Venus in the Second House: Beauty, Wealth, and the Architecture of Self-Worth

Venus in the Second House: Terrestrial Domicile and House Affinity

In the language of traditional astrology, every planet has two domiciles — two houses in which it operates with particular ease and intrinsic authority. Venus rules Libra through the Seventh House and Taurus through the Second. When Venus occupies the Second House in a natal chart, it has come home to what Renaissance astrologers called its domus terrae — its earthly dwelling. This is not merely a comfortable placement. It is a placement of profound alignment, where the planet's core instincts and the house's fundamental terrain reinforce each other at every level of interpretation.

What the Second House Actually Rules

The Second House is older than money, though money has become its most recognizable symbol. In the Hellenistic tradition, this house governed bios — the sustaining resources of biological life: food, shelter, clothing, and the capacity to generate them. It is the domain of what we own outright, what we can hold, weigh, and spend. Modern psychological astrology has deepened this understanding considerably. Steven Forrest, in The Inner Sky, describes the Second House as the arena where we encounter our values — not moral abstractions but the concrete things we are willing to exchange our life-energy to obtain. It is the house that answers the question: what do you actually treasure?

When Venus — planet of beauty, desire, aesthetic refinement, relational magnetism, and the deep urge toward harmony — lands in this terrain, the result is a character whose values are thoroughly Venusian. The things worth working for, saving for, and spending for are beautiful things, pleasurable things, things that engage the senses and delight the eye. Life without beauty feels genuinely impoverished to this person — not as a luxury complaint but as a deep ontological ache, the sense that something essential is missing from the texture of daily experience.

The Astrology of Affinity

In Hellenistic and Medieval astrology, a planet in its own domicile was said to operate from a position of inherent authority. Venus in the Second House is not technically in its domicile — that requires being in Taurus or Libra — but it is in the house most naturally associated with its earthly rulership. The effect is analogous: Venus finds the Second House's agenda highly sympathetic to its own nature. Where Venus wants to attract, the Second House provides the arena of material accumulation. Where Venus wants to refine and beautify, the Second House supplies both the resources to do so and the permission to prioritize it. Where Venus wants sensory pleasure, the Second House gives it a permanent address.

Liz Greene, in Venus: Her Cycles, Symbols, and Myths, locates Venus in the mythological territory of Aphrodite — a goddess not of passive receptivity but of active magnetic power, the ability to draw toward oneself what one genuinely desires. In the Second House, this magnetism is channeled toward resources. The image is less of someone who labors heroically for money and more of someone who, operating from a place of authentic pleasure and refined aesthetic sensibility, creates conditions that naturally attract it. That distinction matters more than it might initially appear. Hard work is a Saturnian virtue; attraction is a Venusian one. Individuals with this placement often report that their greatest financial gains arrive not through grinding effort but through doing what they genuinely love — and discovering, sometimes to their own surprise, that the world is willing to pay handsomely for beauty well made.

A Note on Sign and Aspect

The house placement sets the stage; the sign Venus occupies and the aspects it receives determine the exact flavor of the performance. A Second House Venus in Capricorn carries Saturnian discipline into the Venusian pleasure-seeking impulse, producing someone who builds aesthetic wealth slowly and with great intentionality — the collector who spends decades assembling a museum-quality private collection, approaching each acquisition with rigor and patience. A Second House Venus in Gemini brings intellectual eclecticism into the mix: values are varied, tastes wide-ranging, and the earning style often involves communication, ideas, or aesthetic work that engages the mind as much as the senses. A Venus in Scorpio in this house intensifies every theme to an extreme: attachment to resources becomes psychologically loaded, the capacity for financial transformation grows enormous, and the line between valuing something and needing to control it carries unmistakable Plutonian voltage.

Aspects to Venus further modulate the energy with specificity. Venus trine Jupiter in the Second House amplifies the natural magnetism into a genuine luck current with money and material provision. Venus square Saturn introduces themes of delayed gratification, internalized scarcity beliefs, or the lesson that beauty has a price that must be earned through patience. Venus conjunct Pluto in the Second House is one of the most psychologically charged configurations in the chart — it can produce extraordinary material wealth alongside an obsessive relationship with financial security that no amount of accumulation fully satisfies, pointing the individual toward the deeper transformative work that the Eighth House polarity eventually demands.

