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Horoscopes | Week of June 14-20, 2004

ARIES (March 21-April 19): There's been enough talk, and now it's time to attend to those sentimental drives that resist explanation and definition the way certain modern fabrics repel moisture and let the droplets roll neatly off without dampening. Longings for more than mere circumstantial unity among separate entities—you and your loved one, you and your neglected sensitive self, one side and the other—can now be healthily indulged, as each dips into the other's cup and drinks with arms intertwined. You've incorporated your painful self-perceptions into the public you, transformed wound into strength for the world to see through your achievements. Among the environment of continued word-proliferation, feel free to shut your mouth and regain emotional footing by flowing into adult reenactments of your sweetest childhood securities.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You must be quick on your feet to keep the juggling act enact, to shift numbers between columns and shells across tables so that everything is caught and accounted for and available for deployment. You can successfully do this if you overrule romantic notions of how things should function in a perfect vacuum, not allowing indulgence in disappointments to pull your eye away from the flaming wands. There are no lacks, but rather challenges in assigning energies to the proper thirsting enterprises. In order to comprehensively overhaul what you bring to any table, you must be somewhat able to tune out the clatter and dole out according to your higher preferences. If others detect how easily your attentions can be swayed with a provocative phrase or two, they'll either want all or nothing (or all and nothing). By the end of the week, the noise will die down a bit, and you'll be better able to hear the inner intuitive voices you're accustomed to adhering to.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Oh, to hold all the answers and clumsily allocate them to the wrong hands and/or at the wrong times. Lucky you to command a grid of wise observations, and to be so eager to dispense them, to share your care with myriad cohorts. You may be ready to display your nurturing capacity, but everyone else may reflect varying degrees of open-and-closed-ness, and outward nurture requires the participation of both parties. The truest form of wisdom involves recognizing when your motions to look after others are, in that moment, in their best interest, or whether your sincere desire to be of assistance is more about how fulfilling it will be for you, in that moment, to be of sincere assistance to someone else. I'm not questioning your motives, rather encouraging you to spend the week following their cues on how and when to be the doting dear or the magnanimous maven.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): To gracefully hold firm among the turning tides, as those around you fidget and flit through comings and goings, is the greatest gift you can now provide. You are accustomed to the inherent instability of life. You've built it into your gameplan. The rest of us are more familiar with pretending things will more or less stay constant, at least for short periods of time, but we're all being faced with evidence to the contrary. As the seasons turn and your summer sanctuary welcomes us as the end of the week, you'll start to feel less like a fish out of water and more as if a bunch of land and air creatures have joined you in your aqueous environment. You are to hold our hands and guide us through the pressure changes, to help us avoid a nasty case of the bends. Your instincts don't always compel you to take the leadership position, out of interpersonal inhibitions stemming from past rejections of your helping hand. No matter, though. In this context, you'd be unhealthily swallowing the rising energy if you refuse to push outward and permit others to safely experience your usual emotional submersions, with you to anchor the boat and charm the waters magical.

LEO (July 23-August 22): From a few steps away, I can tell that you're beginning to start to initiate the start of some beginning. But you haven't really yet begun. You merely sense it. And, oddly, it's not like you're really bidding a complete goodbye to something else either. Not officially, anyway. Perhaps you're still gathering clues, recommendations and alliances, in the preliminary factfinding stage of your new venture. In lieu of any final (or even tentative) plans having been made, the excitement lurks without attachment or maybe even without consciousness of its full existence. That could explain any inexplicable and slightly discomforting sensations, and also give you a sense of how to alleviate such discomfort. Start to call it what it is, without fixing it too rigidly into being. If you were meant to have already begun to start initiating, you'd already be underway. You still have more unexpected influences to include and group obligations to attend to before you're off on the next big ride. In the meantime, let the dream start rising closer to the surface.

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): You still have another three months of the year-long Jupiter transit through your sign, which I've repeatedly told you brings good luck. What I haven't previously mentioned is that good luck doesn't always show up wearing a sign saying 'good luck' on it. Sometimes, we lose jobs or homes or friends or loved ones and are rightfully consumed with mourning or confusion or anger so that we can't see more than a few feet down the road, even if a few feet further, a pot of gold is waiting in the spot cleared by our loss. For you, Virgo, the next three months' wrap-up of Jupiter-tinged fortune will move swifter than the previous four or five. Particularly with regards to your career or public reputation, your neat guise could spring a leak or two, sending you frantically grabbing for a bucket to catch the spewing innards. I will not direct you to repress the immediate emotional reaction to your loss of control. Instead, I'll remind you that, in order to reap the positives of a new you, certain outdated impressions must be left to discharge their residual juices, releasing the pressure, until the drip organically exhausts its flow.

