Dear Madame,

Help! I just discovered I have Venus in Aquarius. While that explains a lot about (what I think) is my progressive spirit, it doesn’t do a damned thing for my love life. In fact, after picking up a few astrology books at the local Barnes and Noble and looking through them, I really don’t like what’s said about my Venus! Thank god the men I date don’t read them, or I wouldn’t get any responses at all.

Cold? Clinical? Weirdo? Well, I embrace “weirdo” since I’m old enough to accept my differences, but I really do have a beating heart beneath my apparent metal casing. Am I doomed to the “friend zone” as my kid would say, or will I only find the love of my book club ladies? This feels cruel, really.
— Not a robot

Dear lovely human,

The Moon will enter Leo Friday, the sign of your partnership house, so we’re having a highly appropriate conversation here. Good timing!

Venus in Aquarius is indeed a tricky Venus. If you dig into the old astrology books, you’ll learn that Venus is supposedly wet and warm and moist and fertile. (The old dudes clearly knew nothing about the true nature of the planet Venus’ climate.) So Venus loves it when she travels through signs that are also wet and warm, or at least a little drippy.

And there’s that word, “drippy.” All that moisture makes Aquarius cringe! Aquarius is a dry, cool, airy sign. Drips need not apply. Which in your case, is an excellent thing because drips are boring and the last thing you want is boredom.

But as you say, you’re also as human as the next woman and possess a beating heart that wants love as much as the next woman. So let’s talk about what Venus brings to the dinner table of partnerships.
Firstly, and probably most importantly, your partner must be interesting. You define “interesting.” That’s key, because you’re not typically attracted to someone who follows the norm of any culture or subculture for long.

You may, in fact, be otherwise happy in a conservative milieu, but you’ll always be drawn to the questioning types. When the pastor’s daughter gets married, everyone buys dishware off the registry, but you buy her a copy of the Kama Sutra. If everyone drinks Coke at the restaurant, you’ll start a conversation with the gal drinking Pepsi. It’s just like that all the time.

The question is why? Why are you so attracted to difference? I could go on and on about how cerebral you are, how “airy” and how dispassionate your Venus is, how given to humanitarian, egalitarian causes, but you could get that from any book. Sure you’re curious. But what are you curious about?

For that, let’s look at your Venus’ partnership house — the sign of Leo.

Could it be that you’re simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by every go-getter who ever threw a spotlight on their face? All that pushiness! All that obvious pandering to the crowd! Brass balls, indeed. Why would someone put themselves out like that? Tacky.

Or is it? For all her humanitarianism, an Aquarian Venus is still looking outside in on the human condition. But you’re just as much a human as the rest. You have a heart! And the heart of humans is what you’re here to love on.

Yet what is it about a Hallmark card that turns you off? Perhaps all that mushy stuff isn’t so distasteful as much as intimidating.
Getting in touch with your inner Leo is KEY. Time to flip the formula and slip yourself into a little sparkly golden number.

Here are a couple of experiments for you.

Buy a little something golden. Maybe a piece of amber or citron. Wear it around for a week. Or buy a warm yellow vase and stick it in the middle of your dining room table. Go visit the lions in the zoo and sketch them. Hang out with kids. Make funny faces and silly noises with them. Giggle a lot. Sing “You Are My Sunshine.”

Or how about this? Buy a fuzzy sweater dripping in paillettes, slip on some Whitney Houston (or Mick Jagger, Jerry Garcia, Tony Bennett, Robert Plant or Tori Amos) and rock it HARD in your living room. Step out from the chorus line, and cast yourself as the STAR. What about belly dancing lessons? Burlesque classes?

If none of this appeals, crack open a chapter on Leos in your astro book and pick one thing you like about them. Underline that thing. And then PRACTICE it.

Here’s my point. We tend to seek people with the qualities of our 7th house signs, assigning those qualities to ‘complete’ us. And dear, that may work for a couple of years into the relationship, but by year three, we’re done. You may have already discovered this.

For your Aquarius Venus, it wants a Leo Mars. Or a Leo Moon. Or just a Leo. It wants someone who’s willing to stand OUT. Someone with the courage and heart to be different.

But no one’s born to play just one role, and we do ourselves a great harm by casting our 7th house sign as the person to fulfill all our partnership needs. At some point we get the message we are our own partners. When we embrace both sides of every planetary archetype, we get a fuller picture of our inner lives. We can’t be typecast.

