Although the new year began last month, it may feel as if it’s just beginning. That’s because we began the year amidst several retrogrades that had us slowed down, looking backward, and resolving old business from 2022. Now we’re sailing full speed ahead into the dreamiest month of 2023. Apart from a few brief transits, nothing astrologically intense is going down and we’ve got Venus in Pisces for most of the month. It’s important to acknowledge times like this, small oases of relative peacefulness in otherwise turbulent times. If you’ve been waiting for a moment to catch your breath, this is it.
Of course some of us don’t do well with calm. If your nervous system relies on constant adrenaline to keep you going, or if your mind strays toward anxiety in quiet moments, this is a good month to focus on something you want to make happen. Give yourself a project, big or small, serious or silly. February bridges the end of Aquarius season and the beginning of Pisces season — consider what helps you bridge your mind (air signs like Aquarius) and your heart (water signs like Pisces). Both Aquarius and Pisces are interested in connection and collective experiences — Aquarius through a social process of finding like-minded weirdos and creating communities of shared values, Pisces through a fundamental recognition that we are all made of carbon, aka stardust, and that we share most of our DNA with earthworms. Where are you finding connections this month?
I’d also like to nod to Valentine’s Day and the fact that some of you love it, some of you hate it, and some of you ignore it entirely. Whatever your personal attitudes, it’s a time of year when we as a culture can put a lot of pressure on the performance of love. People in monogamous partnerships may feel stressed by expectations, people in poly or undefined types of romances may feel invalidated, and people who want and don’t have romantic love right now may feel unworthy, and people who don’t want romantic love at all may feel invisible. With Venus in Pisces this month meeting up with Neptune, ruler of Pisces, on the 15th, the vibes around this Valentine’s Day are extra sensitive, extra dreamy, and potentially extra disillusioned. Try to keep your expectations realistic, and remember that extravagant shows of love aren’t necessarily proof of healthy love. They can add some sparkle to it, but they aren’t enough on their own.
If you’re already feeling some pangs of loneliness or heartbreak this season, take some time to be extra kind to yourself mid-month. Venus conjunct Neptune opens up a vast well of longing for a kind of love that isn’t entirely realistic. Do what you can to accompany yourself and your stronger feelings, and find ways to channel that longing toward other Neptunian pursuits: making art or music, meditating or connecting to the sacred, and helping others in some way that heals your heart. This is an aspect that happens only about once a year, so make the most of its creative and healing potential!
Finally, if you’re in any relationships where you have a tendency to overextend yourself or give more than you receive, treat this Venus transit with some caution. This is a good month to pay attention to the actual energetic costs your experience when you aren’t setting appropriate boundaries. To quote the brilliant Prentis Hemphill: “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
I’m also teaching my first live class of 2023 this month, and it’s all about relationships! In Beyond Compatibility: Better Relationships with Astrology we’ll be debunking some popular myths about astro compatibility and exploring the questions you should be asking yourself and your partners / potential partners. I’m excited to be teaching again and I love geeking out about relationship astrology, so come join us! (Read more and register here). My books are open for readings, too, for you and for your relationships so (get in touch). For more astro details you can follow me on Instagram, and join me on Patreon. Have a dreamy month in all the ways that can heal your heart right now, even if, maybe especially if, that means staying in bed as much as possible.
Aries
Redirect your longing: Let your fantasies be detailed, technicolor, and wild. Write about them, draw them, dream them, share stories with your sweethearts, but don’t expect reality to live up to them. Part of the magic of this month for you is helping you access those parts of yourself that aren’t bound by the here and now, by the constraints of time and space, by questions of what is logistically and physically possible. Whether your dreams tend toward the erotic, the romantic, or the creation of entire speculative worlds, making extra time this month to be in them and enjoy them is time well spent.
Taurus
Redirect your longing: Rekindle your hope for the future. It doesn’t have to be realistic hope, it doesn’t have to have a strategy or a plan behind it. You don’t have to map out how you (or the world) will get there — it’s enough right now to dwell sometimes in the imaginative possibility of a better world. Think of it as a hot bath for your psyche, a place to restore yourself. Draw down from this field of potential some bright sparks to nourish your sense that a better world is possible.
Gemini
Redirect your longing: This is a time to direct all your various senses and satellite dishes and antennae towards a faint voice that is calling you toward your future self: You, but more centered. You, but wiser and more compassionate. You, but capable of things you didn’t thin you could do. You’ll notice, if you pay attention, that this you is much, much closer than you realized. May even be the here-and-now you. Now may be the time to do the big thing you’ve been dreaming about maybe someday doing.
