Horoscopes | Week of December 20, 2004-January 2, 2005

Please note: These horoscopes are good for two weeks. There will be no update on Dec 27.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): No use in feigning temperance for whichever specific enthusiasms are fantastically floating your boat as of late… even if you: say what they don't want to hear, drive them crazy, force the conversation and/or dwell on the issue. The boldness in the air cuts through the coat you're wearing, and any other meager protective coverings, stimulating the heat in interactions on matters that really matter. I can't speak for what will happen when your feverish flames of philosophic feeling meet up with blazing bloviations from your intellectually admonishing adversaries, only that the potential for unanticipated eruptions (at you or from you) is in direct proportion to how shut off you are to admitting the applicability of alternative frameworks of understanding. In other words, the more insistent you are that you're solely right, the madder one or both of you will get… obvious, perhaps, but worth restating for emphasis during this intensely Sagittarian moment. Don't hold back, but listen as you would hope to be listened to. Be satisfied in knowing you're right—and let them be right too, if only for their own satisfaction.

 

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Going straight into the eyes of brewing interpersonal storms is the bravest way to support your fulfillment of duties… for what are our involvements in the sorting-through of interpersonal garbage, if not a duty to ourselves to wade in the thick muck of others' issues so they will swim around in ours? Though we are unhappy alone, we may feel our loneliest at those worst moments of heightened intimacy, vulnerability and/or confrontation, another person within such close range that her/his breath is on our face. The mother lode of spiritual good-luck, Taurus, can be found through integrating psychological struggles into your pragmatically-oriented list of things to get done, such that you deeply and truly refuse to separate the maintenance of flourishing relationships from the other jobs necessary for a healthy efficient lifestyle and rewarding professional achievement. Sure, people may be a pain, but so is taking out the trash… you've got to deal with both or you won't believe the stink.

 

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The best benefit to have gained from these recent weeks, purposefully or not, is to have put it all out there on the table with partners, lovers, friends or foes… and/or there's still more to come. What's sitting out there could be incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent or absolutely positively the truth, but what matters most is the relation between you and the information—it came from you, and continues to spill out. Acknowledge no need for pretending. Don't act or speak from the (condescending?) urge to protect someone else from your genuine sentiment. We are all responsible for ourselves. We'll do just fine in managing our feelings for you, should they prove incompatible with yours for us. But, as I hope you're coming to see, we cannot love you purely or accept pure love from you without knowing what other emotions share the airspace. Otherwise, lines get crossed and messages intercepted. Let's aim for clear reception both directions, regardless of the content of the broadcast.

 

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cutting through the bullshit throughout the holidays and into the New Year, Cancer, requires regularly recognizing the connection between (a) the range of your moods and the periodicity of their swings and (b) the manner in which you treat the physical casing known as your body. This physical/emotional connection is always in place, but it's particularly important to honor it now, as a lineup of no-time-for-crap planets in your 6th house favorably aspects expansion in your self-compassion, should you successfully curtail the potential pitfalls of quick-cycling sensitivities. Continue to model emotional fortitude by bravely choosing habits that support physical wellness, as if declaring, 'I am that important,' and you will feel with more confident ownership. Continue prioritizing basic enjoyment of your life, but don't confuse self-destructive practices with real fun. All in all, you are a better peer to us when you are a more lovingly independent soul, and we will learn to treat you as you teach us to by example. Kindness is not merely an attitude, but a set of behaviors. Don't you deserve the glow of kind, healthful attention?

 

LEO (July 23-August 22): There is no good reason not to strive for 'life of the party' status this holiday season, Leo. Your usual lively cheer is being boosted by Mercury, Venus and Mars in fiery sister-sign Sagittarius, fanning the friskiness in your favorite flavors and spurring you to strike up a song or two in hopes we'll sing along. It would be futile to thwart the theatricality in your priceless portrayals, and we who fear the plague of holidaytime familial intrusions welcome the distraction and the entertainment you promise. We love you for loving us enough to put it on the line, after a few too many mimosas or sober as the driven snow, just to keep us smiling and stomping. It's exactly what we all need. If one or more miserly curmudgeons decides to stonewall your celebration and perform 'put out by your presentation', let 'em grumble and groan… then try your best not to single out the stubborn scrooge for extra joking jabs. The temptation could be great to tirelessly teasingly torture those not on board with everyone else's joyous juju, but fun had at someone's expense is no fun at all and void as prohibited.

 

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): You need all the caring self-nurturance and support you can muster, going into the turning of the year with an exaggerated dose of private emotionality, easily aggravated by unresolved pasts rising to the surface through contacts with family and friends. Do not lament the appearance of unsettledness, even if it increases the difficulty in handling social obligations with the requisite surface-level peace and goodwill. What churns within is a source of great personal wealth, though you're unlikely to be able to exchange it for cold hard cash and spend it tomorrow or the next day. You're equally unlikely to want to slow down the internal processing enough to adequately detail its convoluted emotional intricacies when explaining yourself to someone else. You possess everything you need inside your humble self to start the new year out right—with a self-contained tilling of the soil, freshening your be-here-now presence by knowing exactly what you're feeling. Welcome it. It will not overwhelm you. And share it only out of desire or obligation to yourself, not just because they want you to. Trust yourself to know.

