Mercury — the planet of thought, communication, and connection – entered intuitive Pisces on Sunday. Do you feel your ideas start to color with emotion? Do you feel your thoughts start to move to the rhythm of something deep and real inside you? On Thursday, warrior planet Mars enters stubborn, solid Taurus. Here, you can feel your will turn to steel.
Here, nobody can move you from the path you know to be true.
You’re comfortable, most of the time, to be in motion, but sometimes even you need an anchor—something to hold you to the earth, to remind you of your physical form. This is a week for thinking about what makes you feel most solid. Is it another person, a city, a song? Is it something you can hold, something you can wear, something you can feel against your skin? You can sometimes feel like pure energy itself, but this week, remember that you have a body, too, and let your body reorient itself to the pleasures of the world.
This is a week for going in the direction you’re called, for following your body where it leads you. It sounds so simple, but when you’re right there in the moment, there’s no way to know whether you’re doing the right thing. There’s no way to know, absolutely and for sure, that your decisions have been the right ones. In the middle of this much uncertainty, it can feel important to question what seems to come naturally, and to control your energies tightly. This week, though, try giving your instincts some more credit. Try trusting what your body already knows.
You don’t have to think your way through every single thing that’s ever happened to you, everything that’s ever sat heavy in your stomach. You don’t have to keep analyzing all the secrets you’ve ever held onto, all the desires that twist and glow when you’re up at night. You don’t have to wring meaning out of your emotions this week, or use them to create a grand theory of yourself. This is a week to try just to feel your feelings, to know they’re there — a part of you as natural and real as your hands, as your bones, as your eyes.
This week, it’s going to be so important that you give yourself space to change. It sounds easy enough, but it’s a fearsome thing. You already know how to build and how to learn, but real change can feel scarier than that. Sometimes it looks, at first, like a step backward. Sometimes, growing large reveals all the ways you’ve been small in the past. Sometimes, the pain of leaving an older self behind makes it seem preferable not to grow at all. But there are great things waiting for you this week, if you’ll only move toward them.
This is a week for having a big heart and dreams of greatness; it’s a week for resisting all calls for purity or perfection. This doesn’t mean that you have to let anyone do anything they want to you, without protest; it doesn’t mean you should stop trying to live right. It’s just that the world is too messy and too big for you to make it to the end of every day with your shoes clean, without a hair out of place. It’s just that your own heart is too wild, too good, too alive to be neat all the time.
Most of the time you know, with a solid quiet clarity, who you are. Sometimes, though, you look around and see all the other ways a human life can be, all the other worlds that exist alongside your own, and you start wishing for something else. This week, it’s okay to try on different desires, and it’s okay to practice imagining a sparkling life completely different than this one. It isn’t a betrayal to wonder. Maybe you’ll end up wanting to make the big change, and maybe you’ll decide that you’re already where you need to be.
Sometimes the world just feels like too much—too much chaos, too much cruelty. Sometimes it feels like everyone is just so intent on misunderstanding you, on blocking whatever sunlight and sweetness is still available. This week, if you get too frustrated, it’s okay to withdraw from the spinning social world for a second while you remind yourself who you really are, and how much you can do. Your mind is powerful and bright, and it can do more than produce value for other people. It can shine a light. It can make this world livable.
It’s easy sometimes to let yourself think that the only things worth doing are the things that you’ve already started—as though it’s too late to turn around or change direction, or not worth your time to start anything new. You’re right when you think of your time as a precious and limited resource, but that doesn’t mean that you have to ration it as carefully as you’re sometimes tempted to. There’s enough time left to dream and to rest, and neither of these things is a waste. There’s still enough time, even now, to start building another world.
Feeling lonely for any length of time can make you start to feel like maybe loneliness is your natural condition. When you have days, even weeks, when it seems like no one can really see you or give you what you need, it can start to feel like maybe it’s better not to need anybody else at all. This week, remind yourself that even if no connection is perfect, no isolation can last forever either. There’s a light in the sky, and it’s getting brighter. There’s love and generosity waiting for you on the other side of this.
When your needs aren’t met, when your dissatisfaction feels powerful enough to light a whole city, you might start to imagine that the best way to protect yourself is to pare down your needs until they’re so small and so basic you can hardly see them. It’s easy to imagine that the less you need, the less vulnerable you’ll be, and the more prepared you’ll be to walk into an uncertain future. This week, though, the way to become powerful isn’t through denial, but abundance. This week, take whatever sweetness the world offers you.
The world you live in is changing in more ways than you can fully keep track of—new colors, new sounds, new seasons. As the stars move across the sky, and as the ground shifts under your feet, language will twist and bloom to keep up with changing world, and you’ll discover powers you never knew you had. This week, it’s so important not to let yourself be held back by what you think is practical. Don’t limit yourself. Every day, some impossible vision becomes suddenly, beautifully possible.
Love can just be so messy in all its different forms. Even love for yourself can be a strange and bendy thing. You’re skilled at untangling some of the contradictions, and at living with the rest, but that doesn’t mean it always feels easy, or that there’s no fear involved. This week, your tenderness might make you want to retreat, to close up, to deny the world any space in your heart. You don’t have to try to stop being afraid; you don’t have to become something other than human. All you have to do is practice moving through the fear.
Read February 4’s weekly horoscope. February 18’s weekly horoscope is coming soon.