Your February Horoscopes Are Here

Well, for the ones of you reading this that made it out of the longest January to date in the history of existence unscathed, congratulations. For the rest of you, I see you, I feel you, and I hope you feel me too. What a month, what a month, what mighty hard month. We can commiserate all we like, we can commiserate right into February which, as is the way of things, picks up where January dropped off and snaps the reins. Opposing forces, like two horses, drag the chariot of time forward. Whatever transformations the eclipses of the past month spurred in you, reader, February pushes them onward with visions and possibilities. What might have felt like a tear in the fabric has created an opening through which opportunities flow like so many shooting stars and comets. The catch? If you spend your days worrying the tear and kicking rocks, you'll miss the light show in the sky. So, look up and make a wish. Forget those old New Year's resolutions. Celebrate the new moon on February 4 and Chinese New Year on February 5 and make all new resolutions!

Mars, the planet of action, is active all month long, moving into steadfast sensual Taurus, who knows what she wants and how she means to get it. Venus, optimistic and forgiving in Sagittarius, does her best to offer our collective conscious a different angle toward love and varied ways of seeing what intimacy looks like when we liberate ourselves from old mental traps. Mercury in Pisces is murky and indirect, but it is not without the gift of imagination. While it might feel tempting to throw your hands up in the face of whatever chaos you've come from, while it might feel reasonable to take on the suffering of our global world and let it make a living corpse you—it will help no one. Figure out a way to align your difficult transitions with the values you guard and nurture at your core. It might seem impossible and unlikely, but the chance of a better future is real. Realer, still, if you choose to move toward it.

Aquarius

What would the perfect world look like if it was made in your honor? Who would you gather under your swirling disco light, your star-studded web, and who would you talk to first? While Mercury spins in Aquarius, soak up your heightened sense of abundance: ideas and the connections between all things. Once you said to me, "I don't want to ache, I just want to lose my bearings." Few bearing can survive a windstorm, Aquarius, and I hear one is coming around some of these parts. If you're looking for a wild wind, you can't go wrong giving yourself to the wind of beauty, all the words for it, all the names you've yet to taste in your own mouth. Don't worry about meaning right now, or boxes, or any kind of baggage.

If you're looking to lose something that weighs you down, lose convention. It was never natural the way you carried it, anyway, trying your damnedest to fit your ever-expanding life into a plain suitcase someone else made. This is when you begin to put it down without guilt or grief.

What's that Marie Kondo said about releasing what served you once but no longer brings you joy? Hold it in your hands, thank it for its service, and let it go. I think you know how to do that with a version of yourself, or an idea you had once about how your life should go. You might be a fixed sign, but your stars are changing. This month, expect a heightened sense of intuition, a change of perspective, a feeling that not only is the world more generous but you are more generous in this world. Happy birthday, sweet star, expect anything—plan accordingly.

PISCES

You know that antiquated language of going steady? I'm thinking about what it meant to ask someone to "go steady," to be unwavering in your affection, to be consistent and constant, to be safe. What about if, this month, you turn that language toward something more singular? I'd like to ask you, Pisces, to consider making a deeper commitment to yourself. What would that look like anyway, personal steadiness? Financial accountability—examining where it comes from, where it goes, defining what financial stability means to you—a balancing of the books in every sense. Examining your emotional resources: how much nurturance and care do you offer and at what cost? Does your emotional labor (interpersonally or more widely) sustain you or does it deplete you? If your answer is that emotional labor gives you a sense of purpose—I promise you that the care you offer is not your purpose, it is only one of your powers.

This month go steady with yourself, Pisces, and give your other powers a chance to grow. Mercury, the planet of communication, lands under your stars in early February but candid Mercury doesn't do so well in evasive Pisces. Plus, by mid-month, we'll all be feeling the shadow of Mercury Retrograde, which will make communication and connection even more difficult.

You might be the royal highness of multiple realities, Pisces, but I think this month has more than a little to teach you about multiple truths. And, the fact that sometimes you don't get to choose which truth floats up and which one sinks beneath the surface. This time, the lives you traverse and the effects of your decisions will have a greater impact on you than you might be ready for. You can endure a great deal, you can give a lot of slack, and you can hold the weight but—Pisces—you don't have to. By the end of the month, tensions will give way to a greater sense of personal resolve. With Mercury in Pisces making a trine to true node in Cancer, followed by your Sun sextiling Mars in Taurus, your steady commitment to strengthening your foundation will prove to be your best and most enduring valentine.

