Horoscopes | Week of November 7-13, 2005

ARIES (March 21-April 19): This is a week during which you'll want to consider moving through the world in a decidedly less typically Aries fashion. Why? Because your standard direct-and-literal approach won't necessarily add up to the basic sum you'd expect, and pushing even harder to achieve normalcy through obviously practical measures simply doesn't cut it. 'Pushing', in fact, won't work too well at all… for any task or effort, at least, that requires the participation of any other individual, no matter how marginal. Don't misunderstand me, for it's not that others will intentionally try to block you (well, probably not). Rather, the intersection between your immediate desires and theirs is an obscured and jumbled mess of cross-purposes, inconsistent intentions and confused carryings-on. The best you can do is fight the fear of standing still (don't worry, you're probably just moving much slower)… and open up to receive, letting results 'show up' instead of grabbing for what (you think) you want.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Think of yourself as a fair maiden carrying her basket into the enchanted meadow to gather magic mushrooms on a dewy morning. Only your 'enchanted meadow' is the great big social world of allies and acquaintances through which, on days when you're susceptible to wonder, you meander among the Daisys and Donalds and Davids and Dorises without a care other than how beautiful this garden of humanity is. And the 'magic mushrooms' are the rather magnificent theories, explanations, guidelines and bits of truth you garner from these social interactions. Now grab your basket, and imagine you're on a sorcerer's quest to collect ingredients of uncommon wisdom, with which you'll mix and brew some kooky concoction from a recipe yet to be revealed. Thus, the only premise to follow is active, open, full listening, so as not to discount everything a given anyone says, just because some of it may be hogwash. There's no need to buy any statement in its entirety, hook, line and sinker. Pick and choose… after you're heard it all. The worst possible obstruction to benefiting from your magic wisdom hunt is entertaining 'me against the world' isolationist thinking, the surest way to guarantee your basket will remain empty.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): For now, please remember: The experience of the process, which may include symptoms including (but not limited to) bodily or emotional discomfort, frenetic impatience, fleeting pain, disorientation of perspective and/or total incomprehensibility, is much more important than the end result. You must do your best to interpret 'process' by whichever broad or specific terms best suit the current scenario, whether it's a passing contraction through the birth canal or the entire journey of human life. In either case, my point is for you to cooperate fully with what the present moment has brought (and will continue to bring) instead of worrying too much about what will happen next. I know, I know… easier said than done, I'm sure. But by week's end, both Mercury and Mars will be retrograde, making it glaringly apparent it's not a time for clarity, finality or assurance. In particular, since Mercury goes retro in your 7th, take note that comments made by another person to you and/or made about another person by you should not be seen as the final word or the whole story. Indeed, it's likely the words aren't even being understood properly. Hmmm.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): The people around you are going to be tense, likely due to their own individual responses to treacherous internal processes that have little or nothing to do with you. But you can astutely choose to recognize it's not your shit and hold a sensible boundary between your oceans of emotion and their gravitational tugs, pulls and yanks. (Didn't Saturn's recent 2-year transit through Cancer teach you anything?) Thanks to Venus in your 7th, you're poised to get along fantastically with other folks right now… even though the general atmosphere is far less harmonious. Protect your self-possessed pleasantness against oversensitivity to others by outwardly projecting your own strong positive energy, a well-intentioned force field that, if all goes well, just might turn infectious. From this context, think of nurturance (stereotypical Cancerian keyword) as the ability to create a 'chilled-out' environment in which others can blow off steam and blend into the groove… and definitely not as sympathetically following the other person into his/her deep dark hole, a terribly codependent reaction which leaves two people feeling bad and nobody feeling better. Despite what it tells you, misery doesn't love company.