Earning Through Beauty, Art, Charm, and Vocation

The clearest vocational signature of Venus in the Second House is direct and unglamorous in its directness: income derived from beauty. In a culture that has sometimes been uncomfortable with the idea of monetizing aesthetic pleasure — as though beauty is too sacred, or too frivolous, to have a price — this placement is unambiguous. It insists that what is beautiful has genuine worth, that the capacity to create, curate, or embody beauty is a legitimate and economically valuable human skill.

The Aesthetic Economy

We live in what economists are increasingly calling an experience economy — a marketplace where the aesthetic quality of an interaction, product, or environment commands premium pricing in ways that purely functional goods no longer can. Venus in the Second House individuals were born knowing this. They understand intuitively, without needing a business school course to explain it, that a well-designed room communicates value, that a perfectly composed photograph carries a story worth purchasing, that a beautifully plated dish commands a different price than the same ingredients served without care. They feel the economic weight of aesthetic quality as a lived reality, not an abstraction.

The vocational territory of this placement is genuinely broad. Visual arts in all their forms — painting, photography, graphic design, film, fashion design, jewelry making, ceramics, glasswork — fall squarely within its domain. Interior design and architecture, particularly of residential and hospitality spaces. The culinary arts, especially those oriented toward the high-end dining experience where every detail of flavor, presentation, and environment is considered. Floristry and landscape design. Music performance, music production, and the full infrastructure of the music industry. Cosmetics, skincare, and beauty therapy. Fashion styling and personal image consulting. Luxury retail and brand management in categories where taste is the primary differentiator. And increasingly, the digital aesthetic economy: content creation, social media aesthetics, art direction for brands, and any work that shapes how products and experiences are visually and emotionally perceived.

What unites every one of these fields is the application of taste — specifically, Venusian discernment — to generate measurable economic value. The individual with Venus in the Second House is not merely producing work when they do any of this. They are cultivating and deploying an aesthetic signature, a sensory point of view, that other people find compelling enough to pay for. That is not an accident. It is Venus operating exactly as designed.

Charm as Professional Currency

Beyond the purely aesthetic vocations, Venus in the Second House endows the individual with a quality that is harder to quantify but equally valuable in the marketplace: personal magnetism deployed in professional contexts. This is not calculated manipulation or practiced performance — it is the genuine warmth, social grace, and pleasure-giving quality that Venus represents at its deepest level. In any field where human connection influences outcomes — which is nearly every field — this quality functions as a form of professional currency.

In sales and client-facing roles, it translates to effortless relationship-building, the capacity to make clients feel genuinely welcomed and valued rather than processed. In negotiation, it manifests as the uncanny ability to find terms that everyone can feel genuinely good about, creating outcomes where all parties feel they received something beautiful from the exchange. In management and leadership, it produces the kind of environment where people genuinely want to work — where the aesthetic of the workplace, the quality of the interactions, and the pleasantness of the daily experience become retention factors that no benefits package fully replicates.

Aleister Crowley's observation that Venus rules "all pleasant things" captures something economically significant here. Pleasantness, properly cultivated and genuinely inhabited, is a professional asset of the first order. The Venus in the Second House individual frequently excels not because they are the most technically skilled person in the room but because they are the most genuinely enjoyable to work with, to buy from, and to collaborate with. In a service economy built on human relationships, that quality consistently determines who gets the client, who gets promoted, and whose work gets recommended.

Financial Intuition and the Body's Wisdom

One less-discussed gift of this placement is a form of financial intuition grounded in somatic intelligence. The person with Venus in the Second House often evaluates economic decisions through their body — a felt sense of whether something is worth the price, whether a business deal has genuine substance beneath its surface appeal, whether an investment has the kind of enduring quality that will hold value across time and market conditions.

This is not mysticism for its own sake. It is the integration of Venusian aesthetic intelligence — which is fundamentally a capacity for discernment, for distinguishing genuine quality from imitation — with the material domain of the Second House. One veteran art advisor with this placement described her decision-making process as a kind of somatic dialogue with the work itself: standing in front of a painting and noticing, in the body, whether there was genuine substance there or only surface flash. That intelligence, developed and trusted over decades, proved more reliable than algorithmic market analysis in identifying work that would hold and increase its value over time. The body, for this placement, is not just an object of care — it is an instrument of practical wisdom.

