Aries (March 20-April 19) — The conversation you’re having within a particular relationship may turn around suddenly, so don’t get yourself in a huff about anything. Keep listening, and pay attention when you do. You will benefit from the information you gather over the next two or three days. You may gain insight into certain key people in your life that you would be unlikely to have otherwise, and this will change not just your opinion but also your emotional orientation. Put simply, what you know will help you get along better with significant others in your life. What would help immensely is recognizing that you’re working for a common cause — the mutual improvement of your lives. It would be wise of you to work out any anger or resentment that you may feel, particularly toward women. Come to terms with your sentiments, find an appropriate time to have any necessary discussions, and resolve to forgive (especially yourself) and move on. You have greater things to look forward to than you’ve come to expect. Therefore, let go of your old expectations, and point your life forward.

 

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You seem determined to push forward with your creative plans, and you will make plenty of progress over the next few days if you keep your focus. That means a few things. One is to stay close to your motivation. Something is driving you forward, and it would be helpful to work with whatever that is. It might be something personal, such as emotional or sexual attraction. You might be driven by service and your need to do the right thing. You might have a message you want to get out. Whatever may be moving you, stay close to it both mentally and emotionally. Second, don’t let yourself be driven mad by the details. Attend to them as necessary, though that’s different from obsession. Said another way, keep your larger goals in mind and guide everything in that direction. Last, remember that all collaboration is about relationships, and that means relating. Efficiently iron out any misunderstandings. Be flexible and respectful of the authority of others. Be willing to contribute a little extra to the solution, and to help reduce any tension in the environment.

 

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Mercury, the Gemini planet, stations direct Friday in one of the sweet spots of your chart. I could describe the properties of Mercury in the first degree of Libra, such as some miracle of diplomacy, or solving a problem that defied all resolution. Yet there’s something much larger and more significant — which is to say, this involves your orientation on existence. Yes, you have one; you have a worldview, you have a perspective that influences everything you perceive and everything you believe. This is what’s changing; this is what’s awakening in a way that’s never quite happened before. Your life could pivot on something that seems small or insignificant; a single idea could lead you to reevaluate everything. Are you open to change on that scale? It would help immensely if you are. Longterm factors present in your chart are calling on you to be adaptable, particularly in your opinions. You may need to do this in the face of others who expect you to buy into their dogma or their own intractable position. Hang loose. Reality is not what it seems.

 

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — A few times recently I’ve brought up the theme of writing and how important it is for you this year (meaning, the year that Jupiter is in Virgo) — and I’m here with this topic once again. If you’ve found this to have some appeal, or if I’m saying something you already know, this is the weekend to connect with your mission. True, you’ll have others in the coming seasons, but few so effective as this particular moment. Remember that writing is a craft, much like carpentry. It is day-to-day, hour-to-hour work, and it can be great fun. Your raw materials are ideas, observations and personalities. If you’re not especially experienced with writing-as-craft, start with a small project, designed with a purpose, that you complete. Then move on to the next. If you are experienced, you’re ready for something more ambitious. You might start with a one-page treatment of your concept, and get started gathering or building your basic elements — character sketches, dialog or taking some research up one level into readable form. Meanwhile, as for your physical world, this is a great weekend to stay close to home and see what you discover and who you meet. You could not have a better time in Paris, London, Moscow or Mozambique, unless of course you already live there.

 

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — You may feel driven to get your finances in order, and you can make some progress doing that. However, something more immediate seems to be on your agenda — something new and unfamiliar that does not involve resolving much of anything from the past. This is one of those moments when it’s vital that you not allow old business or old ideas to influence your new dreams, desires and designs. This may be a challenge, as certain matters lingering over from your prior affairs are definitely trying to get your attention. They may or may not matter much in the near future; in any event, anything seemingly important can wait. Your new opportunity — whatever it is — is more sensitive to the passage of time and it has a specific window, which you’re about to enter. Unlike any activity or task that is a holdover from the past, you will need to get accustomed to being in unfamiliar territory with a thinner atmosphere. Not everything seems so certain; you have to make things up as you go along. Yet the pull or draw in that direction, the sense that you really need to begin this thing, is undeniable.

 

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — It’s not as complicated as it seems. You just need to sort out your feelings. Don’t dance around the main point, which seems to be anger. There’s a reason people are afraid of anger, which is that it contains power. I suggest you start by not meeting anger with fear and instead listen to what it’s telling you. If there’s something about being angry at women, or a specific woman (your mother, or someone else in a position of authority, whether now or in the past), be real about that with yourself. It will not help you at all to deny your emotions, or to take them out on yourself; you’ll only weaken yourself. The question is what to do with your feelings, and I would suggest that acknowledging them and the influence they’ve had over you is plenty. You may, however, notice that you’re making decisions from a different point of view. You might even pause for a few days and decide what you really want to do. Remember to write your agenda in pencil or on a chalkboard; it’s subject to change.