 

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): My reserve of Libran lieutenants, you have been called up for duty in the war against dull lulls in conversation because of your special training in the art of keeping it going. Please report to duty in every awkward gap and sluggish exchange, and relieve us from our apparent incapacity for the required diplomatic gestures, before we go and offend each other in defense of ourselves. The small-talk itself must be made bigger, to take up more space and to envelope any simmering intensities within its creature comforts. You must obey the commanding officer's order to lead the forces to safety, doing what you already do but without escaping glaring notice on our radar—the good-ol' you, only louder and more recognizably willful—gaining a fuller sense of your unique strengths in the process. Any excess amounts of extroversion should be expended in service to expressing why life is always worth it, if for the entertainment value alone. We will benefit greatly from your service, and we'll show mad love through mysterious returns on your investment, in areas where you may be lacking. Thank you in advance for brave fulfillment of your enlisted duties… now, tell us again how cute our hair looks and how lucky we are to have such great weather.

 

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): I ask you to consider methods in which you can continue to practice your excellence in getting what you want—without necessarily trying to get what you want from someone. I know this sounds like a near-impossible challenge to meet, when it seems like everything worth having is guarded by some gatekeeper who holds the power to either grant your wish or dash your hopes, based on whether he determines you worthy. Someone must hire you for the job, accept your offer on the house or agree to go on that dinner date, right? Still, Scorpio, it's the intention with which you pursue your desires that I'm talking about here. Stay focused on what you can do for yourself, on how the skills and talents and values you possess can be deployed toward obtaining a specific objective, rather than on the battle of wills between you and the hypothetical individual standing in your path to satisfaction. Nobody should need convincing. The sum total of you and what you bring to the table is enough to make the obvious outcome rise into being.

 

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): As of these two weeks, Mercury, Venus and Mars—not to mention long-term occupant Pluto—will all be convening and communing in your sign, which has the combined result of lots of activity with very little outside perspective. That is, for this passing period, it will appear as if it's all about you. Mercury turning direct indicates that you're just beginning to figure out what it all means, but there's no need to be hasty in drawing conclusions. Significant events continue to transpire. Heaping hunks of attention continue to end up on your doorstep. The desire to act, speak, think and move as you see fit intensifies into virtually uncontrollable territory. I hesitate to place any value judgments whatsoever on this concentration of planetary energy in Sag, for you can use it for tremendously social, romantic, intellectual, practically productive or creatively inspirational purposes… or merely to drive everyone else motherfuckin' mad. The only thing I will tell you not to do is sit still. As Rod Stewart once said, 'Young hearts, be free tonight.' There should be plenty of stimuli out there to keep you from the same-old-same-old.

 

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): When there's a lot of stuff going on in the 12th house, as there is for my Capricorn crazies right now, you can expect an extraordinarily rich dose of activity in the unconscious, subconscious, super-conscious and barely-conscious realms of life. Parts of your personality are percolating in privacy, preparing to come out once the new year gets going. After all, the season of your birthday has begun, and you are already putting together the pieces of your next year's incarnation in some degree of psychic seclusion, whether aware of it or not. Hopefully, you're meditating on the hopes for emerging a more fully healed self-and-other, both a more satisfied individual soul and a more present equal-partner, during the course of the upcoming year… rather than seeking to escape your current reality through delusions of grandeur or self-medicated merry. Extra attention to dreams, visions and glimpses of spiritual illogic will reap cosmic clues for achieving these hopes. For these next couple weeks, the fog is thick but the beacon's light shines bright—the beacon is you, and the light is born from faith. Listen from within, and take notes. More relief begins in another couple weeks.

 

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): An Aquarian was recently overheard explaining his relation to the character of his sign: 'I love humanity… I just can't stand people.' The Aquarian truism he revealed, of course, is how beautiful the rainbow tapestry of human diversity looks from the abstracted aerial view—and how potentially menacing each thread of personhood appears, once you're close enough to ferret out its flaws and poke around in its poisonous passions. But these loose threads are living breathing feeling beings, and you are one of them. And unfortunately, I simply can't allow you to indulge such an inauthentic love for humanity, if you insist on retaining such literal detachment from the individual folks who comprise it. Dive into the pool, and surround yourself with those very living breathing feeling beings you fear will spy the qualities in you that you find most menacing and noxious… because that's it, you know… you are the 'people' you can't stand. Be among them, be of them, and let them show you the compassion—and truthfulness—you lack for yourself.

 

PISCES (February 19-March 20): I can't get away from last week's horoscope for you, Pisces, because now there's even more outer-world, profession-related, achievement-oriented action going down, with Mars joining Mercury, Venus and Pluto in your 10th house. I'm not exactly sure that your current career/public-life situation can avoid being disrupted by the tumultuous revolution of identity (i.e, Uranus in your 1st) in which you're currently embroiled. The less conscious you are of said revolution, the greater the potential for unexpected disruption. Any holidaytime vacation from the professional grind could be an advantageous godsend, heading off possible conflict… beware of explosive reactions, should you fail to get the anticipated paid time off, Christmas bonus or other token of respect from authority. Over these couple weeks, force a self-admission of which dreams are being overlooked, and which inauspicious circumstances being submissively swallowed, so you can bust forward toward greater satisfaction in the new year. Otherwise, I repeat, the verdict is likely to crash down on you from outside.