Aries

Because we are both subject to the planet Mars, dear Aries, I'll let you in on a secret. This month, I pulled a tarot card for every sign, and each time the cards matched my astro-work so clearly, it was as if they were sent down to me from the stars themselves. Well, maybe they were. Who knows? It can be tough to believe in something unless it aligns perfectly with what we already know to be true. But, knowing is a tricky business. This time, I felt validated, but sometimes I need a negation to understand that what drives my actions/beliefs isn't ego—it's witness. What about you? What do you believe in? If there's no god for you, or gods, is there a highest good? Even an atheist will come to their knees before a mountain. Or a great love.

Are you interested in awe, Aries? Interest and want alone are not enough. Interest and yearning must give way to the work. I know work, you might say, irreverently. But I don't think you know this kind. I don't think you know this kind because the soul's work is like a river. It is always water, and it is always flowing, and, as they say, you never step into the same one twice.

These past few years have been transformational for you, yes, but have you stabilized the ground you've built your world on? Have you tended to the foundation and the bones? This month, whatever you stored in the basement—untended, aching—will cry to be let upstairs, nurtured and seen. This year, you will find yourself charged with the grief you carry as one is charged with a small child. You will find that no amount of success will give her the nurturance she needs, no promotion, no lover, no pill. This month will offer you chance after chance to witness that child as one does a mountain or a great love: with awe and sacred regard.

Taurus

Just because it feels impossible doesn't mean it's not worth believing in. Just because the rewards for all your hard work haven't been coming in the way you were hoping they would, doesn't mean they haven't been coming. My sweet, steadfast believer. If you were raised in a world where success requires proof and wealth is measured by what one feels entitled to—if you were raised to believe that an invisible rope unwinds and contracts your right to freedom based on how much money you earn and how much you produce—you are not alone. Of course, the vastness of a belief doesn't give it potency or power. Only we do that.

And you've begun to change your mind, haven't you Taurus? You've begun to take stock of your capacity to amass wealth in a way no ever taught you to define it: your wealth of knowledge, your wealth of relations, your deep reserve of spiritual strength.

The answer is not a crumbling tower, Taurus, you need not destroy everything you've built on the material plane just to access what you ache for: purpose. You already have purpose. The visions that come to you might feel without means now, but the means are all around you—slow to make themselves known but very real none the less. Do not make less of your work, sweet bull, do not diminish how far you've come by wishing away the years that got you here. And, don't burn any bridges you'll be needing to cross. Just have faith in what you've built and bet on yourself. Your meticulous will to change, to wear a new path through the tall grass, to walk with intention to water and offer that water to the herd that follows you—it is no small offering.

Gemini

Life isn't all fun and games, but life can be fun and games for a little while. Why not? Winter is long and dreary, and you're a summer baby with summer in your heart. So, go ahead, play. Play the field, play the fool, play creatively and play it as it lays (as Joan would write). There will be time soon enough for figuring out what lies ahead, but, for now, you're better off basking in the visions that come to you, the ideas, and the future possibilities. In fact, making sense of it now, or putting a label onto something unwieldy, might prove limiting and ultimately disappointing.

I'm not a huge fan of secrets, so let's not call this world you're exploring a secret, let's call it protected. Protected from convention and convention's insatiable appetite for proof.

"Life moves so mysterious with its cute little spins":

All day I've been listening to (Gemini) Ferron (yes I'm that lesbian) sing "Snowing in Brooklyn." It's about coming back from heartache. And it's about coming back to a world that thinks it knows all about you, but even you don't know all about you. The refrain is so sweet and affirming and solid: "If it's snowin' in Brooklyn. I'd say snow's what we've got."

If it's snowing in Brooklyn, then snow is all around you. If you're going with the flow, keep going, but stay present. Note the way this freedom makes you feel, note the information it gives you about yourself: your boundaries and your wide-open doors. There is hope here for something new and although the catalyst lies outside, what you want wants to grow within you. There are forces around you that are beyond your control, but that doesn't mean you have no control over the ways in which you participate with those forces.

