Planet Waves Weekly for Sep. 5, 2024 by Eric Francis

Here is The Family Hunger Game article from June, about the early Capricorn cluster. This is for you if you’re unraveling family trauma. Open to all readers. — efc

Question of the Week

When was the last time you stopped and figured something out, unrelated to your paid job?

Coming soon from Planet Waves…

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Your ruling planet Mars is moving into some potentially dangerous territory where family relationships are concerned. It’s interesting how perfectly functional adults can regress to the five-year-old they once were when exposed to their relatives, or even the thought of them. It’s possible to outgrow this, though it takes quite a bit of experience and awareness — or a miracle. It might be both; part of miracles is to keep choosing what helps you and to deselect what does not help. This is a crucial life skill: deciding. It is at the root of any actual freedom that you may have. In fact, to choose is the only freedom. And so every time you find yourself in a position to make a decision, it’s essential that you stop and take note of that. Decisions involve how you feel, how you respond, how you react, and whether you continue any conversation you don’t want to be in.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — Over the next few weeks you will perhaps catch a glimpse at the nature of your bewildering inconsistency. You have a right to be who you are, though it seems you’ve been experimenting with who you are not. Maybe you’re involved in a process of elimination, where you try different kinds of expression and determine what is and is not you. It would be good of you to tell the people you love that you’re doing something like this, though that might spoil the experiment — that is, the social dimension of the experiment. You seem to be testing what gets the best results, which is to say, those that suit your needs. Be aware that there are people who sincerely love you and who are not attaching conditions to that. So they will put up with quite a lot, including enduring their own confusion about how you feel about them. You could be gentler, and you can simply be you.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — You may be afraid to take bold action because you’re afraid of the consequences. Yet one of those might be succeeding, and plenty of people are nervous about that. You can settle yourself somewhat by taking the long view. You don’t need to do everything, or anything, all at once. However, a diversity of aspects hints that you may feel as though you have to. But that is not true. What will serve you well is to commit to developing something — whatever you’re planning over the next six months — taking this particular moment to get a solid start. That’s always the first challenge: making an actual beginning, and building a strong foundation. Then the best approach will be ongoing, steady, consistent and with an eye toward an attainable goal. So take some time and think what that might be. Ultimately you can do anything, but by attainable, I mean on a human scale.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — With Mars moving through your sign, you will not need to apply much energy to get the result that you want. So go easy on the throttle, and modulate your personality. Also, any point that is in Cancer will tend to run in cycles. So be conscious of those, and be mindful of times in the past you felt the way you feel now. That may include the distant past. Over the next week or so, Mars is going to mix it up with a group of minor planets in early Capricorn that I’ve been writing and talking about a lot — sometimes calling it the Capricorn cluster or asterism, and sometimes the family Hunger Games setup. In all that you do, it’s vitally important to remember you are not living in your past. But you can be subject to the past if you go unconscious and start to treat the people you are among now as shadow figures from earlier in your life.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — The theme of finances continues to dominate your astrology. I don’t mean balancing your checkbook; rather, the focus is on where your financial life meets that of other people. Contracts, agreements, and commitments of all forms are involved, and it’s time for a careful review of these matters. It’s also time to know where you stand on your available cash, credit and debt, so you have a realistic sense of your situation. This comes down to the commitments you have to others, and those that they have to you. On a related point, if you’re considering a business startup, it’s important that you set your expectations a little lower than you think are reasonable. The Sun’s current meeting with Jupiter suggests you could be overestimating the potential success or popularity of your idea and will need to go through a series of refinements to get it right. Those will take time.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You have big goals, though it would be better to have one and one only. Don’t worry about what you “might not do” if you focus on a primary objective. Pay attention to what you want to accomplish, and plenty will come along for the ride. The theme of Jupiter in Gemini (your fellow mutable sign, and your house of reputation and achievement) is about bringing your various skillsets and careers together into one integrated whole. Virgo always has two careers, and your mission is to weave these hemispheres into one thing known as yourself. We are living in times that demand mastery of many different tools, and knowing how to use them. One of them is the skill of pattern recognition, which is about noticing what is there rather than projecting your views onto something. Step back, give it some time, and you will see the configurations.