CANCER (June 21-July 22)
Saturn in your security and home angle is a new development as of this year. This is a challenging transit; it’s compelling you to be resolute about certain emotional matters that you would rather avoid, to go beyond the appearance of peace of mind and put your roots into the real thing. Every day brings another reminder that the past is over. This transit may be coming with a bottom-heavy feeling and a sense that you cannot escape from certain emotional loops. True, you’ve been through some profound changes in the past year, but you may wonder what they add up to. This is not a matter of setting your standards lower. What Saturn’s presence suggests is the need for some deep cleaning of your spiritual closets. This is a process that will last the next two years. On one level there is no rush. On another, the sooner you focus on what you know you need to address, the sooner you’ll have the satisfaction of progress. Most of what you’re sifting through and sorting out is inherited material that you ended up with. Far from having no effect on your life, these ideas stand on a thinly veiled guiding principle: for example, informing your notion of what is possible. Let’s put it this way. If you don’t feel deeply that anything is actually possible, then someone else’s ideas are holding you down. You can drop that weight any time you want. It’s no source of comfort. Feeling good surely is.
LEO (July 22-August 23)
Nearly all of the heavy lifting of our lives involves thought. It’s true that we still move house, move rocks, and build barns, but in the lives of most Westerners, the “burden,” if I could call it that, is careful consideration of our situation. With Saturn recently beginning a two-year trip across your solar 3rd house, the house of ideas, of communication, and of our relationship to technology, you’re seeing the value of involving yourself with these processes consciously. Recently this has involved finances; you seem to have worked out a complex issue, and are now finishing the cleanup. What you’ve learned the past two months has the power to set you ahead financially, if you will apply what you learned—and this is the time to do so. Early in the month, there’s some revelation where it all makes sense at once. The underlying theme is that money is not the mysterious thing that it’s made out to be by those who make a living flipping and stripping. It is a practical matter that facilitates other practical matters, and also some of the things you dream of. Yet many of the things that give us the most satisfaction require no funding at all. In our financially obsessed world, we need to remember that every single day. In the age of the $5 cup of coffee, few are the reminders that the best things in life are free. And that includes ideas.
VIRGO (August 23-September 22)
Go beyond appearances—all of them. I suggest that you question anything you do to appear a certain way, from wearing makeup to “dressing for the occasion,” to purchasing anything so that others know you have it. Question whether any belief you hold is designed to please another person, or whether it’s coming from the core of who you are. If you notice that you’re presenting yourself in a way designed to conceal something, or to please another person, it’s time to ask yourself the question so rarely asked: Why? The answer “I do it for myself” is not adequate now; you need to peel back that motive and see if there is something else. Knowing your real motives will only help you. It will help you, in particular, to move beyond any situation where you do the same thing over and over again, or where you don’t seem to get what you think of as “the lesson.” The only lesson you actually need is the awareness of what drives you. Making all of your motives conscious may be challenging and it may shake up certain things you think of as commitments, but at least you’ll be living on honest terms with yourself. It is almost always an unconscious motive that drives us in circles; that creates setups that prevent us from attaining what we think of as our goals. That level is usually the hardest to get to, and the most productive. If you get there, be grateful.