Cancer

Everyone on the internet has been saying that January has been one long year of a month and that might be true. What's also true is that the eclipse cycles that began in 2017, and spun back toward you in January, taught you about the elasticity of time like none other. Sure, January was long but so was December. And, hasn't half a year passed since November? And wasn't June just yesterday? Measuring your life, it's waves and storms, seems less than ideal in a world that burns all around us and burns inside us—with hopelessness, with rage, and with courage too. Better to sit outside time and count your blessings, regard the web of relations you've spun around you as indication that love is real and abundant. That pain is not the only teacher.

To burn with courage in the face of loss, to guard your vulnerability without effacing it, these are deeply Cancerian gifts, and you have spent unknowable time developing them.

You have labored well in the corporeal world under difficult circumstance, you have carried your emotional tumult from task to task, doing what needed to be done for the sake of survival.

This month, February envelops you, guarding you as you work to come back to yourself; as winter guards the seeds of spring beneath its hardened earth. Winter is difficult, yes, and harsh—there is death here, and grief too—but now, more than ever, you are being asked to acknowledge the turning of the wheel. Your own hand readying the spin. There are many kinds of death, Cancer, spiritual, physical, emotional, and all of them are necessary for something new to come.

Leo

Close your eyes, little lion, and check in. I think your body has been missing you. I think your body wants your sweet attention, a big stretch, a series of deep and deeper breaths. I know you know how to work up a sweat and you can start there, if it feels right. Run up and down a flight of stairs, take a movement-based yoga class, swim, anything that gets your blood pumping back to your heart because your heart has been keeping you alive this whole time. And, have you been listening to it? Your engine of survival, where every ache is a signal, every yearning an indication, but the language is not simple—is not surface—you've got to pay attention.

Your body knows more than you think it does about what you feel. Your body can teach you when you are feeling anxious or afraid. While our minds rationalize, compartmentalize, and lift us far from the scene like little escape hatches, our bodies can teach us that pain lasts a long time when it is not attended to and suffering can be a kind of prayer against forgetting.

If you've already been lifted far above scene and you can barely feel at all, okay. Distance, even when dissociative, is the mind's protection. It can be a gift too, for a little while. It can give you the chance to look back at the big picture and really notice the shape of your life, it's little roads and houses, children playing by rivers, mayors and the maintenance crews. What I'm saying is, you are kinder and more generous than any city planner in the capitalist machine. You have the capacity for gratitude, for seeing work that is invisible and honoring it as vital to your life. What I mean is, even when you give up on yourself, your people won't, and when you come back to yourself, you find your people waiting. Now get your heart pumping and honor that.

VIRGO

I don't think a lot of astrology write-ups mention how intuitive you can be, how gifted many Virgos are with second sight. Maybe it's a gift that comes down from on high, zapping your human brain with electric knowing. Or, maybe it's the mutable earth in you, maybe you move through the forest of your life like a deer, alert to every branch's snap, attuned to new scents in the dirt and water, warned by a single hair left caught in the mossy ground covering. What they call skittish but what you pride yourself on: attention.

What you sense is what you know, Virgo, you need not doubt it. Trust your intuition and practice self-protection. Separate if you need to, guard your psychic space if it wants guarding. Life, and the people in it, will eventually offer a whole host of explanations. There will be time for you to listen and consider what to do with what you hear.

For now, strengthen your boundaries and focus on your projects. Yes, you have friends you can turn to, yes, there is companionship that is worthy of your energy, but this month, with the salt circle cast and the bubble up, you are your own most trusted companion. Inside your dome, your dreams are free to take material form and jump on the assembly line. There, you can take creative risks, resist perfectionism, and prepare to put yourself out there in a way that feels wholly authentic and useful to you. Just don't trap yourself inside your own guard or you'll grow thirsty. Your shield, like the deer's camouflage, is your protection. When you need to drink from the river, when you need to shine in the sun, use your powers to your advantage.

Libra

Who can fault you for getting down in the wintertime? It's the season that asks for much maintenance, energy, and attention with hardly any of the sun's warmth. One comes home tense from bracing themselves. Just like anyone, you get tired, worn down, and prone to sickness. Counter to the season's indications, the universe is very invested in strengthening your powers at this time. While the immediate environment proves itself often sharp and unrelenting, rays of generous energy flow toward you offering the gift of pragmatism and abundance.

Pragmatism? You might wonder. What for and how? Pragmatism, my beautiful friend, is using your gifts practically and beneficially. To you and to those around you. Pragmatism is the practice of ascertaining what the world offers and reaching for it with a sound approach and ready sense of application.

