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Horoscopes | Week of February 21-27, 2005

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Realizations about what must get done all seem to lead to one place—your need for momentary withdrawal from the eyes and ears of public pressure. Even an Aries can't always keep the mothership in motion without occasionally handing over the controls and seeking the wisdom that only comes in isolation. In order to ensure your temporary exile is both inspiring and of the self-imposed variety, you must first consciously choose to take it… and, in the process, reach out to the necessary parties who will cover the duties in your fleeting absence. Tell them what you need, shamelessly and with total faith that taking cave-time is a sign of courage. Not only will you benefit from the purifying seclusion, the reaching-out to others is a massive healing step toward demonstrating your awareness of, and trust in, them, whose participation you ultimately require to hit your highest heights.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Is it just me, or have I really found myself in this same position, urging you to join the gang and get out to the meeting or onto the dancefloor or wherever else all the others are brainstormin' and boogiein' down, so many times before? Is it that I, unfairly or not, regard you as something of a homebody, who'd prefer the company of your most cushiony seating apparatus, smooshy slippers and sweet or salty snacks to the hassles of a crowded social event or personality parade? Does it have something to do with the long-term transit of Uranus through your 11th, promising exotically enriching excitements from daring to participate? Or maybe you've misunderstood me all along, thinking I keep egging you on to connect with your whole wide network of friends and fellows because you are lacking in some fashion, when, in fact, I'm just trying to say that we need you so desperately in a way your humility hardly lets you understand…?

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Fresh solutions to long-standing problems of practical import are yours, if you're willing to stop talking like you already have the answer. If you already had it, you wouldn't be living in this sobering material reality of your own unconscious choosing. I'm not trying to rip you a new one; my intention is to shock you into docile admission of your prior incapacity to rid yourself of feeling insufficiency. Only in that space of uncertainty is where the faithful find their signs from above, or else there's no room for miracles to happen. The voice of God, presuming you are open to interpreting such a language, is liable to pour from the mouths of those you're most entangled with… and at the very instant you're prepared to argue, halt the instinctual assumption you know better, and let him/her list off the steps to your best forthcoming strategy without his/her even knowing you speak the code and can translate the key. It's not what's directly said, but the second layer of wisdom whispered atop.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): If you follow the train of horoscopic hints back two stops, then one, you'll know what I mean when I say the choo-choo is now pulling into the central station, and you can feel free to speak the suspicions you've (hopefully) kept to yourself until now. Congratulate yourself if you exercised your emotional discipline (the Saturn-in-Cancer lesson) and didn't react until you had plenty of time to consider and reconsider what it all meant. Looking backward with the clarity you earned by withstanding the temptation to immediately bring it up and out, now you understand what extra intelligence is gained from holding tight. What you are now able to say to the involved parties (or to your own internal sense-maker) has been stripped of desperation, unfettered from too much ambiguity, and fortified with compassion and kindness, since you have fuller knowledge of what was really floating out there. Not only do you have something instructive to share, you also have (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson about riding out the wave before diving straight in and risking drownage.

LEO (July 23-August 22): You have only the littlest bit left you can do on your own, and will barely make additional progress without enlisting your best friends and closest partners for their input and advice. You've taken it as far as it will go while maintaining full ownership, which means you have to settle for things as they are or sacrifice some control in exchange for symbiotic coupling. Chiron's preliminary entry into your 7th house—a therapeutic influence on your relationships over the next five or so years—summons you to get current with the folks who matter most, as your ultimate well-being will be increasingly tied up with how engaged you are in the best mutual treatment of each other. For as much pride as you take in as far as you've already gotten, you must find the same amount (or even more) pride for the important people who are invested in your achievements. For them, it might not be as easy to sing their own hallelujahs from the rafters and rooftops as it's been for you. They need some of your special life-loving spark to ignite their own flames of free expression, and your new responsibility is to be there for them more fully and totally. Bring them along, lift them up, and in return, you will reconnect with what's been missing from your successes… to better appreciate what you've done, through the thankful eyes of someone else.

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): This is a good week to suspend the ninety-five reasons why you shouldn't tell the other person exactly what you think… and tell the other person exactly what you think. With your 7th house of relationships blessed with both Mercury's communicative lucidity and (by week's end) Venus's lovely lift of aura-fluffing, it's time to express your most heartfelt sentiments. Whether declarations of delight, displeasure or confounding confusion are what need to be said, they will come out in just the right way, so long as you don't start second-guessing your phrasings or the validity of your feelings. (Remember: Feelings are neither valid nor invalid; they just are.) In the act of speaking as straight from your unconscious as you can, and not from the constrained rulebook of appropriate statements of logical argument, you will not only convey your point better than you expected—you will also learn more about what you've been feeling than you would if you kept trying to figure it out in internal dialogue with your own solitary self.

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): I'm moved to tell you that you're at the starting gate of a few weeks' period of prep time, but of course, the next question out of your mouth is bound to be something like, 'Dear Astrobarry, what am I supposed to be preparing for?' and I don't have that answer, seeing as I cannot predict the future (contrary to my neediest clients' wishes). I'm quite sure the beginning of spring is liable to bring more than its usual share of flirtatious and/or venturesome intrigue, and that you will possess more barefaced gutsiness to pursue the daring opportunities than your typical demure casing usually permits. But whether you will heed the burgeoning brazenness to its fullest potential or flounder about in indecisive predictability is up to how well you prepare yourself during these few weeks. Think of this prep work as an elaborate grooming ritual for the soul, in which you pluck those extra hairs of self-doubt and work your magic muscles for a firmer constitution. You want to feel your most healthily-in-your-body for what comes next, to endure all that joy and adventure.

