Horoscopes | Week of March 14-20, 2005

ARIES (March 21-April 19): This week is a profoundly transitional one for you, Aries. If you read my article, you learned (via a creative monologue that made a little bit of fun of you… sorry if I offended…) both that Mercury turns retrograde in Aries this week and the Sun makes its move into your sign. I'll add that Venus is also Aries-bound next week, and contributes her blessings to the solar eclipse in Aries a couple weeks later. This is not only the official last week of the zodiac year, but it's also your last week to officially cordon off some time for being a bit moody, mopey or otherwise illogically emotional because, on a certain level, it feels good and nurtures your being. After this week, the action is going to pick up so powerfully, you'll barely have a moment to consider feelings. Meanwhile, the best way for you to weather the wackiness of Merc-retro is to keep thinking of yourself as the spark that gets things going, rather than concerning yourself with whether your idea ends up being the one used or who will manage the project. Your participation is best deployed as group instigator, stalemate-breaker, risk-taker and cheerleader… and once you put that life-force out there, it belongs not to you but to the whole wide universe.

 

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The good news comes through a rapid-fire increase in the number of unexpected flashes of insight popping out your brain, through your mouth and into the ethers. The less you ponder the 'real and full truth' about things and let the free-flow flow freely, the more surprisingly wise your outlook will be. Now, the could-be-bad-if-you-let-it news: What comes out during the heights of this intuitive onslaught could well be only part of the truth ('real' but not 'full') and is very likely only true in that passing moment. Believe me, this doesn't spoil the utility of what you'll spontaneously come to understand. If anything, it's an excellent environment in which to practice the fine art of flowing, not fixing. Don't hold too tightly to the words, understandings, emotions and epiphanies. Experience them in the moment, let them guide that moment's actions… and then realize you've changed the situation and the world and the real and full truth, deeming what you just thought or felt or understood outdated and no longer relevant.

 

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The horoscopic metaphor for your week, Gemini, is a jigsaw puzzle. First off, you can be optimistically excited about the knowledge that you already possess all the pieces you need to complete the puzzle you've been working on for a while. Secondly, because you've been working on it for a while, you only have a few pieces left to fit into the whole in order to be able to step back and look at your finished work with a victorious sense of completion. But, thirdly and most annoyingly, you're beginning to realize that one major chunk has been put together wrong. Only now, after you gotten this much done, do you have the consciousness to recognize the miscalculations you made a while back—in your previous impatient frustration, you'd forced some of the pieces together where they didn't belong. After you vent the annoyance, simply rearrange what you've got. And fourth and final, remember the box in which the puzzle came didn't have a glossy photo of what the completed picture is supposed to look like… so acknowledge you've been working blind, and prepare to be somewhat surprised by the final image that the combined pieces comprise.

 

CANCER (June 21-July 22): It's a great week to practice what you've been learning about the Saturn-gifted benefits of sitting firm in yourself, no matter what's going on around you. The reversing perspective of Mercury turning retrograde in your 10th-house world of worldly achievement is apt to generate quickly-appearing, quickly-disappearing, quickly-reappearing excitements and inspirations and anxieties about what you should be doing out there to make that much-desired name for yourself appear sooner and more brightly in the marquis lights. The fact of the matter: There may well be some bright ideas contained within the maelstrom of rapidly cycling good-enough/not-good-enough ambitions and action-plans, but none of them are adequately formed to lead you to anywhere other than a headache, if you let them take a toll on your self-confidence. Sure, permit yourself to brainstorm… but don't start trying to impress, compete, attack or reinvent, based on what's rising up. It's not about being pushed off course, every time a fresh way of imagining your goals being met and exceeded in the future presents itself.

 

LEO (July 23-August 22): Believe in your feelings, but not in what you propose they mean. Describe them, talk about them, talk to them, ask about them, ask them to speak for themselves. But don't attempt to fix them in time, expect them to stay as they are, interpret their higher purpose, or put them into context. They are what they are—commentary on your current state of being, as filtered through your body but not necessarily worded with philosophic clarity. Listen and explore; tentative. No assertions or avowals. The complexities resist easy encapsulation. You won't want to have to say you're wrong later, so save the trouble and repeat 'I don't know' when asked to draw artificial conclusions, then return to the feelings. Believe in your feelings, but not in what you think they might mean. Let them speak out, through your chest (tight? closed? achy?) and your stomach (nervous? dull?), your throat (clenched? sore?) and your head (throbbing?). Feet on ground, head held high, align and ride it through. You are what you are—never flawed, never lacking.

 

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): Your usually tempered attitude is imperiled by heat-of-the-moment feelings of the variety you'd usually deem 'nasty', catching you in the limbo between wanting badly to explode and feeling badly about wanting to explode. The nastiness may be of the lustily lascivious, the aggressively angry, the embarrassingly envious, the violently voracious or voraciously violent type… or just plain passion of an indeterminate nature. It's probably good for you to have these wholly human and perfectly natural vibes coursing through you, defiling that normally impervious (though ultimately idealized) purity with which you identify. Acknowledge you're as filthy and ugly as the rest of us (and, damn it, it kind of feels good). Just be careful about how it comes out and comes across. What you speak and think has a more significant effect on those around you than you may know… even if you imagine you're doing a good job of hiding your urges. Before you mutter a word, utter a grunt or shoot a glance, remember: It's easy to change your mind, but it's impossible to take back what's already put out there.

