WHO YOU ARE and how you fit into society: that's the whole issue. Well, anyway, I don't like to concern myself with petty matters. In our brief lives, we need to focus on what truly matters. These are the themes that you've got on your plate. At long last, you seem poised to compel the world to move over and make room for you; determined, even. If you cannot fit into the known structure of reality, then it's time for that structure to change.

You would not be the first person with this idea. It's thought of all the time. What is not typically considered is one, ethics and two, the way that we contain the order of society in our consciousness and as we change internally, the outer world responds as if by some invisible alchemy. It is true that the locus of most people's personality is external: the world is the place in which "achievements" are made, and the inner space of reality exists only in service of what is going on outside.

In these four seasons, you will strive to balance your inner quest and your outer one: your profound need to achieve with the need to become. In the sanest, safest, most ethical scenario, becoming would take high priority over achieving. The achievements will come; there will be nothing subtle about them. But what is eminently subtle is your sense of self-development.

The reason that it's subtle is because of how fast the changes are coming, and how they seem to exist on the level of an idea more than something in the world compelling you to change or be aware. The most influential astrology in your life right now has, as its source, an entirely inward focus. The origin is something that you have never, until recently, considered or even noticed. What you may be noticing is that as you tune into this unusual inner sense (which happens at the most unusual times), you feel a sense of potential that is absolutely real but seems to have no basis in reality.

You have big plans. You are going to change the world. You are going to live your dreams. You are going to fight the power, take on the establishment, conquer the world, make yourself known -- however the heck you prefer to describe it -- but none of that has anything to do at all, not even vaguely, with the sense of self-creation that you feel -- when you notice it. It is easy to miss -- alarmingly easy. The affairs of the world may seem to take over and offer you many opportunities to forget yourself. Don't forget! Remember this remarkable, unusual, surprising quality that is developing, this sense you have of being led beyond yourself.

If you approach the issues from what I am describing as an external locus of awareness -- that is, your point of action is outside yourself -- what you are likely to notice is that you stumble into ethical issues, power struggles and the need to exert enormous energy in order to make any progress. If you work from an inner locus of awareness, you will find that the choices, actions and direction you need to take are obvious and that there is next to no resistance. Therefore, when in doubt, pull in and perceive yourself first and the world second.

In terms of what astrology is involved, I will give you three factors to consider so you can dance with the archetypes directly.

The most exciting astrology of the year (in my opinion) is happening right in Aries. That is the conjunction of 1992 QB1 and Eris. This conjunction is so rare that our programming specialists secluded in the hills of Wales cannot calculate the last time it happened, or the next time it will happen. These are newly discovered planets and they both involve how we conceive of ourselves: not our self-concept, but our actual experience of existing; as close to core self as you can get. The theme is you are, if you want, being led past the personality chaos that defines our age, and beyond all that conflict to a point where you not only understand yourself, but rather you are compelled to take action only from a place of self-understanding.

Two, Pluto is about to enter your 10th solar house, Capricorn. This is movement out into the world, the drive to achieve and even conquer. But it is formative. You will want to jump ahead of yourself. What you need to do is test the waters gently, and see what effect you actually have, or what results you notice, rather than plowing into reality with all your influence. Your job is to notice your power, not to express it. Noticing is enough; it is more powerful than applying what some call "intention."

Third, Mars is currently retrograding opposite Pluto and this is involved with a deeply sensitive area of your solar chart; the theme is your sense of safety in the world on the most visceral level. Another theme is how you handle confrontation when you seem to be the weaker party, the one more aware of your fears. Though the Mars retrograde ends in January and works itself out through May, these are aspects that will color the next two years of your life with one crucial question: when do you feel safe, and what leads you to feel that way? The question is more powerful than the answer.

Love and Work: They Love Each Other

WORK IS SEXY to you. Discipline turns you on. You like to get things done, but you're truly attracted to people who aren't like you at all in terms of the way they go about it. You possess or are possessed by a bit of the raging impetuous, but you need and lust for people with focus. And these are people you are drawn to, those who focus their passion and put it to work for them. Instinctively, you want to learn from them, to become like them, to open yourself to their influence and let it fill you up.

On one level, this is a Large World Story -- your opposite sign, the one that tells much of the story of your relationships, is Libra. Libra is ruled by Venus, but Saturn is exalted in Libra and that's the essence of your desire nature. Saturn, Libra-styled, blends the qualities of aesthetic, focus of purpose and high initiative. Western astrology has Saturn cast as close to backwards as it can get, as boring and old-fashioned. You see it as a mix of elegance and authority; of calm, competent, understated power.

