Forecast for April 29 – May 5, 2013

By Kathy Biehl

Spring is bringing a bumper crop of acute, relentless realizations, revelations and life-altering developments. As much as they give cause for contemplation, none of them is theoretical or hypothetical. Every aspect of life is pushing our attention to the physical, the concrete, the practical, the here and now. The theme of the week: making it real.

The sky now has an emphasis in Taurus, the first and most simply, unassumingly earth sign. Taurus values what it can possess, consume and experience through the physical senses and in the physical world. That is the governing framework now; that defines every conversation, in our heads and with others. No matter whether the subject is an ending, upheaval or welcome new development, the inquiry is: What does it mean in practical terms? For me? How does it affect my money/relationships/food supply/leisure time/stuff? How does this project/inspiration/connection/opportunity go from concept into being? The answers we reach will play into the decisions, developments and new directions shooting out from next week’s Taurus New Moon

On Wednesday, Mercury, ruler of how we communicate and get around, enters this realm and replaces the impulsiveness, risk-taking, swagger and aggression of Aries with the calm, slowed, chewing deliberateness of Taurus. The prevailing approach has gone from a two-fisted “I’ll show you” attitude to an energy-conserving “Show me.” Inquiries and conversations are turning to practicalities, nuts and bolts, how-tos and satisfaction you can hold or take to the bank.

Mercury is answering to Venus, goddess of our worldly valuables and mistress of this sign, whose concerns and preferences color the topics we’re drawn to discuss and ponder. With Mars and the Sun in her dominion, she’s influencing the activities that attract us now and holding sway over our agendas, our drive and the masculine as well. Desires are tangible, palpable, sensual and immediate, and we are motivated to make them happen.

This emphasis on one sign continues a trend we’ve had since February. We’ve experienced a concentration of bodies first in Pisces, then Aries, and now Taurus; later in May, the same is coming with Gemini. It’s as if we’re in training, being immersed one a mode of energetic expression and then moving on to the next.

The current course of study involves dealing with life on the earth plane, in the earth and now. As we proceed through the eclipse gauntlet, as inner and outer landscapes crack open, reshape and birth new landmasses, return to the worldly and the tangible. Bring information down into data you can grasp and work. Sink into your body and experiences of the senses. Breathe in the aromas of flowers and fresh herbs; go outside and sink your feet into the grass or dirt; hug, yes, a tree. And don’t forget to dance.

This week will have more rocking and rolling, more splitting and cracking, more revelations and sharp perceptions. Bouts of testing, frustration and hitting limits are likely as Mars opposes Saturn midweek. We are, however, standing ever more firmly in our personal truth and power, as will be shown by the Sun and Mars contacting the clarifying scythe of Pluto on Wednesday and Sunday.

As we see and accept truths about ourselves and others, we redefine ourselves and a variety of situations — choosing our battles and walking away from some, shedding constructs that don’t fit our truth or, I’m increasingly observing, match our personal ethics, taking steps that enhance our worth and express our power in a healthy way, even if those steps privately scare the daylights out of us.

For the longer term context, please read my article about the Scorpio lunar eclipse, which discuss what’s in effect for the next four weeks and beyond from the spring’s dynamic cluster of aspects.

More’s in my extended weekly forecast, which includes day to day analyses. For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for five years without missing a single installment. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

© Kathy Biehl 2013. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

2013 Scorpio Full Moon Lunar Eclipse

April 25, 2013
12:58 PM PDT / 3:58 PM EDT / 7:58 PM GMT
6 Taurus 45 / 6 Scorpio 45

By Kathy Biehl

This week’s Scorpio Full Moon opens a landscape-altering gauntlet of eclipses and revolutionary convulsions and contractions. It is the first of four monumental events that will reboot and reshape our circumstances, attitudes and perspective between now and the end of May.

The Next Four Weeks (and What the ?!? Happened the Week of April 15)

The spring’s eclipses are a major gear shift in our focus: from reconsidering our communication flow, our technology, what we believe about ourselves, our country, laws and foreigners, and how our thoughts and filters mold what we experience to revisitng and rethinking resources, money, possessions — along with who owns what, how we share or combine resources and what we get back — and death, taxes, lizard-brain cravings, terrors and impulses, and other primal matters we prefer to keep private.

