Dear Friend and Reader:
In 12 years of writing annual horoscopes — as of this year, one edition for every sign of the zodiac — I’ve never looked at the charts and thought: Man, I’m glad I’ve been at this for a while. Not until now, that is.
Photo by Eric Francis.
Given the care with which my words are read, I do my best to get it right. I do this knowing there’s not really a right to be got. Astrology is interpretive. When I suggest what is happening in your life or what theme might offer some insight or comfort, I’m using intuition to guide me through a wide range of choices shown in the charts. So I need an internal ideal to aim for; and for me that is following the planets in the direction of a compassionate unfolding of our personal stories.
I look for the best possibilities in the aspects, and at the same time I view them as calculus equations to be resolved creatively. The planets never present a problem without offering a solution. The art of astrology is about working your way from one to the other, then putting that into words.
When the sky is really amazingly exciting, I’ve learned to take a mellow approach to describing it. It would be easy to get caught in all the promise and forget the obstacles that so often crop up on the way to getting there. Those are generally interior: false beliefs we hold about ourselves; our relationship commitments, which are not designed to help us open our potential as much as to offer a kind of delicate stability; our emotional entanglements, which eat energy but which don’t feed us; our fears and that lurking sense of not quite belonging.
I try to get underneath these and see them as the temporary situations that they are; not as actual problems. If I’ve addressed the points of resistance or the stumbling blocks, maybe I’ve helped open the way to your potential. I offer some ideas; you do the work (and often send some great ideas back).
