Backbone > Planet Waves
Horoscopes for 9-02

Aries (March 20-April 19)
You will have lots of company if you get the yen for doing your own thing your own way. Oh, wait, that’s the Thing that I’ve been writing about in this space for months. There are times when astrology provides us with better metaphors than any translation thereof, so I ask: What do you think it means that the asteroids Dionysus and Bacchus join Jupiter, the god of celebration and excess, in your Fifth House of celebration, creation, and taking risks? It must mean something. (If you’re a parent, please get your kids an account with the local cab company, and stash the car keys). If you’re any species of impassioned, inspired, or illuminated, you are being given cosmic license to celebrate the moment and celebrate the season. And while we’re into the astrology, Chiron’s renewed forward motion across your career angle says that such revelries will provide wholesome professional fuel.

Taurus (April 19-May 20)
Others may perceive you as withholding precisely what they know you want to give them. If this is not your intention, than you might want to make it obvious by your words and your actions. Of course, the real issue is giving yourself what you know you want to receive; you have far more power in this regard than you may imagine, but the reasons for withholding from yourself would make fertile ground for a kind of spiritual investigation. It may be, on one level, based on a teaching from your family experience that exchange of any kind leads to over-involvement, disappointment, or involvement in a dependency over which you have no control. I would remind you that the people who raised you are not you, and they were born into a different world with different expectations. Today, we have no obligation but to honor our present moment and our most authentic needs.

Gemini (May 20-June 21)
There is only so much of a substance, like salt, that you can dissolve in a given amount of water. Pretty soon, you reach the saturation point. But if you heat the water, you can dissolve more and more, and when you cool it down, the solution will remain super-saturated. Then, if you add one more crystal, or tap the glass, down rains all that salt, like snow appearing from nowhere. This point of overcharged or supersaturated is about where you are at. Life is getting hotter, or it will be soon. Emotions may be challenging, family situations more challenging, and deep in there, anger is a real issue that needs to be held in clarity. Events around the New Moon on September 6 are due to precipitate an outpouring of feeling, necessity, and experience, and you’re likely to see just how much you’ve been clinging, and just how good it can feel to let it go.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)
The scales of justice are never balanced exactly evenly, but fortunately, they do move. I don’t think anyone would mind if you started piling some rocks (or is it gold?) on your side of the equation. It may seem that the people by whom you are surrounded are demanding a high level of ethical responsibility, but I assure you that the definitions of these things are subject to interpretation. As well, the spiritual forces at work in your life take a more pragmatic view of the universe than they do a moralistic one. The key to justice and equanimity, for you right now, is setting the terms of the game of life before others have the last word, and preferably, before they have the first word. Investigate their actual conduct as well as their language and make sure the two match. There is no need to call bullshit if they don’t, but it always helps to know who you’re dealing with.

Leo (July 22-August 23)
You really can afford to celebrate your passage from darkness. I suggest you do this over and over again, till you get to figure out that it’s true. It’s the act of a courageous heart to be happy, and even more so to live happily. For real: this is something so daring that few even bother to try. We can be sure that there will always be cause for sorrow in this world, and that it will return to our lives. We can be sure that many will seek to escape from it in unwholesome ways, or by means that only lead back to negative spaces. But is this not the whole point of what you are learning in these months and years? And is it not true that what we see depends largely on how we see? And is not honest vision evidence of a clear mind? If there is a test of your worthiness in store, it is whether you can speak your heart in any moment that you remember to do so. For truth strengthens courage just as deception and withholding weaken it.

Virgo (August 23-September 22)
If being Mr. or Ms. Popularity is high on your list of priorities for the month, better look up your Moon or Rising sign. But if the respect of colleagues, friends, and detractors (remember, you’re not cool unless some people think you’re not) taking you seriously is meaningful to you, then you’re on the right planet this month. It is fair to expect people to react to you. It is fair, in fact, to expect unusually strong reactions which defy reason; that is, there may not be a reason, how people are reacting is just about who you are now. I suggest you start practicing the art of asking for exactly what you need, by when you need it. I suggest you practice not taking rejection personally, feeling free to ask again, and being bold with people who may have declined your requests in the past. Then watch the results. Just why you are so compelling is a secret between you and the universe.