LEO (July 23-August 22): Subtlety is key this week, Leo… unless, of course, you'd prefer to keep watching the horizon to see who else is riding off into the sunset and end up missing your own boat. In this dense period of slow-as-molasses pressure-cooking, the only morsels of truth you need reside in the nuances. Notice small differences in sensation or effect—they hold clues toward bigger revelations in how best to treat yourself. Blink, and you'll miss 'em. The more you concern yourself with the mammoth plans (and the mountainous egos of those with whom you must consort to make these plans), the further you'll get from actually knowing anything. Thinking so large will only distract you, no matter whether you coerce logic into concluding the opposite. There's exactly zero danger you'll jeopardize your overarching aspirations and your shot at the gold if you stop voraciously fixating on what you should do to bridge the gap from there to here. Now is just not the best time to build that bridge. For now, you're here, where there's the piddling prep work to finish… and believe me, you're definitely not done with it. Beauty, wisdom and peace in the details, my child.

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): I wouldn't necessarily trust the purity of what you've told yourself about recent emotional experiences… especially if you've been isolating in cave-land and away from the grounding influence of others. I almost wrote 'the calming influence of others', then thought better of myself (though I'm sure it would have given you a good laugh). I'm sure you're convinced that calm is best attained by your lonesome self, where you can calmly put various feelings in their proper places and restore your innards to pristine order. Only, that sort of 'calm' is super-subjective, isn't it? You can't be sure those feelings are in the right place, can you? You aren't going to posit that genuine calm only happens when you have complete control over everything and there's nobody around to argue with you, are you? Isn't it just possible that you're falling victim to your own powers of suggestion, so that what you tell yourself (without outside 'intrusion' of other perspectives) is exactly what you end up manifesting? Even though I'm speaking about the quality of your inner experience, I firmly believe you need to be out and around other people in order to get real with it. I refer you back to last week's horoscope, where I reintroduced you to the value of interpersonal participation. At this point, if you aren't proving able to reach this 'happy medium', then I vote for 'all in' to the social world and 'all out' of your head.

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): Soft and gentle steps. Simplify. Yes, it's another week in which I'm using this horoscope space, Libra, to offer you scant practical advice other than to hold on. You're in the midst of a transition, from the life-expanding and envelope-pushing events of the recent year into something far more sustainable, a base upon which whatever you do over the next few years can comfortably rest. (Look back to where you were in, say, mid-2004, and you'll see what I mean. You're far better equipped to live the future you want than you were then.) But, alas, you're not there yet. Trust me, right around the next bend awaits 'the big click'—the picturesque plateau where you can pitch camp for an extended occupation… and when you reach it, you'll almost hear an audible sound, that 'click' of peg entering groove, of consciousness recognizing that it's made it through to the next rightful destination. Don't force these last few steps. Don't fight through the thickets and thorns between you and the campsite. Spending your energy now is like betting on a game of solitaire—whether the cards say you win or lose, your bottom line never does more than break even. Reserve yourself for later, when your efforts and expenditures will actually contribute to progress and profit.

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): Check your ego at the door before wholly entering into confrontation or conflict. Are you absolutely, positively sure your grievances are legitimate and justified? Or, perhaps a better question, does any of it really matter? With the vice that hold a grumpy retrograde Mars in your 7th tightening its grip in square to Neptune, the probability that you're projecting your own emotional confusion onto a hard fast person is exponentially increased. Once you involve someone else in it, prepare to have her/him respond with another side to the story you might not be ready to hear… a story that implicates your own patterns of past behavior in a way you'll no longer be able to avoid. Let me make a correction—clearly, you are ready to hear it if you've instigated the conversation, even if under different pretexts (e.g., criticism of the other person, 'harmless' venting, an uncontrollable outburst). So, upon considering what I've just written, you decide whether you're ready to hear it. If not, then take this fleeting moment to temporarily shift yourself away from people who know you well enough to trigger your deep-seated crap (i.e., friends who are like family, family who are like friends) and hang out with folks you don't know as well. But you're only buying yourself a passing reprieve. You will hear the psychological truth behind your behavior sometime between now and Feb-Mar 06… unless, of course, you're a rather adept ear-plugger.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): My dearest darling sweetheart Sagittarius… and yes, I'm buttering you up… it's one of those weeks when I must warn you against the loss of patience ('Oh, that again!' I can hear you saying)… especially insofar as it regards the distinction between distractions and what really matters. See, Sag, I cannot trust your ability to accurately assess what falls into which category, now that Mercury is turning retrograde in your sign and making it more difficult to differentiate wheat from chaff. Now we're moving into a devilish dual-retrograde setting (remember Mars too?), a scenario in which very little outward leaping-ahead is liable to occur—or if it does occur, it will probably have to be undone and redone at a later time. If you take your usual hip-hop-and-jump-along stance and refuse to patiently ponder that a side dish might turn out to be the main course, you're apt to miss something important. And all those retrograde snafus you hear so much about from astrologers like me? You'll liable to create your own snafus through rushed or careless attention to matters… and then maybe you'll try to blame them on other causes… all because you're try to blitz ahead to 'the point'. How will you know what the point is? Will it be wearing a nametag? What if pointlessness is also the point? What if, like a Seurat masterpiece, the big picture is made up of lots of tiny points that appear rather pointless by themselves? Seurat, after all, was a Sagittarian himself.