This Venus-Saturn combination can be described as the structure of pleasure, of beauty and of passionate love. The wild, impetuous side of Aries appreciates and often needs to be guided into the garden of pleasure by the hand of one who knows how it works. Saturn becomes the container and allows pleasure to open. For such a fiery soul as yours, this desire that meets the need to slow down, to enjoy, to taste life -- and to use precious time to accomplish real things.

With Saturn transiting Virgo through the next eight or so seasons, you're going to be working side-by-side with some interesting people, and one or more will get your attention. The one you like best may be older and in a position of authority, certainly a person of enhanced wisdom. Part of the aura drawing you in is their experience and expertise; you are being presented with teaching models, for which relationships are excellent when they are working well. Working well means when we choose people on the basis of respect rather than their image. This development would not only be a big healing for you, it would be a lot of fun, because it would give your relationships a focus of purpose, and they would return the favor by giving you the same thing.

Relating to the process of focusing on self-becoming rather than achieving that I described in the introduction, if you view work as a matter of relationship rather than of "doing things," you will stick closer to your inner core. But even relationship will provide distractions, but these can be lessened if you constantly use every opportunity to raise awareness about yourself, how you feel and what is right for you.

The benefit of having assistance in the form of one or more people you respect deeply is precisely that their capacity to make things happen in a lasting material reality will teach you the discipline to do so, which comes with the discipline of knowing and understanding yourself. This is an important contribution to the inherent 'jump start' quality of your sign, as process, patience, commitment to time and endurance are vital parts of your life lessons.

Your relationships will have a teaching and learning quality, but they need not be a directive model, that is, someone telling you what to do or how to do it. Rather, you are here to learn that for yourself -- to master the Saturn principle (focus and structure) through your work and working relationships. The idea is to view others who know more than you as realistic collaborators with your creative destiny, but to find and use the inner strength to be your own master. You will explore this new identity, in part, from within relationships -- that is how you will know that it is real. There is a sacred quality to this kind of relating; as any authentic growth is truly the manifestation of something larger than life, or essentially connected to life.

The story of your life is driven by the fact that you are not the same person every day. This has always been true, to a point, but it's become such a prominent feature of your psyche that there is no denying it. Don't try -- work with it consciously.

You may be boiling inside. This resembles the delightful agony of adolescence: of waking up in the morning without a clue to your identity, but intent to find out -- and every now and then catching the blazing gleam of the Sun refracted in your inner diamond. One second it's green, another it's orange and you see yourself perfectly in every color.

Your lover or lovers need to take that diamond journey with you. He, she or they need to feel confident waking up with you and not knowing who to expect; not knowing what you will say or who you will be or why you think you are alive. Moreover, anyone you choose to explore with must be comfortable with the fact that you are going beyond your self-concept and into some deeper core reality of who you are -- and they must be willing to go into this space themselves. There is that constant sense of being guided past what you knew, what you felt or what you believed yesterday.

We all know, this is what makes sex interesting. Yet for most people and particularly for you, diversity is what we crave when we get naked, even if it's with the same person. Your experiments with identity will fuel your experiments with sex. Let your experiments with sex, for their part, push and stretch you into new shapes. Imagine that one day a long time ago you were dipped in Elmer's Glue and it coated you with a semi-flexible coating you thought was your skin. Now you are cracking that coating, stretching it, peeling it off, getting it wet and setting free the hot, tactile and extremely sensitive skin below. This is what sex can do for you, and it works mostly on your psyche.

If you have a lover, I suggest you talk to them openly about doing something besides strict monogamy. I don't mean anarchy -- I mean some arrangement where you get to be spontaneous and not need to seek permission from anyone to exist. I mean a cosmic order where you get to make your choices based on your own needs and desires. The more scared you are to have that discussion, the more you need to have it. The more nervous it makes you to consider that your lover might experience pleasure with someone else, the more you would benefit from the experience. At the very least, there needs to be no taboos on discussion, and you would benefit enormously by going directly toward what makes you insecure, what embarrasses you and what you secretly crave but will not mention.