Right now Jupiter is in Leo — as is transiting Venus. Now’s the time to practice incorporating a little jazz into your Venus routine. It’ll feel really weird at first, but you have a thing for weird, so this is just a new weird. This is just rehearsal.

As you ease into your inner Leo, remember the point is to touch hearts and warm minds. If you find a few things you genuinely love, that love will make you GLOW. That new glow, along with your inbuilt love of letting people be themselves, will make an unforgettable impression on anyone you meet. You’ll soon be ready to meet and greet like a superstar!

XX,
Madame Z

Any given time in your life has a particular quality of tone. That quality is always a combination of things. Your perception and focus are a big part of your reality. There are usually some fundamental issues going on underneath everything else — like health, food, shelter and survival.

Finally, there are often overtones that vary with place, time, relational patterns and seasonal cycles.

Astrology can help you perceive and understand the tone and timbre of your life (often in relation to other lives) because you live here on Earth.

Earth, in turn, is part of a system called solar. Hence, so are you.

Any system (including the solar system) is defined by the fact that one part can convey information harmonically resonant with any other part, and with the system as a whole.

Nearly all systems of astrology derive their information from the cycles and patterns exhibited by the apparent motion of the Sun, Moon and at least some of the planets that make up the solar system.

By the same token, nearly all systems of astrology will (at least upon occasion) take points outside the solar system into account as part of the harmonic whole. This week is just such an occasion. It is one of those times because the Gemini Sun always opposes the Galactic Core (GC) in Sagittarius at this time of year. This year, however, that opposition will implicitly come to pass with an unusually energetic tone, which is likely to carry over to your life in some way.

As with all opposition aspects, that from the Sun to the center of our “Milky Way” galaxy finds Earth moving between the two points in question; this aspect will be exact on Thursday shortly before 11:05 am EDT / 15:05 UTC, but is in effect now. The alignment is symbolically represented by the Sun and GC on opposite sides of the zodiac. Unlike any other time in recent memory, however, another planet besides Earth is part of the composition: Mars.

Mars will be lending its distinguishing ruddy color to the overall tone of the annual opposition from the Sun to the Galactic Core on Thursday. Not that you will be able to see it. The visual countenance of Mars is still lost in the solar glare from our perspective. Nonetheless, you should be able to anticipate and detect a Martian timbre in this year’s alignment of the Earth, Sun and GC, because Mars will be a functional part of the composition.

As Robert Hand succinctly put it, “Mars is an energy planet.” The Martian emblem of energy was in an exact conjunction to (sharing the same degree of Gemini with) the Sun only two days ago, when Mars was precisely on the other side of the Sun from Earth. This week, that conjunction remains close enough to serve as an energetic overtone of emphasis on what the annual alignment of the Earth, Sun and Galactic Core have always represented: the prelude to a new season.

That’s because the Galactic Core, like a star, is basically a fixed point. It does not move through the signs. Over a very long term of nearly 26 thousand years, the precessional “wobble” of Earth’s axis will make the GC appear to move through the signs, but for all intents and purposes from the perspective of your life, the center of our galaxy is continuously situated near the very end of mutable Sagittarius.

Hence, the Gemini Sun’s annual opposition to the center of our galaxy always means that the Sun is also just a few days away from entering the cardinal sign of tropical Cancer. When the Sun enters Cancer, it always precipitates the crescendo of apparent northward solar motion called a solstice, and initiates a new season for everybody on Earth at the same time — a metaphorically new movement in the cyclical symphony of seasons.

Because of Mars, this year’s prelude to the new season initiated on June 21 looks as though it will come with a tone more dynamic than is typical for the days before the Cancer solstice. Implied is something more like Beethoven at his most bombastic than Mozart at his most muted.

In anticipation of such an energetic prelude to what is always a notable solstice crescendo, you should prepare to pace yourself. Don’t get unconsciously caught up and burned out before the weekend arrives. Rather, be the muting influence in your own life. Take it easy with your own tone. Make it somewhat less than strident. Allow yourself to breathe between beats. That way, you will stand a better chance of entering a new season with rhythm and harmony come next week.

Offered In Service

Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.

By Amanda Moreno

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about comfort. It’s a theme that has been implicated in many ways as I deal with living in a city with a rapidly rising cost of living, while trying to build a practice in the ‘healing arts’.

Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day

My general go-to emotional state at this point is one of either apathy or depression — depression in the sense of being out of touch with my heart and soul as I get stuck in the inertia of making ends meet.

Sometimes I just get cranky and annoyed, especially as I realize I’m living the cliché of, “oh yeah, youth are idealistic, but once you get to a certain age you have to give up your dreams and just realize that the 9-5 job is what pays the bills and allows you to be comfortable.”

At the collective level, I’m seeing the comfort theme rise up in a multitude of ways. Didn’t spirituality and religion used to fill the role of providing people with comfort? Wasn’t there comfort to be found in finding big-picture meaning, or just solace that some mysterious ‘other’ was listening and supporting?

Now that belief in the mysterious other has been deemed largely infantile, we find comfort in swaddling ourselves in the glow of huge screens; and perhaps, if we’re ‘progressive’, some $80 yoga pants as well. That’s not the comfort I’m looking for at this point at all. I’d just like to be able to afford to live where I work, eat fresh food, keep good walking shoes on my feet, and retreat to the mountains or ocean occasionally.

It seems that in many ways, at the same time as our vital mechanisms for meaning-making have been eradicated from mainstream culture, our souls are waking up; which can be a scary thing when there is no reference point. As we stumble into our futures we are still accompanied by salvation mentality, in which we are waiting for some thing out there to come save us rather than actively co-creating our futures.

At the same time, my understanding is that we have all of these deep soul memories of cataclysm, natural disaster, war and chaos that are being triggered. As these memories awaken, we no longer have the constructs to deal with them in any way but the superficial, or perhaps medical. I’m somehow suddenly surrounded by people facing medical crises and sudden physical symptoms that then often seem to just ‘magically disappear’, after blood tests or x-rays show abnormalities. Underneath it all seems to be this rippling fear, sometimes speaking of loss of control, loss of comfort, loss of mortality.

As the earth shakes, which I’m told is happening with increasing frequency, it’s triggering those big fears of suffering and loss experienced after eruptions and quakes or hurricanes. Or perhaps it’s the trauma of being in a village suddenly attacked by outsiders. It’s my belief that we all hold these memories within us, and as events on the outside trigger the trauma held in our energetic or genetic fields, our emotional and physical bodies can respond as if the core trauma is happening all over again.

I’ve been thinking about the ways in which landscapes hold the memories of the events that have occurred within them. Craig Chalquist has done some work with Terrapsychology, and the energy held by the land that then sculpts the human-made landscapes and experiences. It’s fascinating stuff. On the surface, we can rebuild after cataclysm, but the land and the space hold the energy, which affects the populations that inhabit the land moving forward.

I look around at what is going on in my fair city, with its 75 active cranes in the city’s core and skyrocketing rents, and I marvel at how quickly entire sections of the city’s culture are being bulldozed. I’m reminded of something I once read in a book by James Hillman. He was overdramatizing a bit, as we all tend to do, and speaking of the function that capitalism thrives on–– creative destruction.

Hillman pointed towards the WWII era and the destruction of cities, many of which were entirely leveled, as the prototype for our current development trends. The landscapes in WWII Europe held the trauma of sudden air raids, but at least the people had a reference point for understanding what was happening. The images they were seeing of rubble and chaos could be attributed to the war, senseless as it might be.

Then the war stopped, but the destruction of the cityscapes continued, as signs of ‘progress’ this time: the leveling of the old to make way for the new; heaps of rubble, holes in the ground all erasing history and memories. We’ve internalized an acceptance that destruction is necessary to make way for creation.

I type that and realize that that transition is something I discuss regularly as a positive thing, at least at the psychic level. But that’s the difference — it IS at the psychic level, and is seen as a facilitator to positive change. Our cultural tendency towards concretizing and literalizing psychic and emotional processes without understanding the links between the inner and the outer is disconcerting at best — and absolutely perilously destructive at worst. The capitalistic premise of creative destruction spirals outward without limit, with the reference point being that ‘progress’ is good and that newer is better.

There are certainly comforts of the modern world that are beneficial, and many that are frivolous that I wouldn’t want to do without. It seems like we might be able to maintain ways of living with our desired quality of life, with all of our creature comforts, if we could resurrect a worldview that values imagination and critical thinking. If we brought meaning back into life using those old spiritual systems as a springboard, and combined that with our scientific knowledge, might we start heading towards comfort at all levels?