Values Anchored in Material Comfort and Sensory Pleasure

To understand the value system of Venus in the Second House, it helps to set aside any residual Puritan suspicion of pleasure — the cultural inheritance that treats sensory enjoyment as something to be earned after sufficient suffering, or as a distraction from more "serious" pursuits. This placement offers a fundamentally different philosophical orientation, one that treats sensory richness not as an indulgence but as a legitimate and irreducible dimension of a well-lived life.

The Hierarchy of Values

The individual with Venus in the Second House operates from a value hierarchy that places comfort, beauty, and sensory quality near its summit. These are not surface-level preferences or whims of the moment; they are deep organizing principles that shape every significant decision across the span of a life. Where to live is chosen with genuine attention to the physical quality of the environment — the light, the aesthetic of the neighborhood, the feel of the space. What to eat is chosen with attention to quality and flavor, not merely nutritional adequacy. What to wear is considered with authentic aesthetic thought, not reflexive habit. What work to do is filtered first through a question that many people never consciously ask: will this be genuinely pleasurable? Will this align with what I actually value?

From the outside, this hierarchy can appear as superficiality or materialism. That reading misses the philosophical seriousness underlying it. When Epicurus described the good life as the cultivation of pleasure — properly understood as the absence of pain and the presence of genuine positive experience, both sensory and intellectual — he was articulating a position that finds deep resonance with the Second House Venus temperament. These individuals often have a more nuanced and more honest philosophy of pleasure than the unconscious consumption that characterizes genuine materialism. They know the difference between what they actually enjoy and what they think they should want. They spend money on fewer things, but on things that truly matter to them. That is not indulgence — it is a form of integrity.

Pleasure as Philosophy

There is a Jungian dimension here that deserves careful exploration. Jung described the sensation function as the capacity to be fully present to sensory reality — to inhabit the body, engage the senses, and receive the full texture of immediate experience without filtering it through abstraction or projection. The Venus in the Second House individual typically has a highly developed sensation function, regardless of where other planetary placements might push in the chart. Their pleasure is rarely escapist or numbing; it is attentive, discriminating, and genuinely present. They are here, in the body, receiving the world through the senses with a quality of engagement that many people spend years of meditation practice trying to achieve.

The philosophical tradition of aesthetics — from Plato's Phaedrus through Kant's Critique of Judgment to John Dewey's Art as Experience — has consistently argued that genuine aesthetic experience is among the highest forms of human consciousness: a state of full-body, full-mind presence that contacts something transcendent precisely through the most immanent and immediate of experiences. For the Venus in the Second House individual, this is not an abstract philosophical claim requiring verification. It is lived reality, encountered regularly in moments that others might dismiss as ordinary pleasures. A perfect meal, a great piece of music heard in attentive silence, the right arrangement of light and form in a well-designed room — these are not trivial satisfactions. They are genuine encounters with the beautiful, which the Western esoteric tradition has consistently held to be one of the three great faces of the transcendent, alongside truth and goodness.

Material Comfort and the Foundation of Creative Life

The Second House carries a Taurean instinct toward security and continuity. Combined with Venus, this produces individuals who often work deliberately and patiently toward building a stable material foundation — not primarily from fear, though fear can certainly enter the picture, but from a genuine and well-reasoned understanding that beauty and comfort require material grounding to flourish fully. Art requires supplies, studio space, and time free from financial emergency. Culinary exploration requires both money and a kitchen worth cooking in. A beautiful home requires sustained investment over years.

The Venus in the Second House individual understands at a bone-deep level that the material life is not opposed to the aesthetic and spiritual life — it is its foundation. This understanding makes financial stewardship genuinely meaningful to these individuals, even when their spending patterns appear extravagant to outside observers. The occasional significant luxury purchase is not financial recklessness; it is an investment in the quality of experience that sustains and expresses their deepest values. There is wisdom in that, even when it makes accountants nervous.

The Physical Body as a Primary Resource

The Second House governs what we might call our most primordial possession: the physical body itself. Before any bank account, any property, any professional credential or cultural achievement, we own this body — this sensory instrument through which all experience flows, all work is performed, and all beauty is perceived. Venus in the Second House makes this relationship not merely acknowledged but central to self-understanding, often for the entire life.