We last went through this gear shift from late 1993 to early 1994, but without the intensity, confusion and volatility that are in play now.

Long-standing or long-simmering developments are igniting and blowing structures apart — buildings, human lives, relationships, our sense of safety and privacy, and ways we have always gone about things (which has the most positive potential of this list).

This is one of those times that divides life into before and after, and people are extremely uncomfortable, in ways and for reasons we can’t entirely put into words. We’re seeing things we didn’t before. Some of what we’re seeing isn’t as it seems. Misdirection, smoke screens, fear and paranoia are rampant. The same influences that have unleashed those guys are also opening each of us to our own power, our own truth and our own connection to [insert name for higher power of choice].

The four big astrological events are the Scorpio lunar eclipse on April 25, the Taurus solar eclipse on May 9, the next Uranus/Pluto square on May 21, and the Sagittarius lunar eclipse on May 24. They are operating as a cluster, one enormous complicated combination of launchings and endings and reshapings.

Their destabilizing, demanding pressure has been building and affecting us for weeks. It has been an undercurrent while a pile-up of planets in the sign of Aries, from the first day of spring through April 19, awakened and fueled raging life force, assertiveness, aggression, anger, radicalism and sparks of all kinds. The final aspect in this fiery lineup was a clarion call for this eclipse gauntlet. The last two bodies to clear out of the sign, the Sun and Mars (ruler of Aries and the guy who makes things happen), met on their way out by degree and by declination during the week of April 15.

Throughout our lifetimes, the Sun’s passage through the last degrees of Aries has coincided with eruptions and violence (the Texas City explosion, the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, not far from last week’s fertilizer plant explosion, the Oklahoma City bombing, the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech.) This year, Mars traveled those degrees energized and radicalized by Uranus — which we have not experienced in our lives — so when he conjoined the Sun in Aries for the first time since the early 80s…well, the phrase “all hell broke loose” would not be off the mark.

And so the volatile gauntlet of the spring was christened — not with a shattering bottle and splashing champagne, but with explosions that left carnage, confusion, speculation and freely roaming terrors in their wake.

Bottom line — a natural point of focus for the Scorpio/Taurus eclipses — the four big events of April and May are reshaping our worlds, radically, profoundly, permanently, inside and out.

The Influence of the Scorpio Lunar Eclipse

This Full Moon occurs in the sign of deepest, most fixed feelings, perceptions and bent for holding on. As we have been seeing, those qualities are hitting the max this time around. A lunar eclipse always supersizes the intensity and flow of emotions and culminations that come with a Full Moon and adds revelations of important factors that previously went unseen or unnoticed.

This one has special characteristics that are emphasizing its Scorpionic bent. The Sun in Taurus is next to Mars, warrior god and traditional ruler of Scorpio. His presence tightens our grip on what we possess (do you hear George Harrison singing “I Me Mine?”), while his ancient tie to Scorpio, and his position opposite the Moon, pulls in inescapable connections and commitments to others.

The Moon in Scorpio is next to Saturn, enforcer of rules, structures, obligations and responsibility, who is in a symbiotic relationship with Pluto, the lord of death and regeneration and the ruler of Scorpio. (This relationship is called mutual reception; it comes from each being in the other’s sign, which brings both into the picture any time one of them is activated.)

The intensity is triple-strength. Reason is on break for the moment. Feelings are deep and enormous, roaring up from the depths of our beings. Stuff is surfacing that scares the daylights out of us. The bottom line, return on investment and cost-benefit analysis factor into every situation into which we have put our time, money, hearts or energy — friendships, business arrangements, social systems. Shortfalls and imbalances are refusing to go quietly back under the carpet. Internal star chambers are holding session and convicting without notice. Guillotines are falling and severing friendships, relationships, connections cleanly but irreparably.

