Satellite of Love

This year is about getting serious, but luckily it’s also got a slower pace than last year. We’ve peered into the abyss. We’ve seen it snarl back at us. We know what our work is — this is the year we commit to doing it. Facing our insecurities, seeing our instinctive defensive patterns, opening up to deeper compassion for our own mistakes and for where other people are at.

February, the month that celebrates a kind of coupledom that our culture already celebrates every damn day, can really hurt. It’s a dark time in the winter, after the major holidays and before we really see and feel the spring returning. It’s a time when we all need a little extra love. Luckily for all of us lucky queers, we’ve got each other. We’re in it for the long haul with each other, even if we want to murder each other sometimes. We’re in it for the long haul with each other even if we sometimes feel all alone. Our relationships matter, and the ones that matter most will test us the most. These could be romantic partnerships or best friendships or all those nebulous places in between. We know what it’s like to blur those boundaries, and to rely on our exes and their new partners to still be our family when we need them. We know that romantic love, however healing and tender and juicy it can be, isn’t the only kind of love we need. And as Venus moves through Capricorn — sign of commitment, realism, and longterm strategizing — this Valentine’s Day may bring up deeper issues of who’s on our team and where we’re headed together. The best way to use this energy is to stay attentive to the people who are your foundation. Mars moves into Aries on the 13th, renewing our sense of passion and motivation, so we can really combine the Aries energy of rebirth with the steadier Capricorn mission of building something meant to last.

You may feel tempted to work on your relationships under this influence, but that’s not the best starting point. This month, make a commitment to loving yourself a little more deeply. Get romantic with yourself. Go a little overboard in your adoration. Recognize that you’re someone we’re lucky to have with us. Start there, get excessive in your appreciation, and then start spreading that appreciation around. There are people feeling more lost and lonely than you right now — let them know you’ve got them.

Holler at me this month for a Relationship Reading to get the scoop on what’s going on between you and someone you love, or surprise someone special with a custom portrait of your relationship as an Astrogram! Astrograms can capture relationships of two, three, four, or more people and show the elemental balances in the connection.

As always, for these horoscopes read your Venus and Moon signs first, followed by your Sun and rising. Use these for what they can give you, and discard anything you don’t need. Good luck subverting all the norms out there this month! Remember that queer love is revolutionary love!

Aries

This is the month you get serious about what you’re capable of. You’re able to shine with a particular kind of steady, powerful fire right now. Do you know where you want to direct it? Your relationships can help you reach your full potential, so gather the people who see what you can do and want to see you out there making it happen. Don’t get sidetracked right now by doubts or distractions — something beautiful is ready to come through, if you can trust yourself enough to let it. Your motto this month is to be the hero you’ve been longing for, and role model for others to see what they can become.

How to be your own Valentine: Step into your power. Be the authority on your own life. Know what you have to offer. Choose people who see your strengths. Accomplish something meaningful. Be more driven by purpose than popularity.

Taurus

In a year of revitalizing change, your romantic mission this month is to sweep yourself away on some madcap adventure. Be your own manic pixie dream queer. Stability and familiarity may be more your lifelong cup of tea, but now is a time to experiment — specifically when it comes to broadening your sense of the worlds you get to belong to. Resist believing you already know everything about who you are and what you value. Start finding connections you hadn’t expected. Most of all, let your own wisdom guide you. This could be a thrilling month for you, if you let yourself explore the boundaries of your comfort zone.

How to be your own Valentine: Go on an adventure. Begin something ambitious. Have faith in the future. Recognize the bigger picture — in your relationships, in your communities, your cultures. Trust your intuition. Connect the dots. Appreciate your hard-won perspective, and what you can now do with it.

Gemini

With an imagination like yours, life is rarely dull. This month encourages you to deepen into all the strange and wild desires that have been hovering around you recently, asking for a chance to be explored. There is something so sweet about giving yourself the time and space to follow these desires wherever they lead — in reality or fantasy — but it can also touch on old wounds. In many ways, your sexuality (or passion for life, for those who don’t connect sexually) is opening up pieces of you that have been dormant and maybe even a little scarred over for years. There will be pins and needles as you come back to life. And it’s worth it.

How to be your own Valentine: Balance passion and exploration with rest and hydration. Let yourself go where you’re a little scared to go. Transform anxiety into excitement. Notice what makes you feel warm and open, and what makes you feel tense. Care for yourself if you go too far. Let your body set the rhythm. Celebrate your capacity to transform.

Cancer

This month is really the worst when it comes to insecurities about love. Whether you have a core romantic partnership in your life, or several, or none, there’s so much pressure to doubt that you are really, deeply loved. Luckily for you, this month brings you just the perspective you need to look at your situation more deeply. Partnership is really about two things: seeing another clearly, and choosing them in all their good and bad qualities. We do this all the time, in many ways, with friends and collaborators and housemates and colleagues. If you are living with an open heart, your life is probably full of partnerships. If you need encouragement to open your heart more, this month will ask you to soften into the relationships that will reward your vulnerability. Lean in. Speak up. Notice who’s got you.

