Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Amidst much other astrology, Mercury will be retrograde in your birth sign from May 29 through the solstice, ending June 22. Though Mercury is often retrograde, it’s rare enough to happen in your sign, one of its ‘domiciles’ or places of rulership. The gift here is rare insight into yourself, perhaps the sense of being able to inwardly see and feel your true self. This experience will be aided and abetted by a pair of eclipses now underway. The first of these, on May 26, may have pulled back the veil that was concealing your view of a relationship situation. You are likely to wake up and change your mind about someone or something; the direction and content of that will be personal. Yet it would be unwise to push the river or make commitments prematurely, as there is still a solar eclipse on its way on June 10, followed by Mercury stationing direct in your birth sign. It will not be until you have lived through all of these events that you have a complete picture of your options and what they are offering you. You may be tempted to make hasty choices, thinking you’ve got it all figured out, though there are many moving parts and each is working in its own way at its own pace. They represent separate but related issues, and it will take time to see the way they are connected. Yet to put it simply, they are related through you and your experience. What you will see is how your concept of who you are mediates your experience of life and your perception of the world. Large forces are at work helping you shift that perception, which at times may drop below the level of awareness and at other times may feel like the ground of your being shaking.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Before the Sun enters your sign on the 20th (21st in Europe), you will be taken on a journey deep into your self-awareness. Unusual activity in the sign Gemini, your mysterious 12th place (house, solar house, whole sign house), gets you there. This is the house so deep most people lose track of whatever goes there. It’s the house of lost socks, Bic lighters, guitar picks, friends, relatives, ancestors, past lives and karma. Over the next few weeks this space will open up like a forgotten room where you may find a few things that have seemingly disappeared into the ethers. What you are most likely to discover is the other side of the story in some way relating to yourself. Think of this as being about forgotten aspects of your nature that re-manifest unexpectedly. This will include forgotten knowledge and better yet, forgotten questions. Those are what you really want: guidance about what to ask yourself and where to direct your probes. The beauty of the 12th is that it contains all the taboo material that people generally avoid. This is the stuff you want to learn about and seek to understand. Some of it is going to be sexual in nature. That is the deepest essence of the 12th: it’s about the deepest recesses of what is incorrectly called ‘unconscious’ desire. You also have karma to clear, as indicated by the presence of the lunar node. When you find things you don’t want, or that are truly not your own, sweep them together and prepare to release them around the time of the solar eclipse on June 10. Let this whole process be a journey into the unknown, led by curiosity, which is your guiding light in the dark. Aspire to know, discover, and understand yourself and these things will be given you. Self-knowledge is both freedom and power.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Both the work and partnership angles of your chart are going at full-force this month. This involves the movement of Saturn and Uranus, which are each long-term visitors in their current signs. What is different is that at the moment, they are making a rare, potent 90-degree square angle which comes to a peak on June 10. Events unfolding now have a long history. Some, related to your work, even go back 12 years or more; the connections are direct, not merely historical. Now things are coming to a very necessary peak, though this may feel like a suspended interval of instability. That is necessary so you can work in the kinds of changes that you need to make. Your situation, however, is not as shaky or as precarious as it may seem. There’s tension and pressure, and yet you possess integrity that you must trust and relax into. As for the square of Saturn in Aquarius with Uranus in Taurus: the question is, notice who in your life is serving to regulate your desire to change, and who is providing a structure and container for it? Which of your friends are encouraging and which are discouraging of your need to shake up your life, your world and especially your work? You know that the vibration and agitation are necessary for your creative process to get moving. You are inclined to extremes of stability, and that can stifle your growth and your ability to experiment, including by making sudden and radical changes. However, you have support now, yet it’s essential that you notice who is offering it. There are going to be people who prefer you not make them nervous by being so adventurous. And there will be others who will protect and participate in your process. Notice who is who, and who is whom.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — There are those times when all you need to do is change your point of view a little and suddenly you see things a whole new way. By a little, I mean just that: a quarter turn to the left. View the room from the front and the back. Walk around the building clockwise and counter-clockwise and notice your observations. Contemplate your situation walking through a crowded space (now that they are more likely to occur). The aspect of life where you’re about to make discoveries mostly involves your professional affairs, your highest goals, and the set of circumstances that define how you are known by others (your reputation). There are many sides to this story, and typically you miss most of them. Now, you have the opportunity for an investigation, first, into what you really want: into what is a current and desirable agenda item, and what is not. Be generous with yourself by removing old goals from your priority list. In doing so, you may find some commitments that you were not aware of, which were burning energy even in “pending” status. Then, refine your present goals. Start with what you consider to be absolutely essential. This process will take time, and you have more than enough: the time boundary on this project is June 22, when Mercury stations direct in Gemini. Yet if you pay attention, you’re likely to know where you stand long before then. This will give you time to get sorted on your tactics and strategies. The first one of those is to remove obstacles, including conflicting objectives. Set reasonable timeframes for accomplishing things, and most importantly, work in tangible steps that you can reach and have a sense of accomplishment. Motivation is essential, and for the moment, it will come from yourself.