Not to mention what this is doing to desires. Who’s been eating more lately? Carb binging? Running after an object of desire? The Scorpio eclipse is whipping up compulsive behaviors — partially to obliterate the nervous chatter in our minds, partially to ground and pull us back into our bodies.

Further complicating the mix is the open floodgate between the Moon (and Saturn) and the illusion, confusion, magic and wonder of Neptune. This planet’s realm can not be grasped with our hands (except to the extent it’s captured in a bottle, a joint, a pill or a needly.) It’s heightening craziness and misdirection, cloaking agendas, culprits and sources of power, and fueling the bogeymen that are epidemic.

There is also positive in Neptune’s role. Ally with this end and he graces our perceptions, emotions and actions with compassion and a higher understanding. We recognize that other people are in pain, are frightened, are lashing out and clutching because the metaphoric ground is collapsing under them. Instead of demonizing, we see ourselves in others, or at least see others as fellow humans, even if we are choosing to part company. Hard truths can be loving; severances are at least quick and clean, if not gentle.

The questions stirred by this Moon take on different colors depending on which end of the Neptune spectrum you’re occupying. What’s mine? What’s yours? What’s ours? What am I getting back? What are you taking from me? What’s the cost? What needs to change? To end?

Expect internal clarifying and new certainty, with people and situations leaving your life — or being jettisoned by you — as a result.

Whatever we decide now shapes the new phase in our personal resources, cash, values and bottom line coming with the Taurus New Moon solar eclipse on May 9.

More’s in my extended weekly forecast, which includes day to day analyses. For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for five years without missing a single installment. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

© Kathy Biehl 2013. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

The Eclipses Begin: Forecast for April 22-28, 2013

By Kathy Biehl

But first: poet John-Michael Albert‘s life-affirming response to what went down in Boston last week.

Beginnings and endings. Arrivals and departures. Blossoming and uprooting. That’s the texture of this week and the four that follow.

We’re entering a landscape-altering gauntlet of eclipses and revolutionary convulsions and contractions. Landmasses are emerging or reshaping, while new growth is bursting forth from cracks and cultivated ground alike. Our worlds, and to a great extent our selves, are reformulating.

Don’t walk out into this unprepared. Sink down your grounding cord and lock it in tightly. Keep your wits and towel about you, your expectations, knees and neck loose (who needs whiplash in the midst of all this?) and your eyes to the future. Look for reasons to smile, too. They are plenty, whatever else may be going on.

The beginnings taking shape have quite a long growth potential. Flames have ignited that will burn for the next two years. That’s the length of Mars’ new cycle that started last week when he joined with the Sun late Wednesday (early Thursday in the Eastern Hemisphere). Impulses, agendas and sheer life force will stabilize and develop to color and drive our lives over that time. They’re enjoying a prolonged send-off, since Mars and the Sun are still traveling together — acting in tandem and boosting our ability to push ourselves forward –for nearly four more weeks.

Your emotions lately have given clues to what is emerging. Where have you felt the new phase, the new approach, the new resolve? Where have you felt like scorched earth? The blast of that conjunction was fierce, and it erupted like a flare from a gas well within anyone who has placements at the very late degrees of fire signs. (This includes you, Boomers from 1955-56.) The point of departure is wherever 28 Aries appears in your chart. To learn more about this cycle, read Mary Plumb’s article Meeting Mars: Inside and Out at The Mountain Astrologer blog.

As these fires glow — think of a spark traveling down a long, long fuse — they have the protection of the current Taurus emphasis. It’s banking the fire and embers and, to mix metaphors wildly, the sprouting seeds. You’re building, or finding, practical, tangible structures, retaining walls and supports for your inspirations and budding visions.

The placements in Taurus (Venus, Mars and the Sun) also encourage looking for a patch of solid ground as we pass through this gauntlet of tumult. When circumstances shift, or emotions spike dangerously, or you start — let’s be honest — freaking out, sink into your body. Grab something tangible — a pillow, a tree, a pet, a person. Eat something fresh. Go outside. Imagine the currents that are disrupting you running instead out of your hands and feet into the earth.

