Planet Waves :: Tuesday Horoscope Edition for Total Solar Eclipse

Dear Friend and Reader:

Tonight's total eclipse (Wednesday in many zones outside the United States) of the Sun in the last degree of Cancer represents a point of demarcation in our lives. It's one of those rare points in time where we will be able to say, "Before this, things were one way, and after this, they are the new way." I think this will work even if we're not ‘consciously' aware of the process; we're standing in a doorway, a portal, and the past is on one side and the present is on the other.

Photo by Eric Francis.

I recognize that people are trying to do this all the time, usually on New Year's Eve or their birthday. However, we persist in doing something that mocks living in the past. It's not possible to actually live in the past but it is possible to be preoccupied with the concept. The feeling of existing in the present is so different than being caught in mental constructs of history as to be a little stunning; perhaps destabilizing. But it is different; with the main distinction being that the world of potential seems so much more open.

Today is a day where it would make sense to look at your life and decide what you want to move on from. Based on the possibilities you see in the world, some of which may have just presented themselves to you recently, it is a day when you can take a step toward what you want to move on to: what circumstances, ideas, people, places and modes of self-expression you want to embrace.

The biggest secret in the universe is not that it's your life; it's where to find the tools to make it so. Really there is only one: the power of decision. Every small move means a lot.

Yours & truly,

Aries (March 20-April 19)
What is a man? It depends on who you ask. I would ask you: is a man who you make him, or is he who he is? The answer, so far as I can tell, is somewhere in between: a man who is who he is, but who he becomes depends considerably on who you allow him to be. Today's total solar eclipse falls on the brink of your 5th house, which is the line where we take risks, including sexual risks. Here, we see the drama to integrate (or reject) feminine energy in the form of the Sun and the Moon in Cancer. Are you willing to allow the men in your life to embrace an introspective, emotionally grounded orientation? Would you recognize someone who did so as a man? Or would he be a eunuch? Remember, we live in a society where if a man wears a coordinated outfit, many would presume he's gay. This is a difficult place to start.

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Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Remember that you're being driven at the moment by an apparent split in your values system. Values are how we guide our lives. Relationships, as well, are based on shared values and a mutual exchange, but it's difficult to define a shared value and therefore to commence an exchange if you're struggling to prioritize what's important to you. But you can do something: you can commit to finding out. You can commit to relationships that are devoted to learning. As a starting point, it would help if you make peace with the notion that learning is a process of change; communicating is a process of change; understanding yourself consciously is a process of change. You will not fall off the edge; to the contrary, once you take a chance and step out of your emotional mire, you will discover that you're standing on solid ground and in clear light.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
There are so many possibilities; so many of them feel wrong. A few of them feel right. When you engage your desire, one of two things seems to happen: you get caught in a guilt trip, or what you want changes. I would propose that what you feel guilty about is what you really want. What you think you cannot have is what you really want. What you are more likely to reject as inappropriate is what you really want. You might ask how you would ever get out of this conflict, the question takes on different meaning when you remember that the conflict serves a purpose. For one thing, it's a substitute for depth. For another, it stands in the way of getting anywhere on this issue of desire. And think of it: using this method, you don't actually have to deal with an experience of fulfillment. Ask yourself if there's a better way.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Imagine that you finally have all the power. You have total control. You can do anything to anyone that you want; make their decisions, including their decisions about how they feel, so that for as long as you're subject to what someone feels, you can decide what that will be. Are you having fun yet? I didn't think so. Part of the adventure of life is experiencing and adapting to what other people want. Control is toxic in large doses, and it's toxic in small ones, too. Self-control works, up to a point, but that too quickly turns to a fear-contaminated drama. This thing we want, we can only have when we create it together. You seem to be reaching, at times dearly, for something that you already are inside, but which makes you extremely nervous when you encounter it on the outside, as another person, with their own perceptions, desires, needs and volition. You can come a long way right now by embracing what you perceive as your opposite.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
In the process of any transformation, there is that moment where we lose control and surrender to the process. This can be done as a voluntary gesture, or our will can be wrested from us; the difference you may feel says a lot about your method of going through changes. It would make some sense right now to notice who wants you to stand in their shadow rather than to be illuminated by their light. It would help to observe who affirms your self-awareness and who tries to deny it. Yet something much greater is going on; many details you're observing now will end up as notes that you don't come back to, given the vastness of the deeper experiences that you're going through and which will soon begin to show their results. To put it simply, it's a different world when you know yourself well. It's a different world when you trust your own strength.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You probably think it would help if you could define precisely what you're feeling; obviously that is not happening. It's also become difficult to determine what you're going through by the responses of others. Those have ceased to be meaningful, if only because they're so wrought with contradiction. Last and definitely not least, your goals have become so diverse that you can't define your state of mind based on your relationship to any of them. So what exactly do you do? Actually, you can afford to wait. What happens over the next few days will likely parallel what happens over the next six months; but you won't have to wait the full six months for a clue what you're up to, but it would be wise to live the next 24 hours with impeccable awareness, patience and a keen ear for your cue to make a move: from the look of your charts, a move into the vast unknown.