Cancer
Redirect your longing: We all long for basic, simple things — enough love, enough freedom, good health, the resources we need to enjoy our lives. When one or more of these feels scarce, it can be hard to stop circling around that sense of lack — but to be alive is to live through fluctuations and change, to learn how to grieve scarcity while staying open to future fullness. You may notice a longing this month that directs you somewhere slightly different: not just “let me have what I want” but “let me find meaning in my experiences.” You are on a learning journey. Let it take you somewhere new.
Leo
Redirect your longing: This month offers you an anti-stagnation spell. You are longing to get unstuck from a pattern that’s gone on too long, and release is near. What’s counter intuitive is that you don’t have to do much to urge this spell along — the release it offers is less about throwing you a rope to climb up a mountain and more about dissolving the mountain. It can be easy to confuse rest with depression or other forms of stagnation, but this month is asking you to experience the kind of rest and release that actually transforms your life.
Virgo
Redirect your longing: This month’s Pisces energy focuses your longing toward an unreachable ideal of partnership, but perhaps it’s better directed beyond the human world. Your relationships will forever be imperfect, which is fine. Instead of stressing about them, use this Piscean time to fall in love with a forest or a parallel universe. Spill out your devotion to the concept of mutual aid. Leave love notes for the birds that get lost in wander into malls and subway stations. Above all remember that your relationships are always changing but that your capacity to love is yours to keep. Where do you want to direct it?
Libra
Redirect your longing: Have you ever felt absolutely in love with your own body? Maybe inspired by a lover’s admiration of you, maybe inspired by your own joy in how it feels to be in your skin? If you have and somehow lost that spark — or if you’ve never felt that and are frankly shocked that anyone has — this month is beckoning you back into your own body through the lens of unconditional love. Self-love is not easy for most of us, and loving our imperfect bodies even less so. Let yourself dip your toes in the shallow end of the pool and see how deep you’re able to go.
Scorpio
Redirect your longing: Now is no time to be shy about who you are and what you want. Venus in Pisces is boosting your creativity and your confidence. One risk of this transit is merely letting it slip away from how easy it feels to daydream, space out, and do nothing. If your deepest longing right now is to do absolutely nothing, answer that call. But if you’re being pulled toward making art or making connections, don’t let the siren song of staying in bed keep you from finding out what can happen.
Sagittarius
Redirect your longing: What fantasies do you have about an ideal home? An ideal family? Are you dreaming of a rural queer commune where no one ever has any conflict? Or a pre-industrial city with a forest canopy and clean water running through its rivers? This Pisces season kicks up some longing around where you might could settle down and feel at home, if only you could find it. But the magic spell isn’t to start traveling or researching costs of living in various far off places, it’s to create a home inside you for the part of you that always feels like it’s wandering and in exile. Be the safe place you need.
Capricorn
Redirect your longing: If you’re not already writing poetry (or song lyrics, or science fiction, or at the very least creative text messages to dear friends), this month would like you to begin. Instead of longing for other people to get their acts together or for the world to become less chaotic, this month rewards channeling your yearning into a kind of language that you will recognize when you create it. There’s something you need to be saying, but you don’t know how to say it yet. You’ll only learn by experimenting.
Aquarius
Redirect your longing: There’s someone or something in your life right now that you absolutely love. Maybe it’s a friend, a partner, a sibling, or a collaborator. Maybe it’s your house, a land project, a book you’re writing, a newfound feeling of capacity. Whatever it is, this month is asking you to pour your devotion into what’s close at hand and already going well. You get to stabilize here. What you’re planting now will bear fruit.
Pisces
Redirect your longing: Yes you are vast and yes you contain multitudes, but maybe all that vastness isn’t doing you any favors when you’re trying to find your own center. This month offers a kind of homecoming, a love spell for rediscovering your self — who you are now, who you have been, who you’d like to become. As much as you reach for external connection this month, make sure you’re also establishing that internal connection.
I feel both deeply seen and deeply called out by Scorpio:
“If your deepest longing right now is to do absolutely nothing, answer that call. But if you’re being pulled toward making art or making connections, don’t let the siren song of staying in bed keep you from finding out what can happen.”
omg I needed this reminder to rest after a month of intense university stuff and mental health struggles.