Our reactions and experiences are only going to intensify. This week brings the first of the spring’s three eclipses, the Full Moon lunar eclipse in Scorpio on Thursday. A lunar eclipse expands on the culminating nature of a Full Moon with huge doses of revelation. In Scorpio, which perceives and feels more deeply than any other sign, this one is emotional and revealing to the max.

The ahas going off promise to hit tender spots very close to home. (Haven’t you already been feeling the impacts?) Secrets and demons are coming out. Fear and paranoia are running amok. The Scorpio/Taurus axis lights up money, taxes, possessions, power, resources, sharing and what we get out of that. Life and death issues are in the mix, including coming from people elevating situations to that status. What’s mine? What’s yours? Is someone threatening to take mine? What am I getting back? Questions like these are in the air, bubbling up from the depths of otherwise rational people (and many who have been staring into the abyss for some time.)

You can’t argue with impulses this primal, cellular, terrified and, in some cases reptilian. Logic has nothing to do with them. Keep that in mind and endeavor (a) not to take personally or buy into any fury and lunacy you witness or intercept, (b) to view outbursts as the cries of frightened children, (c) to maintain a stance of compassion toward all, including yourself and (d) to separate and clear your energy periodically. To help with the last, listen if you haven’t yet to my free 60-minute talk Keeping Calm Amid Chaos — and watch my site for the next installments of Survival Strategies for Empaths.

I have more about the Scorpio lunar eclipse in my mooncast. Keep your grounding cord locked in place, and trust that information is coming to you that explains much. Space is being made for everything that’s blossoming.

More’s in my extended weekly forecast, which includes day to day analyses. For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for five years without missing a single installment. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

© Kathy Biehl 2013. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

Ahhhhh…..Forecast for April 15-21, 2013

Gear shift! The sky’s emphasis is sliding from the impulsive instigating of Aries to the grounding and savoring of Taurus. The seeds that have been sprouting are blossoming into recognizable form. While ideas and projects and developments will continue to erupt, their impact will be more muffled and pace more manageable.

Three bodies bring the energy to ground in stair steps as they make the move from Aries to Taurus this week: Venus, the Sun and Mars. The first to relocate is Venus, ruler of creativity and all that we value, from relationships to possessions to money to concepts to ourselves. She is also the ruler of Taurus and at her most sensual and physically comfortable in the sign, which promises settling in and comfy-ness in our connections.

The tangible is of prime importance to Venus in Taurus — the smell of flowers, steaming coffee and baked goods; the feel of soft natural fabrics; money in the bank; the reassurance of a physical touch instead of mere words, no matter how artful. She drops the self-sufficient warrior goddess mode of Aries and allows herself to be waited on, catered to and worshipped.

Her shift invites us to do the same: To settle into the moment, unhurried. To enjoy the physical pleasures of existence. To take ownership of our ideas, creations and projects and focus on the fruition of all our energetic seeds.

The earthy emphasis intensifies when the Sun enters Taurus on Friday, followed by Mars on Saturday. The masculine is following the feminine’s lead and supplying the drive and motivation to carry out her wishes. Mars isn’t as quick to act in this sign, but what he loses in daring and zeal he gains in manual dexterity and willingness to see something through. Our instincts are turning to how to concretize and implement our ideas, visions and projects — in short, how to make them manifest.

Follow those impulses. Claim and embrace all that has been erupting within you. Write it down. Make it physical. Begin to nourish it.

And follow the Taurean impulses back to nature. Make a point to spend time outside. Take your shoes off and wiggle your toes in the dirt. Bring flowers into your home. Really look at the array of local produce in the market. Considering eating more of it, too.

Sound simple? Trite, even? Humor me. Do them anyway. For one thing, connecting with nature is a quick and no-cost way to keep from frying or toppling when the energies grow uncomfortable or overwhelming. Grab a tree or plant your feet in the grass and you can drain fire or anxiety or electricity until you feel able to cope again with what is coursing through you.

For another, these acts send conscious and subliminal reminders that you are here, now, in the physical world. The physical world is the plane on which our lives play out. This is the field in which our ideas are taking root, sprouting and blossoming. And we are physical beings, each of us.