Libra (Sep. 22 - Oct. 23)
What is a woman? She is part biological entity (ovaries, chromosomes, the capacity to give birth) and part social construction (learned attitude, values, fashion statements). You have a relationship to both, and so does everyone else. I suggest you make an agenda of being at peace with both the conditioned attribute and the biological one. The more you develop conscious relationships to both, the less either of them will be able to have undue influence; I'm suggesting that most of that influence would come from the choice to be unaware, unconscious or working in automatic mode. There are many influences working on you now, which seem like external forces trying to determine who you are and how you should feel about being alive. They all relate back to your parents and how they perceived your gender role; that, and who they warned you about.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Imagine that the hang-ups you are processing are not your own. They feel like your own, but I'm proposing a psychic or psychological maneuver to give you a little distance and to assess things in a way that is fairer to yourself. Here is the issue as I see it. You are still drowning in your mother's insecurities. She overcompensated for those insecurities by trying to control the entire universe, including you. I would not be surprised if this made her sick, mentally or physically. The vector of control was a mixture of emotional manipulation and applied ignorance. The remedy is to ask for what you want, state your goals honestly and make sure you take responsibility for knowing what you're supposed to know, and for putting that information to work. You keep telling yourself you have actual goals, one of which has recently come back into focus. These three simple techniques will get you a lot closer to them.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22)
I recently got into a conversation with the owner of a spiritual store (statues, books, tarot cards) about whether shit is spiritual. This is another version of the conversation about whether sex is spiritual; or lust; or food; or blood. It's another version of a very old conversation about whether what human beings feel, or who we are, is acceptable, in any form. I will skip, for the sake of a 150-word horoscope, the conversation about who benefits when the natural world and natural feelings are divided from what is considered pure enough for God, or relevant at all. I suggest you fill in the blanks, however, and ask yourself what phenomenon of your life gets assigned to good, bad, useful, pure or obscene; what you call sacred or what you call profane.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
We all live with enormous tension between relationship and commitment. We live with even more tension between sexual attraction and acting on that attraction. In the cartoon version of the world, men are accused of desire and women are accused of resisting desire. This is a simple formula for making everyone wrong. In reality each of us is a complex mixture of wiliness and reticence; of need and craving for independence; of active and passive approaches to existence. Relationships are based on an exchange of energy, ideas and specific forms of nourishment that in turn can be warped into power struggles. You can afford to relax. You have plenty; you have influence; people notice you. You have no need to purchase your bonding in a secret deal. You don't need handcuffs; holding hands is enough.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Relationships imply service. There is no way around this one, but there are many techniques for trying to fake it, or deny it, or to make sure that things are so imbalanced that nobody notices just how imbalanced they are. Relationships also involve cooperation, which would be a novel concept for many. Some of the most important relationships happen at work, which usually goes against the rules in the company handbook or sexual harassment guidelines. One thing we can say for sure is that your charts are strongly suggesting that you work with the concept of power sharing in a conscious way. To have an honest distribution of power, everyone needs to have their agenda on the table, and that includes revealing your deepest insecurities, and being open to hearing about those of the people close to you.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
Tuesday's eclipse stands at the nexus between your house of creativity and sexuality (your solar 5th house, Cancer) and healing and service (your solar 6th house, Leo). For your purposes, you can view these two houses as being one concept for a while, with many combinations of the themes involved. This might involve a sufficiently strange reorientation that you, and others, have some difficulty figuring out how it could possibly be true; viewing sexuality as a creative expression of healing and service remains for most something in the purview of science fiction. Experiencing service as a kind of pleasure is something we typically project onto 'saints'. Yet your life has taken on some unusual dimensions lately, and events of the next few weeks promise to open doors to possibilities that you may have dreamed of, but have not quite experienced yet.