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): People… events… exchanges! Social, social, social! That's how the promising blend of Venus, Jupiter and Uranus is encouraging you to be. Lots of enjoyment, ease, fulfillment and opportunity is on its way to you, Capricorn, so long as you remain in the mix and around as many other sidekicks and soulmates and strangers as possible. The most casual encounters are ripe with the biggest surprises, if for no other reason than to snap you out of conventional thinking and reveal alternative viewpoints. Revel in the swap of energies, without too much concern for why you're bothering to put yourself out there. Simply bother to put yourself out there. Period. Be aware, though, there's also a lot of edginess out there in the world right now—you've certainly had a taste of it yourself, but others are far deeper-immersed in it—and you want to remain present and engaged, but undeterred by any single individual's rotten temperament. You'll only sink into that person's negiverse (definition: a universe of negativity) if you react too intently, either in sympathy or ego-driven reaction. There are plenty of people out there to inspire you, you might as well move on to someone else.

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): No new tale to tell here, Aquarius. More of the same (which I described last time). Another week, another series of emotional twists and turns, trials and tribulations. Please do your best to grin and bear it. Everything is temporary. This, too, shall pass. Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Blah, blah, blah. BUT (capitals and italics) I cannot reiterate forcefully enough that there's a cornucopia of good goings-on happening behind the scenes, so far 'behind' you can barely even catch a tiny glimpse, and you're being challenged to keep faithful awareness of that fact while times are tough. Do your best to refrain from melodramatic statements about the current emotional conditions—for instance, any sweeping generalizations that include words like 'everything', 'nothing', 'always' and 'never'—because their wizardly charge will adversely impact the hidden-from-view developments. If you step outside yourself as you speak such exaggeratory rubbish, you'll know how untrue it is… and how disrespectful you're being to Venus, as she works her good graces in your 12th house. Grin… bear… everything… temporary… this… pass… it's only one moment in time, I promise.

PISCES (February 19-March 20): With Mercury turning retrograde—along with, might I remind you, Mars still retrograde in your 3rd—there's now a double-retro caution against careless communications, which extends over the next three weeks or so. In particular, be mindful of what you say to folks in charge, whether they're cops, bosses, parents or anyone who holds a deciding stake in whether or not you'll bank another success or public shaming. Spoken too quickly or off the cuff, your words might not contain the necessary sense… and other folks' reactions are liable to run out-of-context or off-balance to your reality. See, in addition to the potential for verbal snafus, the astro-environment also pits Mars in a square to Neptune, signifying a whole bunch of people acting and reacting without exactly what the initial instigating force was or why it supposedly matters. Some might even describe this as a lower, coarser manifestation of how you Pisceans customarily move through the world. The difference, of course, is that you (hopefully) possess a deep intuitive understanding of why what matters matters… even when you can't describe what the 'what' is. Thus, your experience comes in handy to the rest of us, feverishly flustered as we are by the current batch of 'huh?' and 'oh yeah?!?' Your overt kindness and active support will be greatly appreciated… and it's far less risky.


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