Horoscopes

Aries (March 20 - April 19) With any luck, you've discovered how much work it takes to be yourself—and you're willing to do it. Part of the effort involves moving through your own doubts and layers of defensiveness until you arrive at the inner feeling of authenticity—in other words, discovering not only something new about yourself, some quality you're not familiar with yet, but also a new state of mind. The rest of the project involves rising above your insecurities and coping with the confrontations involved in presenting yourself to people authentically. This, in turn, requires dealing with their reactions—and making the necessary adjustments in your life to compensate for, or move on from, those members of human kind who cannot bear very much reality. To do this, once again, you need to identify, acknowledge, and deal with your own emotional fears. Is it all worth it? Do you really have a choice? This year was designed to get you to stand up and get out of your seat; to start walking; to discard what you don't need, and travel with a lighter load; and more than anything, to seek your emotional independence. The word "boundaries" is perhaps overused, but to me, it still has meaning and necessity. Have you noticed that the lines between you and everyone else are becoming better defined, and that in the process, you are coming out with a cleaner edge and a smoother, more polished exterior? "Yes" and "no" are words with new meaning. Even "maybe" is a concept with some power, referring to your privilege of taking time to make up your mind. Anyway, it's not over, and what you learn the next four seasons about standing your ground, or alternatively, inviting others to come join you, will more than make up for what you may have missed the past decade. What a plunge into your feelings, your body, and your heart center. What an admission: not all can be spoken, not every idea has a word to go with it, and words actually fall short at a certain point. What replaces them? Only empathy can. Only the feeling that runs through your biopsychic system, at the very moment you can feel it happening to someone you care about. Both your senses and your "extrasensory" capacities have been expanded in the past four seasons, and you are still learning how to manage the energy, the rapid influx of sensation, and the indescribability of it all. Where there is empathy, however, the few words that are spoken are all the more meaningful. Gemini is considered the sign of more words, not less—but this and many other things will be setting off in new and unexpected directions as the next four seasons unfold. Looking back, what will you remember about this year? What are the more poignant scenes, encounters, and transitions? They may play second oboe to the mental skills you learned, principally, the ability to negotiate where your feelings are at stake, even when you're at your most raw and sensitive. We hardly think of feelings as being something actually worth another person's time and effort discussing, much less negotiating over. True, most people descend into irrationality when it comes to their emotional experience of life, but someone close to you has set an example, provided a structure, or taught you language that will come in handy for the rest of your days. Coexistence is something that humans have always done, but never with the expectations of personal autonomy that we have today. The question is how to be yourself and be in a relationship at the same time. You may not think you have the answer—but you know a lot more than you did one year ago. Saturn in your birth sign has turned out to be more productive than you thought. Saturn is a harsh teacher only when we insist on losing touch with reality, which is to lose touch with ourselves, our environment, and our sense of mission. Working within your limits, respecting authority and moreover, taking over as your own inner authority are the practical ideas we need to take aboard. The boss is only a problem when we see her outside ourselves, as someone apart and with separate interests. But this boss tends to be a relic of everyone from parents, teachers, and overzealous Boy Scout leaders, whose ideas of authority we have not addressed within ourselves. Saturn always makes us stretch across the gap between the individual and collective, and his motto in Leo is "the greatest good for all concerned." It's worth a chance. Contrary to nearly all the published accounts of what a Virgo is supposed to be, you tend to be someone guided by your emotions. It's only your advanced mind that keeps you from being ruled or overwhelmed by your sensitivity, and yet it's true that you can go into long phases of denial about how your life feels, what you need, or what matters most. Events of this year have, however, delivered you far away from any refusal to see the obvious. This has proven to be an indispensable skill in the sorting out process you're now going through. Gradually, a certain contradiction is wearing off: As you've gone deeper into yourself, people have shown increasing interest in you. At the same time, you've become keenly aware of who is good for you and why, and you would be wise to take your own counsel on these matters. Stunning breakthroughs are rare enough events in your life. You tend to prefer putting one foot in front of the other to the flying karate kick. Looking back, you've