Photo: Photo illustration by Preeti Kinha / Photos: Getty
On Wednesday, the action planet Mars leaves its home of the fiery Aries for the first time since June, entering the terrestrial Bull. While Mars in Aries was powerful, yet reactive, confident, yet impulsive, Mars in Taurus offers the opportunity to become grounded in your energy – to move with intention and determination, to choose a path and not to move out of it. On Friday morning, the communications planet Mercury enters Aquarius, and the love planet Venus enters Capricorn. With Mercury in Aquarius, your thinking can become unconventional. Strange problems call for strange solutions, and Mercury in Aquarius can help you think in ways that are strange, creative, and completely new. And finally, with Venus in Capricorn, your heart can become a little more cautious, a little less reckless. Venus in Capricorn can help you see the value of trust, dedication, of the kind of trust – and it can be, too, if you try.
There are days to be reckless with your energy – days to let it expand in all directions, to let it go wherever it is called. There are days to trust that every encounter is a message, a challenge, an invitation; days to follow every clue wherever it leads. This week, however, it may be helpful to change tactics. This week you can benefit from protecting your energy – by waiting to respond, by choosing what challenges you will face and what you will ignore. There are beautiful things ahead of you, and it’s a time to stay on the road there.
For so long, it feels like all your best energies have been blocked, as if there were no ways to use your powers or express all your love and anger and desire. This week will see everything that can start moving. Some of the changes are outward – the obstacles you face may begin to weaken – but many of them are within you as well. Now you can remember all the beautiful, luxurious stubbornness you have on your side. In spite of everything, you are driven by a quiet willpower that is truly unstoppable.
In strange and unstable times, there is ease in analysis. It is reassuring to speculate, to theorize, to arrange all the chaotic pieces of the world into a story that makes sense. And there is also reassurance in your efforts to see into the future, to prepare yourself for everything that follows. But give this week a break from the projection and prediction work. It is valuable, but it can make it difficult to see now the opportunities – for magic, for togetherness, for true and lasting change – that exist right before you, and wait until you reach out and touch them.
You are usually a person who moves intentionally, with thoughts and care. But lately, the world has been struggling to do just that. Lately, everything has been so relentlessly dark that it was hard to feel that your actions mattered any more. This week, however, you may feel a small but significant shift. This week you can move away from the kind of hopelessness that drains all your strength, and return to the anger that fills you with determination, with intent, with love for the whole damaged world.
Although “clean slate” does not really exist, although new beginnings always carry echoes of the past, you can suggest a clean slate this week if you need it. You can imagine a real new beginning, if this is what you will get out of bed in the morning, or it will make the world bearable. Try to forgive yourself for all the things you would otherwise do. Try to forgive yourself because you were once younger than you are now. Everything can start again if you need to. The doors are open.
It’s so hard not to be misunderstood. It’s so hard not to feel like you did wrong. Not just by those in power – after all, it is indisputable, but also by the people close to you, those you love the most. This week you feel the love and support that all these people have for you is lacking as it is. This week you can find it in you to accept the imperfect love they have. You may find that even though it is messy, its warmth is still enough to get you through.
It can be so easy, especially in times of loneliness and distance, to forget how solid you are. It can be so easy to think that you are not a person at all, but an image, a reflection, a mind full of ideas. But this week you will do better if you remember that you have a body and that your body has needs. This is a week to pay attention to the needs of your body and do your best to meet them. If you treat your body correctly, you will become stronger, it will make your ideas shine brighter, it will help you to remember that despite all this, you are still real.
It sometimes feels dangerous to rely on your community or seek help from others. Paradoxically, it can feel so much easier to bear all the struggle alone. This way you do not have to acknowledge any vulnerability or need; this way you never put yourself in someone else’s debt. But there are things that a person cannot do alone, and things that a person should not do has on. And there are much worse things than being bound by the obligations of community, of love. If you need the help you need this week, it will make you stronger. It will open up your world.
If you feel that your small actions matter, that your presence here makes a difference, the unbearable world can become bearable. The challenge, of course, is that it’s just as hard to believe. If you are really aware of how big the world is, your own life may seem so inadequate. If you can see all the bright potential of the universe, your efforts to create change may seem tragically small. Work on believing in yourself this week, believing that your small actions will one day be meaningful. Because they will.
It can be so hard not to compare yourself with your friends and peers – with their ambitions, with their achievements, with all the work they have created during difficult times. You can even tell yourself that this kind of comparison is motivating – that it encourages you to achieve, work harder, be better. But this week, competing with others will not motivate you in any meaningful way. It’s a time to think bigger – to look at history, to look to the future, to dream in ways it really is you, which is not limited by what the people around you are doing.
You usually feel comfortable with thoughts of a distant, radically changed future. You feel comfortable with the idea that the world can change, so much so that it becomes almost unrecognizable. The narrow part is not this distant future, but the work that must happen here and now. The narrow part is not the result of the change, but the series of steps between here and there. But this week, the world may offer you a sense of ability, readiness, power. This week you can not only trust in the future, but also in the sweet, strange changes that take place every day.
It can feel so unfair, so painful that you can not do everything. You do not have the time to look after everyone who is needed, and to fight against everyone who needs to be fought. You do not have the power to be everything to everyone. So concentrate this week on determining your role. Concentrate on finding out where you are needed, where you are useful, where you feel the most alive and full purpose. No one is called to do everything, and there is wisdom for you to find out who you are this week is called to do.
Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of December 28 weekly horoscopes for the week of January 11 will be online next Sunday.
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