On Monday afternoon, Mercury, the planet of ideas and communication, leaves bold Aries and enters grounded, sensual Taurus. As your thoughts grow steadier and more solid, which of your bright, wild dreams might start to seem like they could become real? With your feet on the ground, you might finally be able to speak the truth out loud, not impetuously, but deliberately and with purpose.
When your heart is this bright with ambition, it can be easy to recognize tools and maps and instructions, and harder to recognize the world’s pure gifts. There are pleasures in dreaming of places out beyond the mountains, but there are pleasures in the place that you stand right now, too. This week, you might be surprised by the sweetness of knowing exactly where you stand, knowing every tree on your street, every line on your skin, every note of the song on the radio. You might be surprised at the small, earthly magic that happens when you pay attention to your own earthly life.
You have the power to dig in your heels and refuse to be moved, and you have the power to slow down, even when it feels like the world is close at your heels. This week, you don’t have to let yourself be rushed to any kind of judgment, or any kind of feeling. Your instincts are steady and true when you give them the time they need to bloom. It can take a little time, sometimes, to know the true shape and color of your emotions; a feeling doesn’t have to blaze quick and bright across the night to be the real thing.
This week, your world might fill with sound, with music: birds waking you in the morning with song, radios playing from cars passing by, voices on the street below your window. And you might feel a need to listen to every bit of it — to catch every note, every harmony, every word. But this isn’t a week for racing to keep up with it all.
This is a week for letting some of the noise and details pass you by, so that you can focus on the steady rhythm of your own breathing, of your own heartbeat, of your truest, simplest, deep-down purpose.
When you see yourself reflected in other people’s eyes, in other people’s words, you might see a vision of you that’s almost true, but not quite. There’s some essential wildness inside you, some deep and vital courage, that slips through the world unseen and mysterious. Sometimes, you can surprise people just by telling the truth. Sometimes, you can surprise people by proving yourself to be more stubborn, more courageous, more strange than they were counting on. Other people might underestimate you this week, but you don’t have to underestimate yourself.
Sometimes, it feels like you’ll never be able to repay the world for all the joy you’ve known. Other times, it feels like the world will never be able to repay you for all the generosity and love you’ve given. This week, you can release yourself from this cycle of imagined debts; you can resist any imagined obligations that keep you trapped or resentful or depleted. Nobody else owes you their attention; take everything that’s offered not as payment, but as a gift. And you don’t owe anyone else your love — it’s yours to hold and yours to give, as you choose.
Having a body can seem like a terrible burden sometimes — so fragile, so needy, so vulnerable in so many different ways. But your body is more than a site of potential weakness, and it’s more than a site of potential power. There’s elegance in it, not only function. There’s joy in it, not just the sheer will to survive. Try to notice the ways your body can experience soft, quiet pleasure. Can the evening air feel like magic when it touches your skin? Can love bring you back to yourself?
Sometimes a day can feel so brutally long, so drab, so exhausting, so drained of light and goodness and beauty. But this is a week for remembering what vast, unstoppable magic you’re capable of when you can remember who you really are, what you really want, what your purpose here really is. This sounds simplistic, maybe, but you know better than anyone how difficult it can be to cut through all the world’s noise to access the core of your own desires. But this is a week for trying anyway, and for believing this kind of magic is possible after all.
Something in your life that’s been quietly bothering you, something that’s seemed vaguely out of place, might finally become clear and defined this week. Some change that’s been waiting, quietly, in the back of your thoughts might finally step forward and demand to be fully seen. Sometimes, dissatisfaction can sound like a call to escape, but right now, the way forward isn’t to break free of yourself, but to sink deeper in. It’s not about leaving the bad things behind, but about tunneling through all the accumulated layers of doubt and unhappiness until you return to something right and true again.
There’s a quiet, shining hope that you carry with you that once you find the real truth that you’re seeking, it’ll be certain and unassailable, and everyone else will recognize it, too, and they’ll all agree with you, and you will finally be able to rest. But looking too much to other people for recognition or approval can send your mind spinning off in unhelpful directions, down endless thorny detours. Disagreeing with someone you care about can be painful, but sometimes it can feel just like magic. It can bring you back to yourself.
This week, your expectations of yourself — expectations of perfection, of success, of love and wisdom without end — might collide with your body’s exhaustion, with its sheer refusal to continue to go so hard. If your body needs to rest this week, let it. If your brain refuses to keep muscling through every long afternoon, let it soften and slow down. Sit outside in the afternoon, doing nothing but noticing the life happening all around you. At first this can feel like a waste of time, but as you sit, as you offer the world your pure attention, something withered inside you might come back to life.
When you’re in need of clarity, your tendency can be to look outward for meaning — to the mountains, to the future, to the sky. But right now, pay attention to the weird miracle of yourself, singular and alive. Pay attention to your own body as it exists in the moment, at the center of so many connecting ideas, at the intersection of so many long stories. The universe is vast and mysterious, but that doesn’t mean that you should treat yourself like you don’t matter. There are stories only you can tell, feelings only you can feel, riddles only you can ever answer.
It’s impossible to know ahead of time what connections will arise when things get strange, or what connections will be the ones that save you. Here in the quiet of the everyday, there is growth happening all the time. You’re constantly forging relationships, strengthening bonds, caring for yourself as you care for other people. This is a week to recognize that your own fate is wrapped up with the fates of other people, that you aren’t here alone. This is a week for accepting other people’s generosity, and for offering your own.