As if to underscore that message, each move into Taurus this week occurs during cosmic down time. The Sun and Mars follow this year’s recurring pattern of sign changes occurring when the Moon is void of course, a diffuse atmosphere that suspends us in time and forces us to sit with ourselves. Venus’ move is not during a void, but instead during the wee hours Monday morning, when the Western Hemisphere is largely asleep.

The impact is the same. Life is not all-systems-go when these shifts in expression take place. As is increasingly the case, the shift in mode begins within — the starting point of everything.

The fires aren’t going cold, by the way. They’ll be flaring throughout the spring for a number of reasons. One is the delayed detonation properties inherent in last week’s Aries New Moon, which sets the tone for the season. Others are embedded in the dynamic gauntlet we’re entering, with three eclipses and another exact the Uranus/Pluto square before the end of May.

Here’s how the shift to Taurus emphasis helps with all that. It has the effect of banking the fire – surrounding it with stones and earth to shield the fire from the wind and keep the embers glowing. As you slow, ponder, taste and experience, you will be protecting your fires, so that you can return to them and stoke them when the time is right.

More’s in my extended weekly forecast, which includes day to day analyses. For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast.

Would you like to disengage from other people’s moods, emotions and energy? SURVIVAL SKILLS FOR EMPATHS returns on Sunday, April 21 at 8 PM EDT. Read how you can join me.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for five years without missing a single installment. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

2013 Aries New Moon

April 10, 2013
2:36 AM PDT / 5:36 AM EDT / 9:36 AM GMT
20 Aries 40

Spring is always a time of new beginnings and growth. The first new moon of the season will prolong its vibe with a vengeance. Wednesday’s Aries New Moon captures the exciting initiating impulses that have been detonating and keeps them burning for the rest of the season.

The fiery energy has been ramping up since the middle of March, when the planetary emphasis began shifting from the gentle, all-encompassing, logic-scrambling, Kumbaya-singing of Pisces to the independent, trailblazing, shoot/leap-first-and-ask-questions-later bravado of Aries. Ideas, projects, situations and possibilities have been proliferating like popcorn (hence the video I shot for this week’s Astro-Insight forecast). Some are new. Some are nuggets that went quiet long ago and are now roaring back to life. All have a life force packed with steroids and exciting, innovative and far-reaching growth potential.

These are the seeds of a future unlike any we have experienced, and this New Moon catapults them — and us — into it. Every body that is currently in Aries has met with Uranus, the agent of radical, unpredictable change, and is still resounding with its perspective-tilting genius.

The innovation and electricity inherent in that not only color the New Moon, but get a boost from the fusing of heart and drive that happened with last weekend’s Venus/Mars conjunction. This conjunction, which fused desire and creativity to the drive to bring them into being, is core to this New Moon.. The conjunction of the Sun and the Moon is very close to Venus and Mars’ meeting place. Mars and then Venus are the last two contacts the Moon makes by declination before fusing with the Sun, so she brings their passionate, dynamic collaboration into her own new phase. (The Sun’s last major contact is a door-opening link to Jupiter, who contributes his golden touch and expansive bent to the growth potential.) She rolls their magic out into the future as well, since the two archetypal lovers are the first to greet the Moon when she leaves the Sun.

What does this mean for you? You are in an unparalleled time for launching anything. Thinking is not the route; instead, the way to go is responding to impulses that roar up from within (and flare up around you as well). If ever you were going to take risks or dare or try out something you might have previously considered crazy, do it now. This New Moon has a propulsion that could kick obstacles out of your way — or set off a chain of dominos to a mind-blowing destination — like you’ve never dreamed possible.

Not everything will take, of course, but you’ll be surprised how much will lead to something tangible. Even letting off steam –or more fiery impulses — could prove beneficial. if you have a temper tantrum (seen any of those lately?) or feel the burn of ancient wrongs, you may well be adding fuel to your momentum.

So dare. Just do it. What’s beginning or developing now has properties that will fire like booster rockets time and again.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” — Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

Want a road map for 2013? Get my 2013 astro-overview mp3 and/or book a reading with me.

