Forecast Mar 30-Apr 5, 2020: Making Progress

If variety is the spice of life, then we’re in for a saucy week. Personal planets Mars and Venus will make their way into progressive Aquarius and social Gemini, Mercury and Neptune will meet up in Pisces, and Jupiter will join forces with Pluto in ambitious Capricorn, adding further reverberations to January’s Saturn Pluto conjunction. On the one hand, the year’s established Capricorn and Pisces patterns are resurfacing. On the other, we are assuredly breaking new ground.

Appropriately enough, instigative Mars gets the week’s action underway. On Monday the red planet will move into offbeat, ingenious Aquarius. Unconventional methods, radical action and innovative strategies become the new normal when pushy Mars aligns with structuring Saturn in the eccentric air sign. Their conjunction takes place on Tuesday, and has implications far and wide. Mars will transit Aquarius through May 13th and Saturn until July 1st (and then from December 2020 through March 2023). Newly freed from red tape and regulations, Mars and Saturn will strut their scientific and technological stuff.

On Friday Venus will also move from an introspective earth sign to an outgoing air sign, when she heads into tech-savvy Gemini. Here, she’s highly compatible with Mars and Saturn in Aquarius, and in fact trines Saturn on Saturday. Her presence adds a little more wind to the astrological sails, and may provide a few hints about good long-term investments. However, Gemini is where this money planet is due for her next retrograde. I’ll cover that in depth next week, when Venus enters the retrograde’s shadow zone. Friday is also when Mercury meets Neptune in Pisces. In its highest expression, Pisces embodies the virtues of integral living. It grasps the big picture and moves through the world with endless empathy and compassion. In its lowest, its penchants for addiction, escapism and deception are ruinous. After spending much of its recent retrograde in Pisces, Mercury’s meeting with Neptune will feel very familiar. However, because the speedy planet never originally caught up to Neptune, this will actually be the first time that they meet this year. On Saturday Piscean dreams are met with the blunt force of a Jupiter Pluto conjunction in Capricorn

Keeping it real is Capricorn’s job, and favorite past time. The cardinal earth sign is also the realm of governments, institutions and banking. Jupiter expands and Pluto purifies and reforms. This conjunction is the first of three in 2020. The next one will take place on June 30th, when we’re emerging from the Venus retrograde, and the final one is on Nov 12th, following the US Presidential Election. During that time, various economic stimulus packages will have rolled out into the real world. Those future dates may indicate further iterations of these packages or more challenges to economic systems. Austere Capricorn, where the Jupiter Pluto conjunction takes place, is ruled by responsible, ringed Saturn. So, like most of 2020, we’re continuing to negotiate between boundless Pisces and Saturn’s limits. The week concludes under a practical Virgo moon. Big banks may ask what’s in your wallet. Virgo knows what’s in the pantry. Like Capricorn and Saturn, the mutable earth sign brings us right down to earth and into the here and now. Its clarity informs our plans and its calm our daily routines. From its serene, organized frame of mind, we take our next steps.