a person wants to go to a park, and once they arrive, the wanting naturally ceases. That is chanda at work, and it fits our image well. The desire to reach the clover lawn moves you up the steps, and on arrival the desire has done its job and falls away, leaving you simply there among the flowers.

The Middle Way gives this hope its balance. The Buddha's first teaching rejected both indulgence and severe self-mortification, and the tradition tells how, after years of extreme austerity, he accepted a bowl of milk-rice from a young woman named Sujātā before his awakening. For this degree, the extremes are fantasy on one side and anxious pessimism on the other, and most of us swing between them depending on the week. The middle path is hope that eats, rests, and keeps walking: optimistic and adaptable together, with feet on the stones and eyes on the flowering grass.

The Soul's Work

The practice at this degree is to turn hope from a mood into a method, so that it can survive bad weeks and still move you forward.

Start by naming one hope precisely. Not "a better life" but something you could recognise if it arrived: a job in a field you care about, a body that can climb the hill behind your house, a kitchen table with friends around it every Friday. Write it at the top of a page.

Below it, draw the stairs. List three different routes toward that hope, because a single route makes you fragile when it is blocked. Then, for each route, write the smallest possible first step, something you could do within two days. Choose one and do it. The point is to prove to yourself that the stair is real and walkable.

Each evening for a fortnight, note one small flowering thing from your day: a kind message, a meal that tasted good, a moment of calm on the bus. This is not forced positivity. It trains your attention to register the good that is already arriving, which makes it easier to keep climbing when the steps get steep.

When a step fails, and some will, use a single sentence to reframe it: this stone has moved, so I will find another. Then look for the next foothold rather than reviewing the fall. Notice, too, when your hope drifts into fantasy, the pleasant daydream that replaces action, and gently bring it back to the next concrete step.

Finally, share your hope with one person you trust. Marcel was right that hope grows stronger in company, and telling someone makes the path more real.

The steps were here before you, the clover is already flowering, and the only thing asked of you today is the next stone.

Explore the Gamla Healing Taurus collection of embroidered caps and hoodies.

This interpretation draws on the 360 symbolic images channelled by Elsie Wheeler in 1925, as recorded and organised by Marc Edmund Jones and later developed by Dane Rudhyar in Astrological Mandala (1973), read here through the lens of depth psychology, Eastern philosophy, and evolutionary astrology.

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