© Kathy Biehl 2013. All Rights Reserved. You may forward this article as long as the copyright notice is intact. No part may be used or reprinted without my prior written permission. Karma, ya know.

Pop Pop Pop! Forecast for April 8-14, 2013

Life is erupting like popcorn right now. Kernels of creativity, passion and drive are exploding willy-nilly. Others are heating up and will burst when least expected in the coming weeks. The languor and confusion of late winter has given way to a pace so quickened that it’s borderline out-of-control.

We’re very much in initiating and new-growth mode, setting sparks, ideas and projects in motion that will only evolve and blossom. These metaphoric seeds have a primal drive to flourish and on an accelerated schedule to boot, as if they’ve been dosed with thermo-nuclear, radioactive strength, cosmic Miracle-Gro. Some of them have been building strength for months, a year, even years, which only adds to the pressure and excitement behind their emerging.

True, it’s not all new business. Some cleaning up of the old is still going on. The next six weeks will bring a flurry of closings, profound shifts of attitude and situations, permanent departures, abrupt endings and the like. They will not be the focus, though. Their purpose will be make room for the new growth.

The process is much like when a gardener removes debris and dead plants from a garden and thins out seedlings so that the new plants don’t have to compete for space and nutrients. Only, in our case, with a tad more emotion. Okay, maybe lots more emotion. Still, the point remains: the clearing is to further the new, not obsess over the old.

Besides, we don’t have much time for the past. We’re making like the White Rabbit and dashing about muttering, “I’m late. I’m late, for a very important date.”

All of these characteristics intensify this week. By the weekend, the sign of Aries will reach capacity, with all the inner planets, the Sun and Uranus crowding around (or in) the flames. The bonfire is roaring to its maximum height and shooting passions, tempers, enthusiasm and gumption up and off the charts. All kinds of matters, big and little alike, that have been percolating or stalling or lurking in who knows where are coming to life. It’s as if booster rockets are firing in quick succession and catapulting everything forward. (Yes, I know: how many metaphors can I cram in one forecast? Apparently one a paragraph, if not one a sentence.)

Wednesday’s Aries New Moon — the first of the spring — imprints this boisterous, life-enhancing energy onto the entire season. Last weekend’s fiery date between Venus and Mars fuels the mix. What ignited within you? It won’t go out quickly or easily. This New Moon occurs so close to the embers (in some cases, still-burning fires) that it will keep them glowing for the next three months. (Read more in my moon cast.)

Friday Pluto stations for his annual retrograde. As the agent of deep level, unavoidable change does an about face, he will be begin backing into his next clash with Uranus, the agent of sudden and unforeseeable change. The metaphoric roots and structures that Pluto loosens now will snap, break, collapse or fracture when the two change agents square off again at the end of May.

On Saturday, the ruler of communication and transportation, Mercury, emerges at last from all that water in Pisces and joins the gang in the fire of Aries. Brains will lunge back into gear. Words will come easily, exuberantly, quickly, impulsively. People will be running here and there at a moment’s notice. Prepare to think and live absolutely in the moment. And not be bored.

More’s in my extended weekly forecast, which includes day to day analyses. For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast. Please give it five stars on iTunes! You can also get my podcast as an app for Android and Kindle Fire at Amazon and as an app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod! Apple product info under this week’s podcast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for four and a half years. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.

No Foolin’! Forecast for April 1-7, 2013

The awakening and enlivening process continues. We’ve got a major dose of get-up-and-go from the preponderance of bodies in initiating, fast-acting, combative and daring Aries. Another exciting flare-up in the Aries fire is in store this weekend. That builds all week long, amid opportunities for catching our breath and healing at a deep, deep level.

Fires of motivation are blazing under us and within us, and we periodically linger and ponder and acclimate and, in that active inaction transcend longstanding, paradoxical wounds of separation and engulfment. The combination brings balance, really: life force, rest and rejuvenation.