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — From the look of your solar chart, the sky is about to open up and reveal a vast dimension of potential that you may not have considered possible. It is now essential that you not judge something impossible, or yourself undeserving. In other words, you will serve yourself the best by getting out of your own way. The first part of this exercise involves a careful reevaluation of what you think of as right or wrong. Here is what to check: everything someone else told you was one or the other. All of those imposed judgements require careful reevaluation. You must make your own determination of what is ethical and what is not. To skip this step or to refuse to do so means that you’re allowing others to determine the basis of your own choices, for which you then must take personal responsibility. There is something else going on as well. Many people who impose regulations on others are doing so on the grounds that you cannot have more fun than they do. You might evaluate on this basis every judgment someone has ever placed on you. In fact, success is fun, and in fact, people are jealous of it. Many will think nothing of acting on that jealousy or contempt. You must fly high above this and be the master of your own choices, your own values, and your own truth. In the process, you must make another commitment, which is to do your best to be right. The facts and figures that prove you right or wrong are not an opinion. I suggest you marry yourself to verifiable reality and be meticulous about this from hour to hour and day to day. You are about to be summoned to a higher calling and for that you must be sincere: that is Latin for without error.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — Monitor carefully any choice that you make that is based on gaining social acceptance. It could become extremely costly. You will need to be unusually honest with yourself about this. Vying for social acceptance means any form of fear that your family, friends, coworkers or some larger notion of society will not accept you unless you do something. This counts for triple where your health choices are concerned, specifically, what you put into your body, or do to your body, that cannot be reversed. I am not talking about going out for ice cream. Your physical health and healing process are the most important thing in your life right now. They deserve not only most of your attention but also to be integrated into everything that you do and every decision you make. Meanwhile, during the upcoming Mercury retrograde in Gemini, you will have the opportunity to renegotiate many things, both emotional and financial. The place to focus is where the two intersect: by which I mean, sex and any financial commitment. Sift through those agreements carefully, and make sure you are aligned fully with your intentions. By that I mean make sure you are doing the right thing for yourself. As an astrologer who has counseled many going through changes in relationships, I can tell you that the influence of money and concerns about it too often rules the roost, often entirely taking precedent over matters of the heart, of growth and of sanity. As with your health and wellbeing (which extend to matters of where you work and what you do), the agreements you have with others are existential. First and foremost, you must know and understand their exact content and their actual influence on you.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You are in an unusual moment of freedom to define who you are. This implies something new, a next-generation adventure in being. For this to work, it will help if you recognize the ways that you tend to stay the same: what holds you to your patterns of identity, thought and how you relate to your environment. You’re feeling the pressure to change, to grow and to evolve. Most of this will take place in the realm of your ideas and how you think them. Thanks to Saturn, you are experiencing a clearing and cleansing process of your old thought forms and also the mental structures that were controlling how you would think. One of the points of crisis that Sagittarius can face is that you are capable of thinking such vast thoughts, and seeing such a wide-angle picture, that you tend to reduce things to categories and concepts to make them more manageable. This is how thought works for most people, though for you, it’s a particularly intimate and necessary part of your process of understanding the world. However, you need better categories and notions. They need to be more integrated and flexible, and refer to one another. Saturn is transiting Aquarius, your 3rd place (house, solar house or whole sign house). This is about clearing out old thought forms, rules, patterns, and ways in which you were set, and making space for something new. That something new could find you like a lightning bolt at any time, particularly under the influence of Saturn square Uranus this month. The theme here is that your mental patterns are directly related to your work patterns and how you use time and space. Pay attention — you are being given something very close to a free pass.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Due to the influence of a centaur planet in your sign (called Pholus), you may be living with the sensation that everything could come unraveled some time in the next five minutes. It’s as if you could suddenly burst and out of you would spew the collective karma, history and genetic matter of the past 100 generations of your ancestors. At the same time, a powerful and distant point called Ixion is drilling into the question: Am I a good person? As for Pholus, you contain much more than you think you are; you are more than your personality. You contain a vast library of experience in your genetic code, nearly none of which is yours. As for Ixion, you might ask the source of the question. Who or what in you is asking that? Who has the capacity or authority to judge you? The truth is, you have to live with yourself. Though perhaps others do as well, you must coexist with yourself the most closely. The assessment is ultimately your own. Nobody is your judge and jury, though it can take a long time to get out of this feeling, as it is so pervasive. Inwardly, here is the theme of Ixion. What do you do when you’re given a second chance? The world is more forgiving than it may seem, and errors are often met with an opportunity to try again. There is such a thing as a fresh start, if you say so. This might be in a relationship; it might be in a career; it might be the chance to start a new family. Do you grow into those situations? Do you grasp the beauty of the opportunity to be true to yourself, and to do your best with others? You may, if you want.