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — Your ruling planet Venus is moving through some challenging territory this month. You can handle the various situations that come up if you maintain what martial arts teachers call situational awareness. Part of that means knowing where you are and what your circumstances are telling you in any given moment. And part is about scoping out the game three or four steps ahead, and having your contingencies planned. That means sketching out how you might respond under various possible scenarios, without allowing yourself to be paranoid. The real skill you will depend on is avoiding complications, and knowing how to see various traps for what they are. Assume that everyone around you is operating with intent; nobody is “just doing things.” Therefore, you must use the power of intent, which is knowing what result you want and taking the steps to make it happen. And you can.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — Get over the feeling that you owe someone, or everyone, something. And perhaps at the same time, get into the feeling that your life is more about what you offer than what you get. The key difference is that of entitlement. If you have something of value, then that’s true only for the reason of sharing it with the community around you, including intimate partners. Yet it must be about your choice, not an exchange or deal of some kind. The making of everything into a transaction — from attention to love to sex to the willingness to help — is the thing that is devaluing humanity. While there has always been some of this, the digital environment has taught us to expect that we will either be paid or be charged every time we have an exchange with another person. Your value is not measurable in money, and neither is the kindness that others offer to you. Freedom is the ability to give and receive without expectation.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You may be feeling hemmed in or like you’re under pressure to conform to some external rules or authority. But what you really need is more structure and planning when it comes to getting done what you want to accomplish. You don’t have all the time in the world; you have the time that you have, and it’s your choice what you do with it. Yet time needs containers, and it needs to be allocated on the basis of necessity. That’s not easy for one born under the expansive sign Sagittarius. You may feel like you have to constantly break free, but you will benefit from taking over as the one managing the frame of your own existence. This is especially true now. This will lead to the experience of your time being your own rather than belonging to someone else. To structure your life is to take responsibility for your resources, of which time is the most precious.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Retrograde Pluto has returned to your sign for an approximately 10-week stay — part of its long transition into Aquarius. The theme of this development is finishing unfinished business. Sure, there is always plenty of that laying around, at least for a while. I mean the business of whatever it is that you went through from 2008 to the present. There were a few major transitions during that era, and perhaps one in particular that permeated everything you were going through. You might think of it as a central organizing principle in your growth process. Can you identify what that was? It may be one of those aspects of life that’s so encompassing you might not see it for what it is. Or, you might know what I’m talking about. That’s the thing calling for the completion of some unresolved material: be it a commitment you want to fulfill, one you want to be released from, or some facts you must make peace with. The core question is: who is running your life? Write that on the mirror.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Pluto has backed out of Aquarius and returned to Capricorn for about the next 10 weeks. This will give you some dearly-needed wiggle room on a crucial matter, and also provide you with some insights into your own desires and motives that you might have overlooked. It’s vital that you never see your own life as a conspiracy against you — though this is certainly a trendy modern philosophy of existence. All the paranoia you see spewing from endless podcasts and video channels is about selling the victim trip a thousand different ways. This kind of approach is only toxic and is not going to help you in any way — and please make no mistake: it’s a philosophy and not a reality. You are a person who lives by your ideas. Therefore, consider carefully what you would allow to motivate you. Your life is not about “them.” It’s about you.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Keep things in perspective. Remember that you are not responsible for what you did not do and what you did not know about. You may think that you’re being pursued by some kind of karma from the past, but if it exists at all, it’s not about you. Therefore, give back what is not yours, and willingly take on what is your own. The Sun’s square to Jupiter this week is exaggerating both your emotional response and your sense of responsibility. You are the one who has to keep things in perspective. Nobody can do that for you, though there may be certain trusted guides or advisors who can help you see your situation for what it is. Never forget that you are on a mission in this life. Yes, the wild winter winds of society have a way of obscuring this reality, though if you maintain your single-pointed determination to live your purpose, your life will go much more smoothly.

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