done a lot of that this year, that is, the moving forward one step at a time, thankfully, without looking back. But the real journey has been an extremely careful assessment of how you feel about yourself. Reaching a peak over the past two months, you seem to have come further in developing your self-respect this year than perhaps any other in your life. If nothing else, you have recognized your own right to survival, ending a long debate that has too often become mingled in the emotional survival trip of your relationships. How you have managed to break free of this can be summed up in one word: awareness. That skill has, in turn, summoned your most practical ideas about money, resources and how you use them. Now, get ready for something perhaps less than absolutely practical, but undeniably brilliant. You may have walked a huge circle back to where you started, but I'd be truly surprised if you're not seeing the world a whole new way. Perhaps the most significant things that have come up for reassessment this year have been your agreements with others. These accords, you now know, are the foundation of our relationships; without a contract of some kind, be it written, verbal, or emotionally understood, there is no relationship. I trust that it's come as an enormous relief to discover the extent to which others are depending on you, and equally enlightening to discover that you have deep needs that you cannot meet yourself. These necessities, handled honestly, are the basis of honest meetings. It may seem callous to say that the world is based entirely on commerce, but at the very least what we call the world is based on constant exchange. The most pleasant surprise of all yet awaits you: how much you have to give, to offer, and to share. It has begun: one of the most memorable collections of planets in Sagittarius in, well, centuries. By December 10, a specific day that should be pretty memorable on all accounts, Mercury, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and Venus are all visiting your sign—and you will see what you have been missing. (A minor planet called Ixion soon comes into focus as well.) I recognize it's been an excruciating year of shadow boxing with your blind spots, facing your insecurities by smell and sound, and going through a process of inner transformation that lends itself more to science fiction trilogy than a horoscope column. And when your moment arrives, it really arrives: such is the case now. What you need to remember above all else is that the energy for which your sign is known is, at its roots, lacking all morality or external control. You are the one who must bring the theme, the direction and the ethical framework. You are the one who says what it all means. Gradually, your doors have been pushed open, your limits have been stretched, and your prejudices have been melted like a marshmallow over an open fire. It turns out after all that the crispy exterior of Capricorn is a thin veneer stretched over the extreme of sensitivity that you have learned to allow in your life. It's not that you lacked sensitivity before; you just were not quite as sensitive to it as you are now. I trust that it comes as a relief to be in harmony with your inner core, and to be happy that the story of this relationship with yourself goes on. Finally, instead of being pursued by growth, you are the one seeking opportunities to work out the inner complexities you've carried with you for so many years. Remember that in any relationship situation that arises where there seems to be some complication, reverse the roles. It will be easy for you to see yourself in the position of the person you're talking to, and this can pretty much solve everything. If you're not already a High Deacon of the Church of All Worlds, you are well on the way. You're becoming intimately acquainted with the wide range of possibilities you contain: from shocking brilliance to deep doubt; from humanitarian to being able to understand the motives of the darkest, strangest people you're aware of. Along the way and in between, the journey of your life this year has been one of slowly, surely and steadily gathering self-awareness. And, whether we appreciate the fact or not, this often comes with a crisis; in your case, an existential crisis: For example, what does it really mean to be alive? Well, since you've figured out that it means more than smoking cigarettes and renting movies, you're well on the way to enlightenment. But don't be in such a rush to get there. Compared to what you're living out these years of your life, enlightenment is boring. Ah yes, limits. It reminds me of the night a long time ago I was tripping with my Pisces friend Scott on a beach in Brooklyn. It was dark; we came to a fence. The fence was separating us from the water. We wanted to be on the other side, but it was too high to climb, and we were in no condition. Scott and I both had the same thought: maybe this is not a real obstacle. Let's stop believing in it. We walked 20 or 30 feet to the right, and suddenly the fence disappeared down into the sand. It was too strange to be funny, but it was true. And the lesson is worth calling universal: If you cannot go through, go around. To those who believe freedom exists only in theory, I would offer this: We're doing well as long as we can keep making decisions; indeed, it's the only power we've ever had, or ever will.