Venus Embodied

Individuals with this placement tend to have a strong and generally positive relationship with physical embodiment. They are often acutely attentive to how their body actually feels — not in a hypochondriacal or anxious way, but in the mode of genuine somatic literacy. They notice with precision when they are well-rested versus depleted, when they are genuinely hungry versus eating from anxiety, when a particular form of physical movement genuinely revitalizes them versus draining them further. The body is treated, at its best, as what it actually is: a sensitive, sophisticated instrument deserving consistent care, attention, and something close to reverence.

This orientation frequently translates into deliberate and sustained investment in physical self-care: quality nutrition chosen with attention to both taste and vitality, exercise practices that engage genuine pleasure rather than self-punishment, sufficient sleep treated as a non-negotiable rather than a luxury, and the full range of therapeutic bodywork — massage, acupuncture, high-quality skincare — approached as genuine maintenance of the primary resource. For Venus in the Second House, these practices are not vanities and not extravagances. They are the individual's way of honoring and maintaining their most fundamental instrument of value creation. The professional artist whose hands must be kept supple and pain-free, the vocalist whose voice is their livelihood, the chef whose palate must remain discriminating and sensitive — these archetypes capture something essential about how this placement relates to the physical self.

The Body, Beauty, and the Language of Self-Presentation

Venus in the Second House often produces individuals with a natural and highly developed aesthetic in personal presentation. They tend to cultivate a distinctive, carefully considered visual style — not necessarily fashion-forward in the sense of following trends, but inherently coherent, expressing genuine values through visual language. Color relationships, quality of material, texture, the precise fit of clothing, the coherence of an overall presentation — these are not trivial concerns for this person. They form part of a consistent aesthetic vocabulary through which identity and inner world are communicated to the outer one.

Steven Forrest, in his discussion of Second House themes, notes that our possessions and our appearance function as an extension of self-definition — they tell the world, and ourselves, something real about who we are and what we value. For Venus in the Second House, this self-definition through aesthetics is unusually refined and intentional. They are typically not dressing for others' approval, though they tend to receive it as a natural byproduct. They are dressing for their own pleasure and for the coherent expression of an inner world through outer form. That is a genuinely different motivational structure, and it produces a genuinely different quality of personal style: one that ages beautifully and never feels merely performative.

Body Image and the Shadow of Conditional Worth

The shadow of this body relationship surfaces when self-worth becomes conditioned on physical appearance in ways that are neither stable nor ultimately satisfying. Because Venus in the Second House links material reality and personal value so intimately, the body — as the most immediate and primary material reality — can become a primary site where worth is measured and found wanting. The result, when this shadow is active and unexamined, is an excessive investment in maintaining a particular physical appearance, a disproportionate distress when the body changes through age, illness, weight fluctuation, or ordinary circumstance, and an identity structure that is dangerously dependent on physical attributes that time will inevitably alter.

The mature integration involves something more nuanced than simply "learning to love yourself" — which, as psychological instruction, is often about as useful as telling someone to simply be happier. It involves developing a specific inner relationship with the body that holds both full appreciation of its beauty and clear-eyed recognition that its value as an instrument of experience transcends any particular configuration of its form. The body ages and changes; the capacity for refined sensory experience, for genuine aesthetic pleasure, for creating beauty in the world — these deepen with time rather than diminishing.

The Shadow: Materialism, Indulgence, and Attachment

Every astrological placement casts a shadow proportional to its gifts, and for Venus in the Second House the shadow is as specific, as recognizable, and ultimately as instructive as the placement's many strengths. Understanding it is not an exercise in self-criticism but in self-knowledge — which is, in Jung's formulation, the non-negotiable prerequisite for genuine psychological integration.

The Midas Complex

The myth of King Midas offers the perfect archetypal image for the unexamined shadow of this placement. Given by Dionysus the power to transform everything he touched into gold, Midas initially exulted in his gift — only to discover, with dawning horror, that his food became inedible metal in his mouth, his wine became a cold liquid gold that could not be swallowed, and his daughter, embraced in love, became a cold golden statue that would never breathe again. The gift of material transformation, untempered by wisdom and unbound from relationship, ultimately destroyed the very pleasures and connections it was supposed to serve.

