Horoscopes | Week of March 22-28, 2004

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In case the past weekend's double-fantasy Spring Equinox (when the Sun entered Aries) and New Moon (with the Sun and Moon conjunct in Aries) wasn't enough of an event to properly trumpet a 'new you' into being in the world's eyes, then you've simply got to use this upcoming week to force the mental recalibration to happen. Use your words for hypnotic effect on yourself and others, creating belief out of tentativeness. Describe what you've spent your last few months doing in the desired terms necessary for becoming an embodiment of your higher ideals. Yes, you see you have already been accomplishing a healthy chunk of what you've dreamt. Don't be less than explicit in speech, just because the potentially painfully disruptive impact on how the public perceives you is terrifying. It's time to be as free with the breezily-bonafide momentary summaries you utter as you've been in your recent actions. Allow your mouth and mind to guide you in abrupt turns away from any invisible or elusive imagined imprisonments.

 

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Stay in motion. Keep producing small, quick, varied and tactilely real examples of your abilities, as only evidenced through social experimentation. Altering your defined role also involves taking a step or two back from the fray. You can get a better view of the whole picture, while they on their end wind up with a more generalized outline of you, a couple memorably oddball characteristics sticking out to imprint you in their heads. A keyword for Taureans this week is 'unfettered', combining individuality, independence and the active removal of chains binding you too tightly to any single buoy. Don't forget the ruling goddess Venus still glimmers in your sign for another couple weeks. Thank her for the extra goodness, and show some respect by accepting her gifts in the form of admirers and other interested parties. Shunning the attention is like slapping Venus in the face, while abusing it to soothe uncomfortable power dynamics, through subtle domination or deference, is like time-traveling backward toward the destination of Stuck. Tighten up the strings on leaky emotions to become a freer soul available for fateful dalliance into newer, more delightful trouble.

 

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Can you pilot your bustling Mars-in-Gemini life activities like a crazy driver on the freeway—fast, furious, weaving slickly around obstacles—without getting into an accident? Will you effectively light the bomb and welcome the explosion, yet usher yourself and other affected parties safely out of the way of falling shrapnel? Hang your professional or outer-world-reputation banner on the flagpole in the middle of town, grab a rifle and shoot holes in it. Let the townspeople, even the mayor, hear the shots and ask what you're doing. The act of describing in context helps position you, drawing on the intensity of certain key relationships and/or transforming them (i.e., deepening, cementing, killing or maiming), vexing everyone mildly. Vexation allows discomfort to do its job. Keep moving, in swift totalizing strokes, creatively excising blocks in your path to professional freedom by visualizing desired effects first to prevent a free-for-all chaos from emerging. Even anarchy requires guidelines; for you, they are career goals, short- and long-term.

 

CANCER (June 21-July 22): If this week proves in any way to be a moody one, please do your best to ride it out without suppressing the feelings nor acting out to try to ditch or overpower them. If self-doubt stops you in your tracks, maybe you needed the rest—a brief breather, not permission to abandon ship. If frustration is involved, don't let it drive you into automatic, unconscious or evasive actions. Put a box around the swirl of watery feelings, trapping fear outside the gates of the main event, then dive headfirst in for a dip in the pool. Feel without permitting violence or aggression to manifest. Owning feeling is a must for controlling unseen eruptions. Sometimes the best action appears to be no action, as it occurs in meditative wonderland and releases energy without magnetically entrapping elements of the real world. Shine outwardly, bitch and whine and grieve and cry with some decorum, and dance the interstitial limbo of not holding on too tight and not lashing out.

 

LEO (July 23-August 22): 'I am a fervent artist and lover brimming with passion. As my proverbial loins tingle, I'm moved toward off-the-cuff discourse, listing these philosophical ethics that reflect my devotion… life's madness is freeing, though mad… I fight on behalf of the group, and I fight against the group. These are separate instances, though both hold true, depending on the day and the circumstance… To welcome the intimacy I covet, I release attempts to hold it and ask for sharing through inter-/independence. Some will hate me. Some will adore me. Neither's press should I believe nor scorn completely… I am finding my way in the world, knowing certain bridges should be burned or blown up, not allowed to decay, for it takes so long to watch something rot and I have contracts for other projects in the empty spaces… Ah, to desire embrace, to reach for it and be willing to let it go, to believe it will return or not, or another more fitting scenario to arrive, forged without too much will and the thankful random order of the entire system…'

 

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): At first, I was going to write you something that pertained to the theme of 'biding your time'. But then I took a second look and realized the timing was slightly off on that notion. You might indeed be spending much of April doing just that, holding off on the final presentation of well-formed self-defining precepts until the revisions indicated by Mercury retrograde (Apr 6-30) are complete. Still, you have a few moments left in which to squeeze one or two forward-moving pushes, as related to your worldly accomplishments and always-still-being-earned public reputation. You simply must do what you're going to do in this realm, the detractors whose relationships with you are threatened as a result be damned. To withhold this boost of rebellious assertion of your outer-world goals is to do energetic harm to yourself, to invite the very people from whom you seek to bolt to sink their clutches deeper in. The deeper the clutches, the more shocked you'll be by the uncontrollable ferocity of anger coursing through your body. No, you don't want to hold this in. Act as you see fit to further your authoritative aspirations, then sit back and let your mind digest the status changes and the subsequent interpersonal aftereffects. April will give you the time you need to reform and restrategize in retrospect.