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): No matter how many times you stack and restack the evidence, split into pros and cons, arrange hypothetical test-scenarios, or do whatever else you're doing to try to figure it out, you'll still be missing a piece. The wheel of fortune is mid-spin, and not even the most skilled psychic will be able to divine where that little silver ball is going to stop. But I promise that, whichever number comes up, even or odd, red or black, it will land exactly where it needs to be and plug a concrete circumstance into the variable position. So continue exploring possible possibilities and eventual eventualities, but drop the notion they will fit neatly together before all the guests have shown up for supper. This exercise is part of helping you achieve peace with the fact that there will always be an extra detail, a last-minute no-show or emergency alteration to be dealt with—and that you must still find a way to maintain your grace under pressure, despite not knowing in advance where the grace will come from. As you'll be able to see within another couple weeks or so, the piece always fits into place.

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): Bank the proverbial dough. Take the previously uncompensated qualities that comprise your depth, and start up a Christmas-club savings account. You may still struggle with separating yours from theirs, but this ledger only has one designated signatory with access to the vault, and that name is you. You're sitting on a gold mine, and you're either afraid to cash in or too involved with oversharing to the point of drainage to let yourself feel self-centered. It's time to stop settling for being wealthy in love [wisdom / connectedness / psychological astuteness / abstract notions] and add a new line in the P&L for actual material resources. You are neither shallow nor piggish to want a sense of greater security, and don't let the many brief comments and lived vignettes that promise romantic freedom from responsibility distract you from this underpulling to solidify. Feel your way to what's important, and in the meantime, having some bread from which to drop crumbs along your path to ensure a safe return helps too.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): Three, a number of blessed synthesis or a crowd with one too many. Whether there's explicitly a triangle going down in the emotional relationship camp or whether it's a metaphor for split attentions, three holds a higher responsibility and can topple everyone's psychological security if the proper measures aren't taken. To emerge clean from any miasmic multiplicity, be explicit in explanation and downplay the idea that romance (in the broadest sense) will let everyone know what they need to know through feeling rather than description. When one person hurts, everyone involved will hurt, even if they don't recognize it now. It could unfold later when Karma gets his. But, on the other hand, being upfront about being torn or unconventional or open-ended can lead through difficulty to truly rewarding connections that are based on the reality of human experience, instead of the desperate attempt to deny its internal contradictions through silent omission or outright dishonesty. Three delivers philosophical transcendence or a triangulation of abuse.

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): To defend the honor of your deeds, you have an army of seven at your disposal—in alphabetical order: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy. Together, these men possess every analytical approach and conflict-resolution strategy in the book, and you can be sure that, with them sharing responsibility of managing your ongoing attempt to work through relationship dynamics, there's always a good possibility of emerging victorious. The trick, though, is to determine who to send to do which job. How must they be ordered in line so that they each meet their match across the battlefield? No one wants Dopey drawing up treaties or Sleepy participating in the all-night Dance-a-Thon. But even Sneezy has his rightful place. If you misarrange your conceptual troops and fight the wrong battles with the wrong soldiers, you can expect painful defeat. However, the rightly assigned soldiers will complete their tasks with aplomb if duty rather than desperation remains the name of the game. If you end up winning, be gracious and kind. If you lose, pick yourself and move along. One loss does not mar an entire life; in fact, it can be the greatest gift of healing you ever receive.

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): You may have been the one with all the ideas for as long as you can remember. But when it comes to enacting your visions, on stage and in costume, you are a young'un. A mere pup. So drop any expert posturing, and take delight in the leeway afforded amateurs. Embrace this youthful naiveté. There is something so fresh, so pure, when a newbie shows up the seasoned performers with all the squeaks and ahems that accompany nerves. Becoming the powerful person you claim a duty to become necessitates starting somewhere, and then starting again and again, acquiring more experience and modesty and compassion by wearing fear like a paisley-patterned cloak. 'See, look at me! I don't know anything other than what I'm doing right now! Clap and sing along with me!' This unashamed stance is contagious, loving and just what you need to keep from getting jaded by your insights into the world of collective angst, which overwhelm when love isn't permitted to beat it down in arm-wrestling matches.

PISCES (February 19-March 20): You were in my dream last night. You ruled the world, with headdress and scepter. So rich were you, you'd be able to breaststroke through a pool of gold coins, if you dared be so crass. You were surrounded by a pack of tigers who, at the sound of your commanding voice, would attack any trespassing interlopers and tear them limb for limb, or merely hinder their efforts with minor injury, based on your preference. What you chose to do with your immense power, that I do not know. It's up to you. But what I reaped most from the tone of this vision was the necessity of battening your hatches, gathering your tigers, and counting your coins, in order to best hold authority in the outer world. If you don't know what you have at home, and if you don't secure it properly against potential invaders, you will not be able to hold fort solidly enough to ascend to the throne in your outer-world life. As you know, big self-identity changes have been afoot since Uranus entered your sign at the end of '03. How can you go forth into such an adventure without a comfy castle to return to after hunts or meetings with important dignitaries? Home awaits attention in order to await you.