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — As times in your life go, this is one of the most important in many years, perhaps ever. Saturn, the traditional ruling planet of your sign, is with you, and this influence is pushing you to grow, to evolve, to become, to mature, and to at last emerge as yourself. If you’re feeling this pressure all the time, count that as a good thing. Yet there is something specific that’s trying to get your attention, which is the need for a certain kind of change. It is likely that you need to do something more interesting with your professional life, or live somewhere more appealing to you. The ground on which you stand is moving, and you need to move with it. This is, of course, primarily inner ground: your orientation on your existence. It is also the ground of society, which is shifting so rapidly that most people are failing to notice it. The movement is all in the direction of surrendering our biological existence to technological “solutions” that have nothing to do with us personally, and do not solve any of our problems. You need to recognize and define the things you want to change and the matters you want to resolve — and then make your own adjustments, as is right for you. When these things are imposed on us from the outside, there is always an agenda. Your mental health is paramount right now. If you are feeling pressure, whether emotional, psychological, or from your environment, stop and address it. Ask yourself what decisions you need to make. Ask yourself whether you are where you belong, and with whom you belong. Ask yourself if you’re doing what you want to do. Ask out loud — and listen within for the answers, as they come.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Your ruling planet Jupiter is in your sign now, a relatively rare, once-per-12-years event. This time ’round is unusual — part of it happens in 2021, and the rest happens in 2022. This is a gift in many ways, though let’s start with the primary function of Jupiter, which is to magnify. Before the discovery of the lens, nobody knew what this was about. Today we have the power to see things more closely, and therefore to make adjustments in exacting detail. Jupiter is now enlarging everything, including your problems, so that you can see them and do something about them. It is also enlarging your potential, your gifts, and your opportunities to both grow and succeed. Remember to keep your sense of proportion, since magnification is a kind of distortion. Also remember to attend to the details that you can now see. For the next month or so, these are likely to be details about your most intimate inner life, which is to say, how you relate to yourself. This extends into your home life, which is to say, all that happens within your four walls. In both instances, the human realm is more important than the material, at least for now. Everything related to family, social experiences, and anything involving a group are all under revision, and deserve careful review and scrutiny. The question to keep asking yourself is, “How do I feel where I am?” It will help if you maintain an ongoing, conscious dialog with yourself, which includes a review of what you thought was true in the past. It’s essential that you be working with current, accurate feedback from yourself, and observable facts from your environment. It is easy to get caught in the past, and to think what was true in the past is true today. Here is some news: it’s not.

Aries (March 20-April 19) — What is spiritual? Let’s start with going beyond appearances. We can add a commitment to honesty, and also respect. Being trustworthy is at the essence of spiritual if anything is, and so too is learning how to trust. Let’s keep honesty, respect and trust in mind as we address the first topic: going beyond appearances. The world we see with our senses is often a projection screen. This is not always true, but it’s often true, that we see the contents of our mind rather than the nature of what we think we are perceiving. It would be impossible to notice the difference if not for some shift in perspective, or some experience of the veil lifting and the underlying realty glimpsed and acknowledged. For you, that’s an important dimension of what develops the next few weeks. You may experience it in ways that you can describe and also in ways impossible to describe or quantify. As this happens, there is something brewing on the mental level as well, described by Mercury retrograde in your 3rd place (house, solar house, whole sign house, Gemini). This is about rethinking, reviewing and re-evaluating what is immediately present for you, close to you, or what happened very recently. Events in Sagittarius for you describe the wide, the distant and the deep. Events in Gemini bring these same things right down to the ground, right into your immediate world. The greater truth can find a home in your immediate apprehension and observation of the world and the people around you. What if you lived as if all those high-minded ideals were actually true? How would you make different decisions? How would you speak to people? What would you say to them, ask them about, or offer them?

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — Your life story right now is about growing into your professional commitments and emerging into your true calling. Rather than judging what this is supposed to be, consider what is so, right now, and what you are learning from it. Just that thought contains much power for change, adaptation, growth and success. This does not usually come in expected ways or expected times. Goals and ambitions are the rough draft. The process of refinement comes in the process of living and working. This calls for a blend of experimentation and discipline. You are having two of the most powerful transits in many years happening at once, and working together. The first is Uranus in your birth sign — perhaps the planet most antithetical to Taurus because it’s so agitated, spontaneous and erratic. Yet you must relate to the streak of brilliance that it bestows, and you can take advantage of freedom from your inner routines. At the same time, Saturn is transiting your 10th place (house, solar house, whole sign house) in Aquarius — one of the best transits of them all. This is Saturn at its best, by both house and sign. The peak of the Saturn-Uranus square takes place June 14. This will help you resolve the various contradictions you may be experiencing over what is the right thing to do. Your wild side is being lit up at the same time as your persistent, dependable side, and these are two things you have long wanted to get working together. Remember: this is a process of trial and error. Squares also call for you to work one leg (meaning one of the planets) and then the other, and then to keep doing that until you gradually integrate the seeming opposites. This actually works if you work it, and the result will be phenomenal.

beautifully illustrated by Deirdre Tanton

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