 

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): Standing paralyzed in the long door-studded corridor of the headquarters, you cannot decide which door to knock on, what room of which people sit behind it and what sorts of opportunities await. It's a passing paralysis, challenging the Libran nature to see the benefits of both sides, since you can only walk through one door at a time (even if the others will still be available when you're 'done'). Beneath the seeming indecision fostered by well-thought-out reasons for every option, a magically senseless river of intuition easily carves the clearest channel through the rock. See if you can't block out the influence of our social world and find the answer of your deepest desire from a self-imposed momentary isolation. Maybe all the choices are right, but a particular position will be more apt to offer unconventionality in daily routine, revolution through service, and a less unilateral set of rules for doing things. For a week, stray from the middle of the scales and jump hard down on one side, letting the abrupt weight catapult your fears off the other end; then later, you can make efforts to rebalance.

 

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): Pause for a glimpse of mental clarity before next month's Mercury-retrograde confusion sets in and spoils the vision with conditional complexity. Even in one-on-one interactions, your participation is best spent in orientation with a mind toward higher service. Any interpersonal involvements must support—and not conflict—with the work you know you need to accomplish. Consciously elicit the energies of creative tension—your lust for intimacy vs. the freedom required for reimagining how you express love—rather then letting them linger in dormancy as likely victim to explosive inter-relational drama. Utilizing this tension to direct your work is up to you in how it works. That is, so long as you're keeping the fire burning on last month's transition to loving anew, which requires you deepen your vulnerabilities on your own. (That doesn't mean you must be completely alone, just reserving certain pieces of yourself for yourself). You must know these parts intimately before inviting someone else in. Discuss the psychological issues amongst the selves within you before asking for audience questions.

 

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): For a limited time only, truths that you speak come across as even more profound than usual, and their very expression contributes to reasserting that you are a powerful force to be reckoned with. Not to mention your love for the world (and the love you desire from the world) is perfectly encapsulated in those ego-strong reflections of direct honesty. Dissenters beware. You will not be shaken, and rather are content with battling if it will open an even greater emotional space for yourself for quiet comfort later. As before, I'm moved to mention that happiness in the home goes a long way toward actualizing the goals you have in the outside world. Don't underestimate the need to stand up for what you require to feel nourished everyday, and don't kowtow to individuals whose presence in this intimate realm are blocking you from a good day-and-night's rest after wearying hours of labor. You need your beauty sleep. Speak it, and let those words sit out there, even if they are fighting ones. You're too fiery a creature to forget that conflict is sometimes what's required to get the job done. Conflict without jabbing, that is.

 

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): Practice a favored form of Capricorn meditative mindfulness by clutching onto the focus-mantra of self-care through a calming home life, and center everything else around that. It's a helpful strategy, particularly when the 'everything else' includes the emotional pull of a rise-and-fall wave of relationship reactiveness. Repeat: It's okay to be alone, your lone priority, even if partnered and/or inter-involved. There are at least two ways of doing the daily duty, but at this point, you'd better be able to justify how each serves a higher purpose if you expect any such efforts to generate exploratory change rather than unchanneled chaos. Think about ways to rearrange and control those environmental items under your control and able to be rearranged. You desperately crave psychic peace, but the question lingers as to whether you'll let the allure of real or imagined others call the shots and stir the pots. You are responsible for parenting yourself; neither do you want to parent a partner or have a parent for a partner. Get clear on the difference between the two archetypal figures, and maybe different daily-duty doings will direct the differentiation.

 

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): Glib won't do the trick when irrational residual distress is concerned. Distress often doesn't respond to direct attacks on its nature, especially when to even identify it causes it to scurry behind the shelter of activity and invention. Speak its own language, strings of codes of it'll-be-all-right subliminally inserted into the mosaic of the day's conversations, a little inside joke between you and your wounded inner child. That way, when the propulsion toward creative play and fun-love love-fun wants to smash that recently hired accounting consultant/life coach on the head, you can both write a story or sing a song about it and then get back to work. You don't get to pretend the tension isn't there, to treat the radical material transition as invisibly easy or not notable. Instead of fighting with the bratty children or playing war games with the lovers, be the bratty child—within a frame—and play love games with the warriors. Speak to distress like a neighbor, bring it a batch of your famous potato salad, invite it to the next brainstorming session and listen intently to its wacky opinions for the periodic marketing hints.

 

PISCES (February 19-March 20): The walls are not closing in. You are just getting bigger Alice-in-Wonderland-style, as if you couldn't help but nibble on the cake marked 'eat me' (read: grabbing the Uranian bait toward initiating change) and suddenly your legs are hanging out windows and your head crammed against the ceiling. Don't waste your time searching for the bottle with the peeling label that might read 'drink me' or might read 'poison' (willing to gamble your life on a peeling label?). Just punch a hole through the wall and wave to the kids playing out back. Will you be remodeling, relocating, or kicking out the extra tenant? Listen to the practically-minded intuitive sounds as you rustle your restless oversized body through its meager dollhouse shelter. Support yourself in living where and how necessary to cradle this newly gawky frame with added cushion for the growing pains. Listen and repeat: You ain't returning to your old self, no matter how hard you might wanna try.