We’re getting clearer, more optimistic and more confident about ourselves — and particularly about the new direction into which we’re heading. The cosmic red arrow that has been flashing and pointing since the winter solstice has become a firm, strong, reliable and friendly signal. We start the week with the Sun in an easy flow to the point of that arrow (a configuration called a finger of God), expansive Jupiter in the high-flying, multi-tasking sign of Gemini. The pair beckons us to a future that is brighter and more expansive than our previous concepts. Dream big, and then dream bigger.

The week’s undercurrent is a link between Pluto, lord of the subconscious, and wounded healer Chiron. The first body is primally scary and insistent, but equally, potently empowering. He’s the agent of unavoidable change, and is locked in a several year universal remodeling project with Uranus, the agent of unpredictable change. The second body (a dwarf planet to be exact) embodies the challenge to sink fully into physical existence.

As Pluto and Chiron reach out to each other, they offer balm for the cracks, fissures, splits and torn-up roots we have all been experiencing. The pair also opens the door to feeling less alone — to feeling not at all alone, in fact, but part of a greater multitude. Notice how many people — and specifically who — have been in contact with you in the last week. Notice the quality of the connecting and reconnecting. (One example is a red tide of marriage equality images washing over Facebook last week, showing more and more and more people who stood in solidarity with each other.) Are you feeling more connected with yourself as well?

This soothing, therapeutic air could turn this week’s spate of void of course Moons into personal spa time. The Moon is void of course when she makes her final major aspect before leaving a sign. Because no planets are in the second half of any of the signs at the moment, the Moon has an uncommonly long journey out of each sign, which makes for frequent, long voids. During a void (think: devoid of major aspects), outward activity often amounts to little, or unravels later. The atmosphere is gentle, diffused, contemplative and generally supportive of not striving toward a goal or the future but instead, simply being.

This week, the long voids consume all of Monday and Wednesday and the second half of Friday. These stretches are suited to stoking and gazing into the fires and experience your own life force coursing through you.

And what is on our mind throughout the week? More appropriately, what is driving us? Desire. Desire and the will to go after it, no matter what. Desire and drive got amped up in last week’s Full Moon festivities. This week they will have their way. They will be satisfied.

That driving impulse comes from the week’s big event, a date between Venus and Mars, after midnight early Sunday morning in the East and late Saturday night elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. This meeting flame-kisses both the spring season and the next two years, which is the length of the March cycle that has just begun.

This meeting is uniting the archetypal feminine and masculine and setting them on fire, within you as well as in the collective. Although there may be an aspect of the phoenix entering the fire and emerging reborn, the focus of this event is definitely the future. The burst is initiating, motivating and kick-starting. This clinch merges our hearts and our willpower, our desires and our drive to get them met, our value systems and our willingness to go to battle for them. We’re all impassioned to the max, bold, driven, hell-bent even on going after what we want.

Anything that starts now will have a progressive, new-paradigm edge, because both Venus and Mars have come through the freeing, perspective-tilting electricity of Uranus, which each of them met in late March. Relationships may erupt into life, or into new life, with parameters unlike your previous experience.

This energy is not merely about relationships, though, not by any means. It is about throwing yourself into life at full throttle.

Use the voids to quiet the voices in your head, still your being, ground, regroup, and listen to your heart. When the signal changes — and these days, red means go! — let your energy lead you. If you feel excited or energized, zoom ahead. If you find yourself thinking about something and running it by your friends and thinking about it some more, that’s a “no” or “not yet” signal. The same’s true if you are feeling neutral or resistant. Any reaction other than emotions rushing toward something means “no,” at least for now.

The astrology of why gay marriage is inevitable.

More’s in my extended weekly forecast, which includes day to day analyses. For another take on this week’s events, listen to my quickie podcast. Please give it five stars on iTunes! You can also get my podcast as an app for Android and Kindle Fire at Amazon and as an app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod! Apple product info under this week’s podcast.

I have now been making this weekly forecast freely available for four and a half years. Please support it by booking a reading or making a donation via PayPal to kbiehlATempowermentunlimited.net. Thank you! And thank you to those who have donated — I truly appreciate your gesture.