Photo: Photo illustration by Preeti Kinha / Photos: Getty
On Wednesday, the action planet Mars leaves its Aries home for the first time since June and enters the Earth Taurus. While Mars in Aries was powerful, but reactive, confident but impulsive, Mars in Taurus offers a chance to become rooted in your energy – to move with intention and determination, to choose a path and not be led astray. On Friday morning, the communication planet Mercury enters Aquarius and the loving planet Venus enters Capricorn. With Mercury in Aquarius, your thinking can become unconventional. Strange problems demand strange solutions, and Mercury in Aquarius can help you think in ways that are strange, creative and totally new. And finally, with Venus in Capricorn, your heart may be a little more cautious, a little less reckless. Venus in Capricorn can help you see the value of reliability, commitment, the kind of trust that must be built – and it can be, 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 each meeting is a message, a challenge, an invitation; days to follow each lead wherever it leads. This week, however, it may be useful to change tactics. This week, you can benefit from protecting your energy – waiting to react, choosing which challenges you face and which ones you ignore. There are beautiful things in store for you, and this is the time to stay on the path towards them.
For a long time, it seemed that all of your best energies were blocked, as if there were no way for you to use your powers or express all your love, fury and desire. This week, all of that may start to change. Some of the changes are external – the barriers you faced may start to weaken – but many of them are also within you. Now you can remember all the beautiful and luxurious stubbornness you have on your side. In spite of everything, you will be driven by a silent willpower that is truly unstoppable.
In strange and unstable times, there is comfort in the analysis. It is comforting to speculate, theorize, organize all the chaotic pieces of the world in a story that makes sense. And there is also security in your attempts to see the future, to prepare for what comes next. But this week, give yourself time to work on designing and forecasting. It is valuable, but it can make it difficult to see the opportunities – for magic, unity, for real and permanent change – that are right in front of you now, waiting for you to reach out and touch them.
You are usually a person who moves with intention, thought and care. But lately, the world has made it difficult. Lately, everything has been so relentlessly dark that it’s been hard to feel that your actions matter more. This week, however, you may feel a small but significant change. This week, you can move away from the kind of hopelessness that drains all your strength and back to the anger that fills you with resolve, with intention, with love for the damaged world.
Even though “clean slate” doesn’t really exist, although new beginnings always carry echoes from the past, this week you can imagine a clean slate, if you need to. You can imagine a real restart, if that’s what will get you out of bed in the morning, if that’s what will make the world bearable. Try to forgive yourself for all the things you would like to have done differently. Try to forgive yourself for being younger, once, than you are now. Everything can start again if you need to. The doors are open.
It is so difficult not to feel misunderstood. It is so hard not to feel that you have done something wrong. Not only for those in power – that, after all, is indisputable – but also for those who are close to you, who you love the most. This week, you can feel the love and support that all these people have for you, however flawed it may be. This week, you can find in yourself the ability to accept the imperfect love that they have to offer. You may find that, even if it is messy, its heat is still enough for you to get through.
It can be so easy, especially in times of loneliness and distance, to forget how solid you are. It can be very easy to think that you are not a person, but an image, a reflection, a mind full of ideas. But this week, you’ll do better to remember that you have a body and that your body has needs. This is a week to pay attention to your body’s needs and do your best to meet them. Treating your body well will make you stronger, it will make your ideas shine brighter, it will help you to remember that you are still real, despite everything.
Sometimes it seems dangerous to trust your community or ask for help from others. Paradoxically, it may seem much easier to endure all the struggles alone. That way, you don’t have to admit any vulnerabilities or needs; that way, you will never be in debt to someone else. But there are things that a person cannot do alone and things that he should not Tue for. And there are things much worse than being bound by the obligations of the community, of love. This week, if you ask for the help you need, you will be stronger. This will open your world.
When you feel that your little actions matter, that your presence here makes a difference, the unbearable world can become bearable. The challenge, of course, is that this is very difficult to believe. When you are really aware of how big the world is, your own life can seem very inadequate. When you can see the full potential of the universe, your own attempts to create change can seem tragically small. This week, work to believe in yourself, to believe that your little actions will someday result in something meaningful. Because they will.
It can be so difficult not to compare yourself with your friends and colleagues – with your ambitions, with your achievements, with all the work you have created in difficult times. You can even tell yourself that this kind of comparison is motivating – that it pushes you to perform, work harder and be better. But this week, competition with other people will not significantly motivate you. This is a time to think bigger – to look at history, to look to the future, to dream in ways that are truly for you, who are not limited by what the people around them are doing.
You are comfortable, most of the time, with thoughts of a distant and radically changed future. You are comfortable with the idea that the world can change, so much so that it becomes almost unrecognizable. The scary part is not that distant future, but the work that must happen here and now. The scary part is not the result of the change, but the series of steps between here and there. This week, however, the world can offer you a sense of capacity, of readiness, of strength. This week, you can put your faith not only in the future, but in the sweet and strange changes that happen every day.
It may seem so unfair, so painful, that you are not able to do everything. You don’t have time to care for everyone who needs care and to fight everyone who needs care. You don’t have the strength to be everything to everyone. So this week, focus on discovering your role. Focus on finding out where you are needed, where you are useful, where you feel most alive and purposeful. No one is called to do everything, and there is wisdom for you this week to find out what you it is called to do.
Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of December 28th. weekly horoscopes for the week of January 11 will be online next Sunday.
Get Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Star Guide, out now.