The weather won't be all that gets you down this month, and there's indication that communication issues will arise in the family matters or matters of the home. Do your best to work past your instinct for sideways speech. Practice right speech whenever possible. If anticipating tension has got you down or if accessing your pragmatic powers seems impossible when your body is your obstacle—pragmatize your relationship with your body. Add things that bring you pleasure to your schedule. Add self-nurturance to your schedule. In the factory of being, there's a clipboard with maintenance checks. Even a beautiful machine needs fuel to run.

Scorpio

Someone taught you once that there is no such thing as a safe space, and they were wrong. They were wrong to teach you that because they did not register the possibilities of your magnificent body. How safety threatened can be safety re-imagined. How the cells and sinews that make you who you are, light up like an alarm system and get to work spinning an elaborate net that protects you from what threatens to destroy you. Someone taught you that there is no such thing as a safe space because they had forgotten what it was like to trust themselves. And they were so busy projecting their fear onto you, they missed recognizing your singular power.

A Scorpio guards their own truth and the truths of everyone they love. A Scorpio's work is guarding the sanctuary that is ancient inside them, the sanctuary where any heart entrusted comes to rest. If an entrusted heart seeks to leave your sanctuary and fend for itself, let it. The shelter you offer is not a prison. If you are afraid your own heart is not safe in the shelter of yourself, you are mistaken. Rest.

Psychic danger is spiritual danger, what wounds the mind infects the body and chains it to the earth. But, a Scorpio in danger is a Scorpio transforming, and transformation needs solitude, sleep, and succor. You are the only one who can give yourself those things. Do you think a snake slipping off its old skin spends its time wondering whether all the effort will be worth it? I don't think so. I think you have an instinct for shedding, a bittersweet love for it. I think a snake is familiar with death when it wraps around her, an intimacy, a closeness to something like god.

Sagittarius

You can be spontaneous without being reckless. You can take a risk, an emotional one, a creative one, a financial one, without losing your head or—god forbid—your heart. You have the power, Sagittarius, to harness the fire that lives in you with consideration and intention. So, go ahead, set a flame to that arrow and aim it farther than you ever let yourself aim it before. You deserve to take a chance on yourself and to dream. Just make sure the target you're aiming for is a target that can shelter your fire rather than extinguish it or spread it where it may cause more harm than good.

Patience is not your virtue, Pony, no matter how many books you read that teach you about patience. But, kindness and diligence? You've got that in spades. Humility, too, grows in you as you spend more and more time sitting with the varied truths of the world—recognizing that even the false is tender, even the jagged is beautiful. Virtues aren't just powers of perception, they are also tools, Sagittarius.

What I'm trying to say is, it'll be worth your time to celebrate the virtues that you've got and apply them to the possibility that you were meant for more in this world. Use your tools and use them wisely. Don't make yourself small to accommodate a small town or a lineage of smallness. Or, conversely, don't make yourself small for fear that somehow life will prove you've been small all along. Why smother your fire for fear that a big wind might come and put it out when you are the one that sparks new fires? Big changes in your self-perception are par for the course this month, and you will do well to embrace the biggest version of yourself.

Capricorn

Put yourself out there. Put yourself out there again and this time let it be more than your anger, more than your beauty, more than your capacity to help others. Take a creative risk but don't call it a risk because risks make you nervous, call it a creative leap in good faith. Haven't you climbed the side of the mountain long enough to take in the view? Don't you think it might reward your soul to do something less strenuous for a while, less invested in self-limitations under the guise of self-development?

Why limit yourself so fervently when all the forces in power, with their guns and their wars and their white hetero male masc. supremacy, have built an empire in the name of limiting your personal power?

And, what is your personal power? Compersion, the feeling of elation at witnessing the success of others whom you love and admire. Compassion, a tendency to offer concern and care even to those who've caused your harm. Capricorn, you don't need to compromise your core sense of self to prove your personal powers to others. In fact, in compromising yourself, you weaken your ability to access those powers in yourself. The ones who see you also know you, and they will weep with you as they walk the long road alongside. The others can find their own way to the top of the mountain so don't worry who or what you must leave behind in the arduous effort to choose yourself. Choose yourself anyway. As the adage goes: The ones who mind don't matter and the ones who matter don't mind.