 

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): The best settings in which to voice your thoughts are those where another person is present, purely for the purpose of being present for you. To attain such a situation, you must be able to specify this purpose in advance, clearly and directly, by asking for assistance and/or support, a la: 'I need your help (or support)… I'm hoping you will listen to me because I need to get this out.' (This is best achieved with a good friend, trusted co-worker, therapist or perhaps an astrologer; more emotionally loaded with a family member or romantic partner.) Then, start speaking quickly, without considering what you'll say beforehand or concerning yourself with how the other person reacts, outwardly or in his/her head. This exercise is not about getting anything or anywhere, but merely to encourage you to move through to support a freshening-up of your spirit. Just like last week, if you compare this advice with what I've written for the other signs, yet again you'll notice yours stands out—I'm cautioning them about what gets released and how, but urging you to get it out. If this doesn't prove that, at least for right now, it's all about you, then I don't know how else to cut through that fence of excessive modesty keeping you bound and enclosed.

 

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): Right about now, I could easily lapse into the ultra-trite cliché/reminder that invokes 'marathon' versus 'sprint', a metaphor intended to prod you into reserving some physical energy in the taskmastering so that you still have enough to hit goals the day after next. But how trite, right? Plus, there's very little way I'll get you to move in measured maneuver, to decelerate or delicately deliberate… and besides, these amplified action levels are actually healthy on your emotional soul level (so long as you don't exhaust your material body along the way). Instead, I'll amend the idiom with a helpful nod to the multiple sprints you'll be running over coming weeks, a veritable decathlon of dutiful feats you're required to complete in order to qualify for the big race. You can run yourself ragged in the first heat and blow your ankles out at the onset, or you can simply remember how much more is going to be demanded of you before it's all said and done and save some for the discus and the shotput. Must I beat this dead-horse of a cliché further into the ground, or do you get it?

 

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): Embrace 'cryptic' because it's fun. Always trying to get point across loses joy of process. Using words deems you a user, but playing with words reinvents you as a player. Wanting the answers is a lifelong compulsion; not caring is this week's temporary pleasure, a softening-up of your fundamental personality that you can take in and learn from. What if all that matters is how vigilant you are in your treatment of intimate companions, the ones with whom you're typically the loosest? 'Not caring' is easily misinterpreted, by the way… I meant: About the answers, not the people. This horoscope started out with 'fun', so if you've already forgotten that, spurt aloud a nonsense noise and make a funny face to go with it. I am serious. Silly is a responsibility to yourself… delay the hunt and couch whatever you're about to say to someone in a laugh-at-myself pride in being humbly unimportant. Do the daffy dance. And when telling it like it is, insist on jabberwockian gibberish. That's how you save the world.

 

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): It's time to make a deal with yourself. If you draw a self-centered family history of how you were nourished, ignored and/or mistreated into fuller consciousness and admit its formative effects on where you are emotionally in the present, then you'll permit yourself to let it go and move into the future unburdened by what has previously gone unacknowledged. If you spend the next three weeks having a brutally honest conversation with yourself about the feelings you've locked inside because you've secretly doubted the truth of your version of what happened, then you get to kill that doubt by realizing what really matters are your actual feelings and not some elusive 'truth'. If you grant yourself a finite time and space to be as petulant and bratty as you'd like (not toward others, mind you, but in the safe haven of your privacy), then you don't have to beat yourself up for perceiving yourself as a petulant brat, nor need you act like that brat in your 'real life' if the beating-yourself-up hasn't worked as an appropriate censoring mechanism. And if you are willing to face that the self-critical messages in your head have their source in unsupportive comments made to you way-back-when, then you can acknowledge their irrelevance today and move past them into a freer and more self-embracing rest of your year.

 

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): The combination of (1) Mercury going retrograde in Aries and (2) Aries's ruling planet Mars moving into Aquarius is a dynamically energetic, though potentially scattering, influence on the clan of the Water Bearer—one which will continue to exert itself over your entire life for several weeks. In short, this week is when it all shifts, in a big way. Be prepared to have less of that characteristic visionary genius at your conscious disposal for seeing the future results in advance of their manifestation. But have deep faith that you've still got it working for you… only it's decentralized, blessing your individual cells on the nuclear level, rather than found in isolation in the brain area. That means, you've got to give up the mental control and shift to a more physical 'just do it' orientation. What you might previously have conceived of as 'sloppy' now serves you well, once relabeled 'spontaneous'. You are without the usual ability to engineer your next big leap. 'Motion first, understanding second' is an unfamiliar way of being to you, Aquarius, but it's a necessary step in permitting your whole self (body and spirit, as well as mind) to become smarter.

 

PISCES (February 19-March 20): Use this last week of the Sun and Venus in your sign to your highest advantage. With precision in your solar and a smile on your face, articulate with calm conviction (1) two goals you dream of accomplishing, one which can be completed within this next zodiac year (beginning when the Sun enters Aries on Sunday) and one which will take another few years, as well as (2) two aspects of yourself you'd like to let go, one which can be bid a fond farewell during this zodiac year and one which will take more time. The more serious you are about actually moving ahead with achieving these goals and self-improvement projects, the more likely it is that you'll actually articulate them to one or more other people rather than just privately to yourself. Furthermore, you might consider confessing the goals or the desires to develop to folks who could actually help you make them a reality. With the grace of this week's astro-environment, you have every chance to move a bit closer to actualization, as long as you come off pleasantly serene, without a bit of desperation or self-doubt. Why couldn't these dreams come true?