THE DAILY TRAVESTY | Reason & Passion, Planet Waves

ARIES (March 21-April 19)
You will have reason to question the intensity of your current efforts if you find yourself repeating the idea that you're not supposed to see any of their direct benefits. Selfless service is perhaps the most important lesson this world can learn, but as next week's solar eclipse builds in one of the most beneficent angles of your solar chart, you would have reason to be suspect of anyone or anything that made all demands and offered no real rewards. I'd say this is a great opportunity to investigate the underlying realities that led to your being in such a condition, but at this moment there is no point, and little time to waste. Your present opportunities are too rich to squander on psychoanalysis.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)
I get the sense that you are building toward something radical, toward creating some important change that has for many, many months, refused to occur despite your best intentions. Yet I'm not sure you're seeing how easy it will be to effect this adjustment or decision, no matter how hard it seemed, say, last summer, when it was a very critical issue in your life. Much has changed since then. The tides of time have worn down the critical edges and washed away the earth from beneath the foundations of this particular structure. And you are now in possession of the one missing ingredient that would make all the difference between the fruits of your hard work being bitter, or being sweet.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)
If you've ever wanted to do something really, truly brilliant that could leave its mark on humanity, alter the course of your life, and illuminate your light-bulb like mind with a flash of lightening bright enough to reveal the hidden nature of so much that is so often invisible, now is a very good week to consider and act upon such possibilities. But if you strive merely to find innovative solutions to life circumstances that have proven to be too challenging even for your wits, if you are seeking insight into the nature of your relationship to this thing called the Higher Self, or if you think your life is a prison of bullshit and you want to make a clean, fast break -- don't wait too long.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)
Common wisdom holds that relationships are the high road morally, requiring time and commitment, while sex is a questionable, passing fad between two people, a superficiality and, at worst, a means of inflicting harm. I take another view. I think that far more often, relationships are the lazy way out, the prefab and "risk-free" solution to what seem to be life's problems, while consciously exploring sex is the far more daring, provocative, creative and growth-oriented way of being. It is not really possible to separate sex from its relationships, but it's possible to pretend that sex does not exist, and it's easy to use relationships as an excuse for thwarting one's life force. If any of this rings a bell for you, then get ready for some fun.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)
Many of your troubles in recent seasons have surrounded trying to love and cling to reality at the same time. It seems natural to want to secure our affections and hold onto the good "things" in life, but love as wee people experience it is not a thing; it is, at least at first, a fleeting quality of energy that eludes description or being named or held for more than a moment, and yet therein is its eternal quality. And when confronted with the experience of love, we have a choice either to take the ride, or not. At your particular juncture of history, this translates thus: all that's left for you to do is tell the truth about how you really feel, both to yourself, and to whom it may concern, then do something about it.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
Passion can exist as an idea. Creativity can stand as an abstraction. Daring to live is usually something we follow in the life of a book or movie character. More to the point, we can explore the universe adventurously and vividly in our imaginations without needing to lift a finger or taking a risk or putting our money down, and such are usually based on the excuse of staying in a safe zone. My question is, how safe is your safe zone? How secure is it to allow the hurts of the past to set the limits of your potential for now, or in the future? Changes of the current and coming weeks will inform you that there really is only one way to live.

LIBRA (Sep. 23-Oct. 22)
In the history of human pregnancy, there was a time recently when we wondered whether it would be a boy or a girl. Today we can get fetal portraits made and carry them in our wallets five months before a child is born, but we still don't know whether he or she will be a lesbian or an engineer, or a musician, or a painter or a master locksmith or a mystic or poet. Likewise, the universe is pregnant with you, and while you may know, or think you know, if you're a boy or a girl, you have no clue what reality you're about to be born into. You're in for a surprise or two, with the added luxury of everyone else going into spontaneous amnesia as far as what you were before this mysterious change manifested.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
I feel you gathering your nerve to settle an old family issue that has long been driving you crazy. But I suggest you let your nerve gather you rather than you trying to gather it. In other words, my sense is that you are well settled on what needs to be done, and now it's only a matter of the appropriate space and time, and then actually making the necessary move and statements of fact. The right time is the first moment you are ready, and you will know when that is because you will feel very different. Pick up the phone, or write the letter and put it in the mail, or say the words face to face if remotely possible. If you wait, you may have a second chance, but circumstances are such that the whole situation could rearrange itself, or the appropriate time will pass, and you will lose this rare chance.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 23-Dec. 21)
Please be patient while the universe shifts gears on you. Take this moment without clear direction to reassemble your scrambled brains, only while you're at it, play with the shapes and see if anything interesting appears. Your ruling planet, Jupiter, is in what some astrologers would describe as the "void-of-course" phase, which is another way of saying big changes are afoot, but there is now a slight delay; perhaps a sense of free-fall; a time of reassessment and uncertainly; but it is all in preparation for progress so sweeping, so unpredictable and, as a result, so unforeseen, that you will wonder whether it's really happening.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
Your highly innovative nature and your seemingly conventional ways of being are often at odds. People expect you to be far less imaginative than you are, and it's easy to fall for it by thinking it's true. This is especially a concern in your personal relationships. If love has entered your life recently, track its progress, and note whether its path of motion is from something wild and free toward something rather ordinary. You have that potential, for sure, but this particular relationship can also serve as one of the most electrifying creative and erotic opportunities you've ever had. The difference will be up to you; you'll need to take the lead, and encourage others to have faith.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 19-Feb. 18)
The theme of "betraying others by being yourself" comes up in not just in your stunning charts for the next two weeks, and indeed, for the entire year, but as a fact of the society and times in which we live. Those words above in quotes are another way of saying "guilt." Guilt is another way of saying that people have the power to control us, if only we will cooperate and not dare to say, do, think or be anything that might possibly make them think, feel or question their own reality. Our job is to be good little people and make sure that the world is safe for everyone else to stay just the way they are. Well, here's an idea for a birthday present to yourself. Hmm, pardon the pun, but present yourself -- sans the plain brown wrapper, wearing a bright green bow, and, if anybody gets pissed off, don't forget to laugh.

PISCES (Feb. 19-Mar. 20)
How do we recognize the problems we face in order to solve them? One way is to look for patterns and read them like Tarot cards. To serve your current purposes, search for the very large patterns -- perhaps those that you can track the existence of, in some form, for a decade or more, and those which are in many ways too big to see. You will need to pull way back, create maps and diagrams, read your diaries, ask the people who have known you for the longest for their sense. Things are too good, and your potential is way too rich, for you to waste your precious time on problems that don't need to be there, yet you'll will need a little more clarity before you can make your decisions, and make them stick.

For the Faithful
The first two things I discovered in astrology were eclipses and Chiron. Eclipses came first. It seemed amazing the way life shifted so dramatically under their influences, and the river of time accelerated its current, dropped down waterfalls, passed through chasms and turned around bends that were not ordinarily there. We're now passing through some of these magnificent geographic features of spacetime, as the next week or so builds to a stunning solar eclipse in Aquarius, exactly conjunct the Aquarian planet Uranus. So electric, so provocative, so threatening to the stuck reality known as the "status quo" is this chart that even yours truly, Mr. Eclipse, has been feeling rather shaken up. But I've been coaxing myself to get with the program. The chart suggests many problems and jammed aspects of life can now start to work out and come loose, and that a few choice, brilliant ideas will be born. We could all use a good dose of both.

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