Weekly Forecast June 29: Full Moon in Capricorn, Venus Conjunct Jupiter

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

With the pain and setbacks of the past few weeks still heavy on our minds and in our hearts, we’re at last getting some encouraging news, with real signs of progress.

This week looks good for more positive change, with fortunate planets Venus and Jupiter finally reaching exact conjunction – and it’s going to be a spectacular sight. Better still, both planets are in a positive trine to Uranus the Awakener. An intense Full Moon on Wednesday shows us how far we’ve come and what we’ve had to sacrifice to get to a new place, and it hints about the fights still ahead. For now, though, we can celebrate in gratitude and heap loads of love and appreciation on our comrades in arms. Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast June 22: Mercury Square Neptune, Mars Enters Cancer

Secret Garden. © Gretchen Friedrich, 2015.

Secret Garden. © Gretchen Friedrich, 2015.

When tragedies like last week’s shooting take place, the first instinct of an astrologer is to cast a chart and try to identify the correlating aspects.

I did, but not immediately. My first reaction was to get depressed, or maybe it was a sad sense of resignation. We’ve known all along that it wasn’t a question of whether another shooting spree would take place, but when. That this one took place in a church added to the shock and disbelief. We think of churches as a sanctuary. Then, I don’t suppose it’s any more “sacred” than a school, a sorority house, or a movie theater, and certainly not more than one’s home. We tend not to include the latter in our definition of mass shooting, so they don’t make sensational headlines, even though Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast June 15: New Moon in Gemini, Sun Enters Cancer

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

We’re still floating along in a Neptunian fog, but this week has a couple of positive shifts that should make life more bearable overall, maybe even fun.

Oh, dear. Did I just use the “F” word? Must be all the sleep I got over the past week. Apparently it has made me feisty. If I could put that in a bottle, I would be a millionaire, and all those Lunesta moths would be out of work. (Did you know that luna moths belong to a family called saturniids?)

There’s going to be a lot of feistiness in the air this week, for better or for worse, with the New Moon in Gemini conjunct Mars. Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast June 8: Mercury Direct, Neptune Retrograde

King Neptune. © Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

King Neptune. © Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

Neptume is to blane. That’s may story and I’m sticking to it.

Seriously, Neptune in Pisces hasn’t been all roses and strawberry fields forever. There’s a debilitating side to it, not the least of which is fatigue, sleepiness, mental confusion, and inability to concentrate. There’s going to be a lot of that going around this week, with Neptune turning retrograde.

There’s also an escapist side to Neptune, which is what many astrologers predicted would happen when Neptune entered Pisces in January 2012. I don’t have statistics about substance abuse, addictions to computer games and pornography, or numbers of mishaps due to failure to look up from a cell phone while driving or Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast May 25: Mercury Conjunct Mars, Sun Square Neptune

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

We’re in for another trying week, with an increased risk of arguments, errors on the job, and difficulty staying on task.

Mercury is retrograde until June 11, in his own sign of Gemini. Mercury rules information, communications, small electronics, traffic flow, siblings, and your immediate neighborhood. Challenges in one or more of these areas are typical during Mercury retrograde periods, but the potential for frustration and delay doubles with Mercury in his own sign.

Mars and the Sun also are in Gemini, adding another layer of complication, and this week all three planets are in conjunction, and all in a square to Neptune, the planet of foggy thinking, confusion, and deception. Gemini usually is quick-witted, funny, curious, and chatty; however, this configuration is anything but amusing. Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast May 18: New Moon in Taurus, Mercury Turns Retrograde

New Moon in Taurus 2015 collageThis is going to be a tough week before it started.

Mercury isn’t retrograde yet as I write this, and already I’ve experienced several Rx moments. The most unnerving was was getting a phone call on Friday morning before I was awake, reaching for the phone, and … nothing. The screen froze. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just reboot it.” Power switch didn’t work. Remove the battery? Tried it twice. Nope and nope.

Fortunately, I have drop-step-on-run-over-fall-in-the-toilet-Mercury-retrograde insurance, but it means being without a phone for a day or two. I was about to submit the form and had a sudden idea to try one more thing, stupid as it sounded. I plugged in the charger. The phone shuddered and Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast May 11: Mars Enters Gemini, Venus Trine Neptune

Duel of Hektor and Ajax2Frustrations begin to mount this week, as Mars enters Gemini and Mercury, Gemini’s ruler, slows down in advance of next week’s retrograde.

Mars has been in slow-moving Taurus. That hasn’t entirely been a bad thing; there’s something to be said for endurance as opposed to a sprint. However, there’s been a drag on our energy, and that will lift after Mars enters speedy Gemini on Monday. The movements of Mars are always important to watch, particularly in world affairs, but that has been doubly true since Uranus entered Aries in 2010. With the planet of unpredictability and upset in the sign Mars rules, he has been receiving something like an intravenous drip of caffeine. Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast May 4: Sun Trine Pluto, Venus Enters Cancer

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden, 2015.

This week is mostly about the Full Moon in Scorpio, which occurs on Sunday night in the United States and Monday morning in Europe.

Because it technically fell within last week’s forecast period, I covered it last week. However, I didn’t realize last week that this Full Moon is Wesak, the celebration of the birth, death, and transformation of the Buddha. Normally it falls at the Scorpio Full Moon in sidereal astrology, a different system practiced in Eastern countries that is a month “behind” Western astrology. The sidereal Full Moon in Scorpio is on June 2. But apparently it’s more complicated than that and historically has always been in May Continue reading →

Weekly Forecast April 27: Mercury Enters Gemini, Full Moon in Scorpio

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden and Pat Paquette, 2015.

Composite by Osk Ingad Alden and Pat Paquette, 2015.

The pace remains fairly low key this week, and yet our thoughts start racing in a struggle to make sense of the barrage of information we encounter daily.

Many people understand or are beginning to realize that much of the information we receive is meaningless. It’s like loading up on junk food, which is cheap and readily available. After living on a diet of this stuff for so long, one tends to develop a taste for it, and then it’s hard to appreciate healthy alternatives. In time, real food becomes a distant memory.

Likewise, many of those born since the 1980s don’t remember what real journalism was like. We had Continue reading →