 

 

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — If you can set aside the idea that others are being critical of you, you will see that you’re the one being critical of yourself. However, this may turn up in some form that you don’t recognize, such as fear. You’ll help yourself greatly by observing your anxiety level (including in your dreams and upon awakening) and pausing long enough to figure out what’s really going on. You may have to move through a few layers of consciousness to do that; one issue is likely to mask another. From the look of your charts, you appear to be in a situation where you don’t see an easy way to resolve things, nor do you see an easy way out. You may be wondering if you’re actually trapped somehow. If you’re in a trap, it’s psychological, which would include emotional. There are some old patterns involved. The most important things you can do are to observe yourself carefully and look for those patterns, which may go back a very long way. Remember that you are no longer a child and don’t need to respond as one. You have your adult powers, including the ability to make choices. Remind yourself of that, and get some options in front of you, and you will feel better.

 

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — You may notice that people are responding to you more than usual — that is, hearing what you say, or at least recognizing that you said something; noticing you in public; perhaps responding to you more vocally in online environments. If you haven’t observed this happening, you might step up your presence a notch or two and be just slightly more open about how you’re feeling. This can include with yourself, in the form of not intentionally suppressing — or worse, rationalizing — your emotions away. You may feel especially vulnerable dropping these defenses. You may feel like you’re suddenly subject to the wrath of others. Something else is more likely: you will be in a much better position to negotiate. Indeed you may feel like you’ve discovered the secret ingredient that brings you to the same level as others. This whole thing about denial and rationalization as mental processes that render others superior to you deserves a good close look, such as if you were to write a novel about it. For now, you have a tool to work with, one that will help you maintain level ground with the people in your life.

 

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — The next few days arrive with a rare alignment that gives you many ingredients you need to move your life forward. You might begin by identifying the areas where you feel like you’re held back. This in turn would help you focus your priorities. There are some aspects of your life where you are making steady progress and others where you seem to be lagging behind. The areas where you feel like you’re moving slowly are not as stuck as you may think. Much of what you need is a bold, clear assessment of your existence, your priorities and your sense of the future. Put one way, you need clear goals; and if you take some time today and through the weekend to focus some of those, you will discover later on that they were prescient. Your planets have you aligned with your future so well that you can look right at it and see it clearly. Notice what you can visualize. Notice what you can feel. Notice what makes you curious. Those are signs that you have vitality and passion behind your ideas.

 

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — You know you’re capable of great things. The question is, what is standing between you and your potential? If you’re asking that, your mind is starting to come into focus. Though you’re a Capricorn, famous for getting things done, it would appear that applying discipline to a specific idea is what you must focus on. It’s not enough to have good ideas, and it’s not enough to be busy all the time. It’s essential to take a larger task, in this case a specific goal, and break it down into smaller steps, and complete each of those steps one at a time. This is about efficiency more than anything; there are a limited number of hours in the day, and a finite number of years in your life. If you find yourself acting like you have time to spare, you need to re-focus your mind and get back to those specific steps. The good news is that you’re in an excellent position to actually do this, rather than merely wanting to, or thinking about doing so. You’re at a point of beginning where you can strike a difficult balance between taking care of the present and taking care of the future. Yet in the long run you must be willing to come back to the task at hand every day, and maintain vigilant awareness of your priorities.

 

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You may not adhere to any religion, preferring your own version of the cosmic order, based on your own inquiry into life. That is a sign of intelligence; you don’t need to run your body and soul on someone else’s operating system when you can write your own. Here is the place where anyone who is really thinking falls off the wagon of the dot-org, ism-obsessed version of spiritual reality: it almost always prioritizes an abstract relationship (with a seemingly non-incarnated entity) above the connections we have with one another. True, religion pays lip service to ‘love thy neighbor’, but we see how well that works in the corporate version of spiritual life. You seek connection with the divine through connection to humans and other critters, to society and through self-awareness. Nearly all religion is set up to deny the obvious benefits of living in actual contact with yourself and your world. It’s designed to drive people’s lives through guilt into a state of desperation, leading them to seek something ‘greater than themselves’. As part of living your own way, the most vital clue from your chart involves cultivating your own ideas about relationship, on your own terms. For you, that is the message of this Mercury station direct.

 

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Some people have a lot of weird ideas about sex. Some have nearly no ideas about sex. And a few people have some coherent, helpful ideas about sex. Right now you’re being invited into this third category, which will require you to question what most people are terrified to do: take charge of your own agreements. Everything that’s not a criminal act of some kind depends on an agreement, an understanding or some kind of contractual arrangement. Right now there is festering rage (particularly in American culture) about sex occurring outside the context of an agreement. There is a remedy to that, which is being the master of your interpersonal contracts. To do this well, you must question what you believe, which invariably takes you deeper into questioning who and what you are. That, I believe, is the controversy: to have an honest agreement, you must be in contact with your values, your desires and your needs, and unabashedly so. It’s easier to get overpowered. It’s easier to manipulate. It’s easier to compromise with your values — in the short term. Right now, you have an opportunity to put out what’s absolutely true about you, and in particular your ideas about sex, and get some positive result. This particular window opening up is rare enough, but I think you can squeeze through and come out on the other side.