You need to be experimenting socially, and without fetters. Keep your old friends, but get some new ones, with new rules and new privileges. Pretend you're a reporter for News of the Weird, and your job is to get the real story -- even if you have to make it up. Some of the hottest action in your life is going on in Aquarius, one of the most delightfully perverted signs. This means the world is your flirting ground and your fantasy ground. You're an Aries and you're not supposed to be shy, but you have self-confidence issues and you need to get over them. You will do that by practice. So practice, and let yourself go past your limits, particularly the fear of being too much or too intense. Find your cousins, the ones who like you better the more outrageous you are.

The Economics of Innovation

The 11th house in astrology is where we find the material rewards of our work and profession. It is also where we associate with our friends and relate to our immediate society as a whole. For you this is Aquarius. There has been some kind of struggle in this house for a while, and you may have invested a lot more money and energy into your work than you have taken out. I don't suggest you stop, but I do suggest you remember that you're not going to succeed professionally, in the economic sense, by any conventional means.

Chiron's long-term visit in this house is making it abundantly clear that you need to do this your own way, standing out from the people around you. Others may claim that what you are attempting is impossible, or too different to succeed. They may say that it will take you forever to get there. They can say anything they want and that does not make it true.

Part of the game is breaking your addiction to conformity. Despite your abundant sense of innovation, there is something stuffy about the way you approach work, and you have a kind of crushing need for the approval of authority. This has helped you many times in the past, but you are now in different days. You must learn to do things your own way without getting in everyone's face about it.

Remember, you are in transition. Part of being in transition with money is navigating your way through a social environment that is inherently driven by money, not by love or passion. You need, each and every day, to focus on the passion part before the money part, since that will give you the strength you need to stand apart from certain people around you who otherwise might resist.

As you do this you are cutting a niche for yourself in the world, but one of its qualifications is that you have the ability to adapt constantly from that position, rather than getting stuck in patterns. You have done more than enough of that, I am sure you would agree. The new pattern you are creating is the ability to do what you do and change what you need to change on a daily basis, precisely so that you don't get yourself wedged into any new corners that are boring or unproductive.

It makes perfect sense to wiggle into patterns that encourage innovation; to be in social environments where you are pushed to be an individual, or where you must assert your leadership within a group. As you do so, you will see that your sources of income connected with innovation enter your life in strange and unpredictable ways. This really can happen, and it is happening. What you need to avoid is what I can only describe as idle fantasy. The way you do this is, if you have what you might call a fantasy or dream, put it to work that day. Try it out and see. You can afford to experiment, just keep it a conscious experiment and like a good scientist, keep notes and apply what you learn. You will learn a lot, and it will compound as you apply that knowledge.

Just bear in mind, this inner process you're in, where you change identities every day -- the thing that holds most people back from growing and changing in lasting ways is social conformity. It is pressure from their friends to stay the same. You will need to bring all of your Aries power to bear on this, pluck up some courage, and be yourself. If someone persistently tries to resist you, try to avoid turning them into a toad. There is probably a better way.

Conclusion

Some of the most exciting astrology of our era is developing in Aries. This is an excellent place for it -- we all have a lot to learn about being ourselves. However, you're not going to read about this astrology anywhere else, I can pretty much assure you of that, and the reason is because people have not heard of, or do not trust, or do not understand, the two planets involved. Again, they are 1992 QB1 and Eris -- what I will refer to as The Conjunction. I suggest you read about these planets in our Planet Wiki section of Small World Stories and decide how they apply to your life.

Astrology often misses the point about what is happening now, particularly if it involves new planets. Such was the case in the 1960s, when astrologers had nary a clue that the Uranus-Pluto conjunction was driving society forward at a breathtaking pace -- but Pluto did not even appear as a real planet in one of the leading and best-respected ephemerides. Believe it or not, Pluto was at that time an unknown; the only book that existed about it was out of print, and had been published in German. We are not doing much better today, as astrology is not exactly wearing rollerblades in the quest to find out what Eris is about.

The Conjunction portends a revolution in how a human being perceives herself or himself amidst the chaos of the current model of the psyche. If we tune into the energy of this alignment, it can guide us toward a sane idea of who we are in an insane time. It can point to a way to relate to the world from that new idea of who we are. You are a kind of living experiment because The Conjunction is taking place in your sign, and you can feel it the most vividly; you become its exemplar.

In the meantime, you don't need to worry about your constantly changing sense of self running wrangle on your life: Saturn in Virgo will keep you grounded and focused on necessities. We forget, amidst all the diversions of modern life, that we are all working to survive on a tiny blue speck in the deeps of space and time. Being grounded with a sense of purpose is about the best thing anyone can hope for, and this blessing you have; it is yours if you accept it.