For Venus in the Second House, the Midas shadow manifests as an excess of the placement's genuine gifts turned inward and calcified: the authentic love of beauty and material quality that hardens, over time, into an inability to be satisfied with what one has, a compulsive accumulation that never reaches the point of enough, a substitution of beautiful objects for the genuine intimacy and aliveness those objects were always meant to ornament and support. The art collector who is privately profoundly lonely, surrounding themselves with beauty because beauty does not leave or disappoint. The person who purchases another expensive piece of clothing each time they feel unloved or undervalued. The food-obsessed individual who spends freely on restaurant experiences but cannot sit with a friend over a simple meal with genuine warmth and presence.

The Jungian diagnosis is, in each case, essentially the same: projection of inner worth onto outer objects. When the sense of personal value has migrated outside the self and become dependent on the market value of one's possessions, the individual has surrendered their psychological center of gravity to something inherently unreliable. Markets fluctuate. Objects break, age, depreciate, and eventually vanish. If self-worth is tethered to them, the psyche experiences every financial loss, every theft, every ordinary deterioration of material things as a personal diminishment — because, in the unconscious economy of this pattern, it functionally is one.

Worthiness by Price Tag

A particularly modern and culturally reinforced shadow pattern for this placement involves the unconscious equation between cost and intrinsic worth. Venus in the Second House individuals, sensitively attuned to quality and aesthetic refinement, can develop the habit of treating expensive things as inherently superior to affordable things — using purchasing power as a proxy for self-esteem, or feeling, at a level they rarely fully articulate even to themselves, that they are only genuinely "enough" when surrounded by visible markers of economic success that can be seen and registered by others.

Contemporary American consumer culture — which has, perhaps more than any previous culture in human history, systematically turned goods into identity markers and spending into a form of self-expression — amplifies this pattern with relentless effectiveness. The individual with Venus in the Second House absorbs these cultural messages with particular susceptibility, because the Second House is already primed by its nature to assign personal significance to material resources. The cultural noise and the internal psychological vulnerability point in the same direction, which makes the pattern easy to fall into and genuinely difficult to see clearly from within it.

The antidote is emphatically not asceticism, which would represent not genuine liberation but simply the opposite pole of the same fundamental confusion — still measuring worth through material conditions, only now through their absence rather than their presence. It is the development of what Liz Greene might describe as an internalized Venus: a relationship with beauty, pleasure, and personal value that is genuinely anchored within the self, capable of finding richness in simplicity as readily as in luxury, and stable enough to maintain its center when the outer material landscape inevitably changes.

Indulgence as Emotional Regulation

When early formative experiences have established an association between material comfort and emotional safety — being given gifts during distress, being soothed with food, being loved through the provision of beautiful things, learning that abundance meant things were okay — the Venus in the Second House individual can develop a deeply emotionally loaded relationship with sensory pleasure. Shopping as the primary strategy for managing uncomfortable emotion. Eating as comfort in the face of anxiety, loneliness, or grief. Surrounding oneself with beautiful objects as a defense against the felt threat of inner emptiness.

These patterns are not shameful; they are understandable and often quite intelligent adaptations to early environments. But recognized clearly and addressed with genuine compassion, they allow access to a more authentic relationship with pleasure — one that nourishes and enlivens rather than numbs and distances, that enhances genuine presence rather than sedating experience into something more manageable. The transformation is not from pleasure to austerity, but from reactive consumption to conscious enjoyment.

Mature Integration: Balancing Self-Worth and Shared Resources

The Second House does not exist in isolation. In the architecture of the horoscope, every house stands in inherent polarity with the house directly across the wheel. The Second House — personal resources, self-worth, what I own and value — exists in perpetual dialogue with the Eighth House: shared resources, transformation, intimacy's financial and psychological territory, what must be offered, merged, or surrendered in relationship. The full and mature expression of Venus in the Second House requires engaging this polarity consciously, allowing the movement from the possessive Taurean stance of mine toward the transformative Scorpionic territory of ours — not abandoning the self but expanding it.

The Eighth House Mirror

The Second House represents what I have built, what I own outright, what anchors my sense of personal identity in the material world. The Eighth House represents what must pass through relationship — the partner's income brought into a shared household, the inheritance received from a parent who has died, the business partner's contribution that changes the shape of what I alone could build, the psychological materials of the self that must be offered, risked, and sometimes surrendered in genuine intimacy.