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): You don't have to risk everything all at once, in order to hit that deep itch for the extreme and attain total immersion in the holy mess of human life. You can get the same level of intensity without constantly living on the edge of the deep abyss. At least you deserve a home base from which to pounce into the world's mind-boggling complexities and then to return to and tend to your battle wounds. I think you know exactly what I'm talking about, too… because it's about time to start considering some form of settling down. Before you get all reactively indignant, as if I'm criticizing your manner of being (when, in truth, I think so highly of it that I'm only trying to enable you greater access to more layers by encouraging the homing instincts), let me clarify: 'Home base' can be a place, a state of mind, a kit of nourishing goods you can bring with you wherever you go, a fuzzy sweater or a pillow. But its existence cannot be negotiable. You need something emotionally stabilizing; otherwise you're soon going to start repeating past mistakes… oops, not mistakes, I mean learning experiences, with increasingly unpleasant consequences for not learning the first time.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): The problem with you Sags is the same thing that makes you so wonderful—your near-inescapable search for the next great adventure to stimulate your senses and feed your hunger for knowledge about this enormous world in which we live. The wonderfulness of this wanderlust is fairly self-evident; the problem, less so. Let me spell it out for you: Your eyes are so set on the faraway horizons, you often overlook those exhilarating escapades and exploits in your own backyard. The next journey beckoning your participation, if you are gallant enough to embark upon it, is to find the hidden pots of gold in your own neck of the woods, without some dramatic travel to the far reaches, move across the country or immersion in another sagacious study of cosmological wonder. Sleeping in the same bed night after night, seeing the same faces on your same walks to and from the same destinations, so on and so forth, might seem so dreary as to be completely excitement-free… that is, until you stumble upon what you'll never know you've missed in the never-ending search for something strikingly like it.

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): It's better to loosen the self-control that would otherwise keep you from sharing the full truth of what's up with you—because 'what would be the point?' rings through your head on a feedback loop—and to speak of both little frustrations and giant predicaments to whoever seems amenable to listening. Don't convince yourself (1) you already know the advice they're going to give, (2) you can't bear to hear the obvious spoken aloud because it'll make you feel stupid, and (3) you have no right to bore others with the tedious details of your life. If figuring out what to do next was a professional research-consulting project, upon which your future stature rested, I'm quite sure you wouldn't be foolish enough to draw conclusions without referencing multiple sources and pulling together the best of what each had to offer into your comprehensive recommendations. Why, then, do you treat the more important matter of your life's development in such me-alone-is-best contrast? Convincing yourself to seek outside counsel is one of the final steps in your Saturn-in-Cancer relationship challenges. You'll still be the one ultimately in charge, but you'll have a lot more raw data to work with in making your decisions.

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): Last week I left you hanging with nothing more than a call to stay present and unapologetic for being yourself, and you may have thought I was short-changing you with the briefest of horoscopic insights. Well, looking back on last week, can you see why I left the significance of it all so open-ended? I will still refrain from fixing your individual experiences into some single model of significance… aside from telling you that, with Chiron entering your 1st house for an extended 5-year run, what you're going through now (whatever it is) is the official kickoff to your long-in-waiting ascendance to the role of priest-doctor-shaman-healer, crucial for humanity's transition to the new age. Any challenges you're currently weathering are inextricably linked to—have everything to do with—the utter uneasiness an interstellar seventeenth-dimension soul of your magnitude endures in the very act of incarnating into an earthly body. But here you are, in one now, for the reason to help the others move ahead and rise up. The quicker you mend your own bodily rifts and root fully into those lower chakras (the ones you use to make a steady living, in contrast to all that sixth-sighting and soothsaying), the sooner you can get to modeling the perfect-as-is template we other individuals will mimic in our evolution to psychic reunification. Stay here where you are, and learn everything you can about your every discomfort. The wheel of fortune will be starting to spin ever faster in mere moments from now.

PISCES (February 19-March 20): It's your turn to bask in the beauteous rays of Venus, which enters your sign over the weekend, to cast your every movement over these coming few weeks with a glow that others will find appealing, even when you're not sure why. The Full Moon this week in your opposing sign reenergizes your interest in trying to carefully craft how you appear to others in relationship, and trying to make categorical sense of what you like and don't like about them, but Venus's influence is enough to keep you from worrying too much about trying too much. It'll all glide so nicely along, so long as you don't force yourself into holding back, keeping quiet, or pretending you aren't one of those people who need people. Most of all, this would be the time to embrace Uranus's pledge to Pisceans to liberate your souls, if you're ready to change one or more major aspects of your life as abruptly as you'd rip a Band-Aid off an appendage or pull a piercing needle through some soft tissue. Venus is like the kind nurse who blows on the boo-boo, and chaos won't shock you nearly as intensely if you act before Spring Equinox. By the way, if your birthday's this week, then you'dreally better do something radically different, and fast.