Good Morning!

Mixed messages from the cosmos at 6:36AM ET, as the humanitarian Aquarius Moon squares the Taurus Sun. Squares are energetic aspects — pushing an agenda forward. What are you all fired up to do?

Perhaps it has something to do with the third stage of the New Moon agenda you set three weeks ago. Whatever it is, be advised that right after the Sun-Moon square, the Moon will be void until 10:53PM ET. This suggests twists or delays in your efforts to move forward in a straight line. Knowing about voids is an awesome way to prevent panic attacks and other imagined crises if things aren’t going as planned. There’s a higher flake factor during Moon voids, e.g., appointments cancelling or meetings wandering off into another dimension. Chill and roll with it — and you’ll be just fine.

Mars is the Planet of Week. Mars refers to action! It leaves slow and stubborn Taurus for Gemini at 10:40PM ET. Mars in Gemini is great for multitasking and getting the word out. Game plans may become more flexible. And they darn well better be clever and entertaining.

If you have a planet at around 2 degrees of Virgo, Pisces and especially Gemini or Sagittarius, you will be more personally affected by Mars this week. That planet (or your Ascendant or your Midheaven) is likely to be energized — for better or for worse. You may find yourself compelled to take action. Or, if you’re suppressing your inner action hero, you may attract someone or something who takes action on you.

By Friday, Mars will have moved into a challenging face-off with Saturn, currently at 2 Sagittarius. Mars-Saturn patterns suggest disciplined, militant action and ambition — for better or for worse. So look for those themes in the headlines. And if your own horoscope is personally affected, may you use that disciplined push for a cause with higher consciousness.

If you don’t know what degrees your planets are at, consider ordering the Astro-Basics Report. In addition to the computer-generated report of where everything is and what it means, I will include a personal note identifying the planet in your horoscope that is the key to fulfilling your potential in this lifetime.

This is the week to BACK UP YOUR COMPUTERS and other gizmos, as Mercury turns retrograde at 9:50PM ET next Monday, May 18th. No whinging will be permitted! Mercury retrograde periods provide absolutely fantastic opportunities for certain things. There is no reason to sweat the snafus and miscommunications that may arise. Here’s the survival guide I posted for the last Mercury retrograde — in January. I will re-post and update it on Monday.

Moon voids for the week, other than today’s long wandering drift: Wednesday 12:55PM – 1:13AM ET on THURSDAY; Friday 8:03AM ET until 3:02AM ET on SATURDAY.

And now, the news.

Speaking of Mars and Saturn, you know who has a planet around 2 degrees of Gemini or Sagittarius — and is thus personally affected by the “disciplined, militant action and ambition potential” of Friday Mars-Saturn opposition? Barack Obama. And there he is in the headlines, “aggressively courting skeptical legislators” so they will pass a bill this week giving him accelerated powers on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. He even dissed Senator Elizabeth Warren and made a speech at Nike, a company notorious for outsourcing jobs. He is serious about this TPP. I wonder why.

I would now like to take this opportunity to rave about my New Balance cross-trainers, which I bought at the company store in Skowhegan, Maine. New Balance is apparently the only athletic shoe company that makes a portion of its inventory in the United States. New Balance has five manufacturing operations in the U.S. Two are in Massachusetts and three are in Maine, where my family is from. I’ve seen first-hand what happens when textile mills and shoe companies outsource production overseas. So as long as I have a choice, I’ll buy sneakers with labels that say “Made in the USA”.

This concludes the soapbox portion of this forecast.

Meanwhile, with Venus (women) at the Aries Point on Friday, some of our fearless leaders in Congress re-introduced the Equal Rights Amendment. If you are younger than a certain age, you may not know what that is. So I’ll tell you. It’s this:

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

This amendment was passed by Congress in 1972, in the wake of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1965-66. Thirty-eight states needed to ratify the amendment by 1982 for it to become the law of the land. That didn’t happen. Now, in the wake of the Uranus-Pluto square, we find ourselves revisiting agendas that were hot in the mid-60s. Will we finish what was started? This is our chance.

In other news, Frida Kahlo is “having a moment”. That’s what the NYT headline says, as a clueless reporter reports:

In a welcome though unexpected convergence, an array of new books and exhibitions about Kahlo have suddenly appeared this spring, adding insight and depth to our understanding of a woman who would seem among the most overexposed artistic figures of all time.

Dear Clueless Reporter, there is nothing “unexpected” about it.  If only you had looked at Ms. Kahlo’s horoscope (or asked an astrologer for an analysis). Such “unexpected” and “sudden” prominence strongly suggest planetary patterns at work,  no doubt involving Uranus and Pluto. And in fact, in a two-second glance at the chart we’re immediately drawn to this: Neptune, Sun, and Jupiter at 12, 13 and 20 Cancer respectively…all opposing Mars and Uranus at 12 and 10 Capricorn. That intense configuration has been supercharged by Uranus and Pluto for two years. Uranus (now at 18 Aries) is just about to square her Jupiter (suggesting, usually, expanded fortune — and in Kahlo’s case, corresponds to another exhibition opening). Her 23 Leo Ascendant and 23 Taurus Midheaven have just been hit by transiting Sun and Mars; Jupiter will hit her angles in July (more expansion); transiting Scorpio opposed her Midheaven last fall…..all adding up to prominence, expansion, revelation, empowerment, with a focus on personal/domestic concerns, even for a woman as “overexposed” as Ms. Kahlo (and even though she is no longer among the living). Horoscopes live forever!

To find out when your horoscope is scheduled for a period of expansion and empowerment, here’s the 411 on personal consultations. I look forward to an excellent discussion with you soon.

Thank you for reading this forecast.

Update: Before Mars hits President Obama’s 3 degree Gemini Moon, it opposed his 28 degree Scorpio Midheaven over the weekend. Mars suggests action — and also provocation, attack and/or an outburst. How interesting to stumble across a provocative story by Seymour Hersh, alleging that a lot of what you may have seen in Zero Dark Thirty is fiction, and that President Obama lied about what really happened in Abottabad the night Osama bin Laden was killed. On the other hand, the story was published on a square between Neptune and Mercury, which can be pretty surreal (or untrue).  We will see this Merucry-Neptune pattern again on May 29 and June 23. It will be interesting to see if there are further developments on this story then.