Libra (September 22-October 23)
The question is, can you handle the power of your own attractive force? We might well ask how many of the complications in life are born of our inability to work with this strange power that we have to draw people, energy, and things to us—but particularly people. We may not feel like we have the power of attraction, but in fact we have attracted ourselves to the physical universe, a family, a culture, and all that comes with them, most particularly, a vast diversity of choices and an ocean of possibilities. In reality, the power of attraction may be all that we actually have at our disposal, and in sum, please don’t be corrupted by the power of your own beauty. Meanwhile, watch what you say, and what you don’t say, in relation to a situation where the control dynamics may be older and deeper than you realize. Neither of the two alternatives you’re proposing will actually solve the problem; they are not possible to reconcile.

Scorpio (October 23-November 22)
We might ask what combination of grief, loss, and the withholding of your needs has led to some of the strange emotional shapes you encounter deep in your psyche. But the fact is that you do encounter them consciously, and the difference between this and simply being ignorant is all the difference in the universe. And while Scorpio is called a fixed sign, in truth that quality of fixity provides friction and the necessary strength to compel progress at depths that are, as you know, quite unusual in this world. Events of September wind up to an event that provokes you to be the original person you once were, deep inside, before the confusion set in. The result, if I am seeing this clearly, is that you will have a fine, radical experience of saying yes instead of a thousand shades of maybe. Of course, you can always say no, but the important thing, whatever you may do, is to say yes to yourself.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 22)
I am noticing an ever-increasing number of people who are waking up to the fact that their work does not fit their personal reality, and that they must, must, must do something every day that does fit. We could divide the world into two categories: those who get this particular notion, and those who don’t. Among those who do, I would imagine that Sagittarians are of a higher proportion, and now of a rapidly increasing proportion. The usual excuses for being stuck (change is difficult, inertia is annoying, the world does not cooperate, I am unworthy, and I don’t have the energy) are all in the process of going up in flames. But those flames should rightfully be illuminating the idea that this is no one’s life but our own, and if we’re going to be alive, we might as well live it: in reality, not just in principle.

Capricorn (December 22-January 20)
What if you were alive at one of the greatest moments in history, and your own personal history, and somehow missed it? Imagine yourself in 10 or 20 years playing one of your favorite songs from these days, and realizing what great days they were, and wondering how it was that you did not notice, and what it was you thought was so important. There will never be a time when there are no problems, but problems have solutions, and much of the process of life is matching the two. But a big part of our problem is living in the past, and dragging the legacy of the past and that of our predecessors along with us. I recognize that certain people in your personal history were not especially creative when it came to dealing with their stuff, and not particularly honest about what they were feeling or facing. This, however, does not need to be your problem, and I assure you that if any door you now face is closed, it is not locked.

Aquarius (January 20-February 19)
Behind what may be the hot and heavy scene known as your life are brewing a number of insecurities that can be found under the heading “weird family/potential substance abuse” category. There is, in particular, some issue brewing that may have a lot to do with your mother and her views of sexuality that are misinformed by some other legacy. Writes John Bradshaw, on a related theme: “As anger is shamed, two things happen. First, the anger is shame-bound. Every time the person feels angry, he feels shamed. Second, it is repressed…as more anger is repressed, it grows more and more [until] one day there is just no more room to stuff the energy, [and] one day the anger erupts.” If you release it a little at a time and not all at once, and keep the feelings in your body no matter how great the temptation to put them into your mind, you’ll feel a whole lot better.

Pisces (February 19-March 20)
You have no need to worry if the world seems like all promises and pretty faces lately, or all potential that does not meet you where you stand. With the Sun now at the beginning of a two month journey through the relationship angle of your chart, you’re likely to get what you need, if you know what it is, if you ask for it, and if you admit that you really want it. This is the time of year when you can see the world most clearly, and the world can see you, but this time around the Sun, we’re including hot peppers: Mars, the planet of desire, is also crossing your relationship angle, and I remind you of the two most important words in the universe, to be used in approximately equal proportion: Yes and No. You may need to work to find a balance between work and play, but I assure you that on both counts, it’ll be worth the effort.