For Venus in the Second House individuals, Eighth House invitations arrive in characteristic forms: the intimate relationship that requires genuine financial entanglement and the vulnerability that comes with it. The business partnership that means yielding unilateral control over resources. The inheritance that arrives with strings of obligation or complicated grief. The financial crisis that strips away carefully accumulated possessions and forces a direct confrontation with the question that was always waiting beneath the accumulation: who am I without these things? These experiences are not punishments for enjoying beauty or building material security. They are the specific curriculum the universe delivers to this placement in its movement toward the second half of the life's work.

Liz Greene's extended meditation on Venus-Pluto dynamics in The Astrology of Fate addresses this territory with characteristic depth. The encounter between Venus's instinct toward beauty, harmony, and preservation and Pluto's demand for transformation, depth, and the dissolution of what has outlived its usefulness represents one of the most challenging and ultimately productive polarities in the chart. For Venus in the Second House, Pluto's domain — the Eighth House, shared resources, the underground rivers of shared value — is the necessary complement to everything Venus has built above ground. The encounter changes both. Venus teaches Pluto that beauty has worth. Pluto teaches Venus that the most enduring worth is not the kind that can be accumulated and held.

From Having to Being

The deepest integration available to Venus in the Second House — and it is genuine integration, not transcendence of the placement but maturation within it — involves a shift in the existential orientation from primarily having to primarily being. This does not mean renouncing material pleasure, surrendering aesthetic refinement, or pretending that economic security doesn't matter. It means discovering, through the particular experiences that life arranges for this placement, that the genuine Venusian gifts are qualities of consciousness rather than properties of possessions. They cannot be taken away. They are, in the most literal and philosophically serious sense, intrinsic worth.

The artist who has achieved this integration understands that even if every painting in their collection were destroyed, they would still be a painter — someone who sees the world in visual relationships of color, form, and light, and whose perception is itself a form of beauty. The culinary artist who has done this inner work knows that the capacity for refined pleasure in a perfect meal is a quality of their awareness and presence, not a function of the restaurant's price point or the wine's vintage. The person who has genuinely made this shift knows, in a way that does not require continuous reinforcement from the bank account, that their value is not indexed to their net worth.

Practical Pathways to Integration

This integration is not a single realization but an ongoing practice, developed through specific choices and orientations cultivated deliberately across years. Several pathways recur consistently in the lives of Venus in the Second House individuals engaged authentically with this work.

Generosity as spiritual discipline. Making regular and meaningful gifts — of time, resources, expertise, beauty, or simply genuine attention — begins to loosen the Taurean grip of mine and teaches the nervous system the lived truth that abundance is replenished rather than diminished by sharing. This is Venus moving toward its Libran expression: beauty and value created in and through relationship, not merely accumulated in isolation.

Distinguishing genuine pleasure from numbing consumption. Developing the capacity to notice the felt difference between eating with full sensory attention and pleasure versus eating compulsively as a management strategy for anxiety builds the authentic Venusian intelligence that is the placement's highest gift, while progressively reducing the shadow indulgence that merely mimics it. This is not a moral project; it is a perceptual one.

Cultivating non-material beauty. Bringing deliberate attentiveness to the beauty that costs nothing — light on water, the structure of a well-turned sentence, the architecture of a bird's flight, the quality of genuine laughter in a room — trains aesthetic intelligence toward what Forrest calls the real wealth: the intrinsic richness of conscious experience that no market can price and no circumstance can finally confiscate.

Working the Second/Eighth axis with conscious intention. Bringing honest attention to how one navigates shared resources in partnerships — financial, material, and emotional — transforms the polarity axis from a recurring site of friction into genuine ground for growth. Depth-psychological work, particularly approaches that engage the body as well as the mind, tends to prove especially effective for Venus in the Second House individuals working on the attachment patterns and worth-schemas that constitute the placement's characteristic shadow territory.

The destination is not a Venus who has been disciplined into austerity or who has learned to be suitably suspicious of beauty and pleasure. It is a Venus who has grown large enough to hold both poles of the axis simultaneously: someone who earns through genuine pleasure and genuine talent, who builds real material security from an inner sense of worth that preceded the security and will survive whatever changes it undergoes, who finds beauty everywhere and creates it deliberately in the world, and who holds the material realm with enough lightness that it can do what the finest things have always been meant to do — not to substitute for life, but to open us more fully to it.