What We're Doing This December...

Eric Francis divines:
ARIES: With any luck, you've discovered how much work it takes to be yourself, and you're willing to do it. Part of the effort involves moving through your own doubts and layers of defensiveness until you arrive at the inner feeling of authenticity -- in other words, discovering not only something new about yourself, some quality you're not familiar with yet, but also a new state of mind. The rest of the project involves rising above your insecurities and coping with the confrontations involved in presenting yourself to people authentically. This, in turn, requires dealing with their reactions, and making the necessary adjustments in your life to compensate for, or move on from, those members of humankind who cannot bear very much reality. To do this, once again, you need to identify, acknowledge and deal with your own emotional fears. Is it all worth it? Do you really have a choice?

CANCER: Looking back, what will you remember about this year? What are the more poignant scenes, encounters and transitions? They may play second oboe to the mental skills you learned, principally, the ability to negotiate where your feelings are at stake, even when you're at your most raw and sensitive. We hardly think of feelings as being something actually worth another person's time and effort discussing, much less negotiating over. True, most people descend into irrationality when it comes to their emotional experience of life, but someone close to you has set an example, provided a structure, or taught you language that will come in handy for the rest of your days. Coexistence is something that humans have always done, but never with the expectations of personal autonomy that we have today. The question is how to be yourself and be in a relationship at the same time. You may not think you have the answer -- but you know a lot more than you did one year ago.

VIRGO: Contrary to nearly all the published accounts of what a Virgo is supposed to be, you tend to be someone guided by your emotions. It's only your advanced mind that keeps you from being ruled or overwhelmed by your sensitivity, and yet it's true that you can go into long phases of denial about how your life feels, what you need, or what matters most. Events of this year have, however, delivered you far away from any refusal to see the obvious, and if anything have urged you to consider ever-more subtle levels of what you're aware of, both internally and in others. This has proven to be an indispensable skill in the sorting out process you're now going through. Gradually, a certain contradiction is wearing off: as you've gone deeper into yourself, people have shown increasing interest in you. At the same time, you've become keenly aware of who is good for you and why, and you would be wise to take your own counsel on these matters.