Basic trauma theory, or at least my semi-professional synopsis of it, says that trauma is held in the body and in impulses that were not able to be completed at the time of the trauma. This leaves the individual in a state of constantly magnetizing similar situations so that the body, mind and soul have the opportunity to complete the impulse and resolve the trauma.

Ours is a culture that seems to compulsively create destruction while at the same time being compulsively drawn to comfort — the lure of which is pretty strong when we’re considering a population with so much collective experience with PTSD. It’s time to stare that compulsion in the face, dig deep to face it, and work together to get through destructive phases. Then, perhaps, we can get on over it already.

By Sarah Taylor

What seems clear in this week’s reading is that there has been a clearing.

The Tower in the near-past position, at left, forms the foundation to this particular part of your ongoing story — and I use the word “foundation” advisedly: The Tower is nothing less than the archetype that sweeps clean right down to your foundations.

The Tower, Ten of Cups, Ace of Disks from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

Its Martian energy comes at the culmination of a build-up of false dreams and edifices that reach ridiculous heights. It is at this point that the illusion can no longer sustain itself.

Everything that lacked grounding, that lacked a bondedness to integrity, is torn down and away, leaving a dust cloud as the earth tremors in the after-shocks.

I know a lot of people fear The Tower. I do not any longer. I have lived through enough Tower moments, where I am aware of its work in my life, to know that, although uncompromising when it makes its appearance, that refusal to compromise takes nothing that still feeds my Soul with life-blood.

More than that: it paves the way for an increased flow of life-blood because obstacles have been removed. The Star, which comes after The Tower, is indicative of this re-connection to inspiration.

So where does that bring you now? Into the realm of the Ten of Cups. Cups are associated with water, and emotions — our own watery natures. But here, there is a closer correlation with The Tower than there would be with any of the other Cups cards. Because we are dealing with the Ten, we have another culmination. The Tower is bringing us into a shift, away from the Ten and into the final card, the Ace of Disks.

But first, the Ten.

The Ten of Cups’ title of “Satiety” is apt: to be sated is to be filled up. The process of filling may be pleasant — the breast as the largest element in the card attests to that possibility — but the implied message is clear: it is time to move on. Acknowledge what you have received; acknowledge that you have fed from something to your heart’s content. And now it is time to take what that has given you, and shift it.

Let’s define “heart’s content” a little, though. Because what you feed on will not always feel like it is either nourishing or pleasant. But it will have been what you needed — even if what you needed was something that told you that you have had enough — or, “Enough!” You might be sated; you might have “had it up to here.”

Tens are the point of release that indicate you have reached ‘tarot suit saturation point’. With the Ten of Cups, you no longer need to suckle from a particular emotional breast. You no longer need emotional nourishment from a particular source — a source that possibly has its roots way back when — and that the time is getting close to overdue for you to unlatch and release yourself.

Is this a childlike habit you are facing — a form of solace that, while comforting, keeps you in the same place in your life?

Is this a desire to reach for something, or someone, that you identify as nurturer — when, in fact, the moment has arrived when you are able to spread your wings and offer that to yourself and to others?

What comes through strongly in this reading is that Mars is responsible for moving you through that period of clearing, and a current time of integration of your own inner child, and towards a possibility that is grounded in something more in keeping with who you are, and infinitely more precious: look at how the compact disk of the Ten becomes the Ace of Disks in the final card.

“Success.”

The Ace of Disks seems to be hewn from hematite, named after the Greek word for “blood” — the life-blood that starts to flow as a result of The Tower. You are standing on a foundation — one with aligned integrity — of your own, inner, creative life-blood. It is the kind of life-blood that brings things into form.

You are one powerful mutha right now! Yes, that’s right: you are mother. You are mothering yourself. You are mothering your own material, tangible life into existence. One that has an integrity that you can feel simply by standing where you are and sinking into the core of what supports you, and aspiring to your own light — the one that feels simultaneously distant and yet so utterly connected to you.

Time to start building. Not rebuilding. Building. Something new. Something you. Reach for it, because it is there. It wants to meet you halfway. It is only by putting your hand up to the mirror that the mirror reaches back to you.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Tower (Mars), Ten of Cups (Mars in Pisces), Ace of Disks (the pure, infinite potential of earth)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.