Aries (March 20-April 19)
Ambition, focused and urgent, seems to be the most significant theme of your charts, but you know better. Your calling to succeed is so potent as to be humbling; as to make you wonder whether you can do it at all, and you need to burn that doubt like fuel. This is a special phase of your life, wherein you will orbit closer to your outer destiny than perhaps ever before, and even make direct contact. What you accomplish in the highly eventful early part of the year may indeed open the way for what you create during an extended phase of your life. This being said, try not to judge your achievements or lack thereof; your impulses are likely to be far greater than your ability to actually do all that you want to do; and I strongly suggest that you keep in mind just how long of a process we are talking about with Pluto in Capricorn. My godmother, an unusually patient specimen of an Aries (born 04/04/1904), was fond of saying that Rome was not built in a day; you might want to use a photo of the Coliseum as your desktop image to remind you of this. I also suggest you remember that, though your push energy is running strong, you are being drawn to something as well. That something involves your human environment, a factor that is rapidly developing, though the shape of which you may not yet see. The beauty of this process is that you are gradually, but very steadily, finding out who you are through an ever-clearer reflection developing in those around you. They can see something you cannot; and as you begin to open your eyes, you will become what you have been missing.
Taurus (April 19-May 20)
For a while, trying to figure out how writing careers work, I read a lot of Wiki pages on authors. I began to see a pattern. Many of them were unknown nobodys until one day they were somebody really special. Before and after, they brushed their teeth and took their coffee with however many sugars. Their cat did not notice the difference (but cats are smart, so you never know). But the recognition came, often after a long, exasperating delay. Why it came when it did was often a matter that could, at least, be identified in their astrology: They had one of the five of six big transits of their lifetime. You now have such a transit developing; in fact, several of them. While you are waiting the relatively short time for this to happen, you have a little time to make up your mind about a few things, such as what is possible. Your job is not to conquer anything or make anything happen or even to get people to notice you. Rather, in my view, it is to adjust your beliefs to the point where you at least concede anything is possible, evidence of which you can find by (for example) looking at the career trajectories of people who are doing some version of what you want to do the most. While you are noticing the at-times comical befores and afters, notice the core theme, which is that most of them were doing exactly what they wanted to do the most when this elusive thing known as success transformed their lives. Also notice the pattern of how incredibly insecure many of the most luminous people have been throughout the ages, and perhaps stop using this as an excuse to convince yourself of what is not possible.
Gemini (May 20-June 21)
Did you ever take a sociology class where the professor explained that there are two kinds of power—formal and informal? An example of formal power is the prison warden. Informal power is the bull goose inmate, who really runs the place because people respect and resonate with him. At this point in your life, it’s imperative that you learn the difference between the two, both as someone who is subject to them and as someone who may wield either. In reality, we respond to informal power, because it’s based on a human factor; how we feel; who we like; how a person talks to us. This works in group settings and also in the most intimate personal relationships. You are in a reorientation process, a phase of your life where you are adapting to a new mental posture and also a new understanding of how and why people respond to you the way they do. If you are running up against old obstacles, now is the time to clear them out, particularly what are called ancestral patterns. You are the heir to a very old set of ideas about marriage, sex, and partnerships. Your breezy, open-minded mental approach to the world conceals a much deeper involvement with the ways of the distant past, indeed, a profound notion that there is just one way to do things: they way it’s always been done. It is time for a new way, if for no other reason than the previous ones were not getting you what you need. In short, they left little room for negotiation, and even less space for people, yourself included, to simply be themselves rather than who we are all expected to be. The antiquated, useless ways of history will yield to the present more gently than you may imagine.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
We typically live with an annoying, disturbing lack of directness in our relationships, and our attempts at relationships. Whether we fall for the indoctrination or not, most people are taught to lie casually, conceal important aspects of our reality, omit significant experiences of how we feel and to report our personal history selectively. Then, we wonder why we draw so little satisfaction from what we call intimacy. I’ve noticed that one reason for all the smoke and mirrors is that many people you meet feel they lack substance. Heck, you might even feel that way sometimes. When met by a person we perceive to have a little soul fire going on, or a little more vitality than we’re accustomed to, the typical response is to bob and weave, a strategy designed to conceal how empty we feel; how powerless; how needy. Another typical response is to attempt to control the person we perceive as alive and substantial, rather than allowing ourselves to rise to the occasion of life. I could not think of a more profound waste of time, except maybe a war. Many of us live it out (on one side of the equation or the other) every single day. Pluto entering your opposite sign Capricorn indicates a profound change in your relationship patterns, particularly the ones that have gone on so long you thought you would never experience anything different. The thing is this: You cannot use your old response patterns, nor can you walk around with the same expectations of how people are going to approach you. Ideally, you would respond to everyone you meet directly and boldly; and you would have no expectations at all. It may not be possible to forget the past, but it’s that much easier when you have an occasion to remember how alive you feel right now.