How to be your own Valentine: You have permission to be un-partnered. You have permission to have four or five or eight partners. You have permission to feel most partnered with a friend, an animal, a mentor you’ve briefly met. This month, think way outside the homo-normative box when you’re thinking about who is choosing you and who you are choosing. Feel chosen. Help others know why you’re choosing them.

Leo

This month invites you to reconnect to why you do what you do. It starts with embodiment, with that sense that your experiences come not only through your ideas but through everything you sense — and that how you treat your body deeply affects your quality of experiences. Right now, love is a project for you: you are looking to grow and transform through the process of loving. This month asks you to commit to this path, to understand what you are devoted to and why. Love yourself by choosing to be in service to what you most value.

How to be your own Valentine: Tend to your body like it’s the most precious thing in your life. Listen deeply for the rhythms that work best for you. Name what your strengths are. Name what you want to be strong for. Dedicate yourself to growing in those directions. Find the support you need for this growth. Let love fill you with a sense of purpose.

Virgo

There is some deep healing available for you right now around stepping into the center of your own damn life and having a ball doing what feels good for you. If you’re already on this train, congratulations and enjoy the ride! If it sounds daunting or impractical to begin foregrounding joy, ask yourself where you learned those stories. What parts of you are attached to being of service and denying your own desires? Where did you learn that it was dangerous to demand pleasure? Do you feel guilty for experiencing joy when others are suffering? Find your growth edge this month around joy, pleasure, and desire. These energies are abundant for you right now, if you can make peace with them.

How to be your own Valentine: Flirt shamelessly with yourself. Get dandy + take photos. Write your own erotic stories. Appreciate what makes you a major catch. Treat your magnetic appeal as a good joke that only those in the know really understand. Make meaningful eye contact, without needing any follow-through. Let yourself play.

Libra

This month brings you inward and slows your pace. What better time than midwinter for being lazy and luxuriating in as much downtime as possible? For those of us that have a hard time distinguishing between luxurious idleness and uncomfortable stagnation, here’s a few pro tips: Keep asking yourself, “How good does this feel right now? What might feel even better?” Watching one trashy movie on Netflix with a bowl of popcorn could feel blissful. Watching four in a row, eating nothing but popcorn for several meals, might stop feeling so good. Find ways to slow down without getting stuck. You deserve real rest, real joy, and to stretch and reset when you’re ready for what’s next. Let this month be the gaycation you need from all the things you’re trying to make happen in the world.

How to be your own Valentine: Reconnect with chosen family. Feel your roots. Take naps. Forget about your to-do list; let yourself be enough. Stay in and luxuriate in what’s familiar and cozy. There’s nowhere more important to be. Treat your bed as a temple.

Scorpio

This is an active month for you, especially when it comes to your social world. Find the real sweetness available to you right now by reaching out to connect in new ways. It may feel at times like you know yourself thoroughly and know the world thoroughly and nothing new is possible, but remember those stories you tell yourself are only ever partly true. You keep changing, the world keeps changing, and something surprising is waiting for you to find it right now. Commit yourself to looking!

How to be your own Valentine: Get out of your ruts and find new routes. Talk to someone you’ve always wanted to approach. Write yourself love notes. Reach out to long-lost buddies. Look more closely at what you think is old and tired and discover what you haven’t seen. Tell yourself new stories about what’s possible.

Sagittarius

The physical world beckons to you this month, asking you to remember that romance is available to you in every moment of beauty. The sky is falling in love with you. The angle of light that comes through your window in winter is asking you to remember warmth, and to reach out toward it as much as it reaches toward you. Your only responsibility this month is to keep noticing and appreciating this beauty wherever you find it.

How to be your own Valentine: Honey. Roses. Silk. Sunrises. Spices. Saunas. Delight your senses this month, with or without a partner. Luxuriate. Befriend pleasure as a healer.

Capricorn

While 2019 will be gentler in some ways than the last few years, for you it will bring very specific insights and revelations. To work with these, spend these early months creating the foundation for the tremendous growth you’ll be doing over the next few years: Discover and embrace what brings you into a sense of your own power — not in a “gritting my teeth and getting through it” way, but in a “I was born for this, watch me rock it” way. Love up on yourself this month by abandoning stories about what you’re supposed to be good at, and start paying closer attention to how it feels to use your strengths.

How to be your own Valentine: Throw away your mirrors. Feel your beauty in how you move. Trust your connection to your body. Feed yourself what brings you joy and strength. Feel your way into those two states, both at once: joy and strength. They’re yours.

Aquarius

This is a beautiful time to turn inward. Not in that depressive, mid-winter Netflix-binging kind of way—where you’re not only hiding from the world but hiding from yourself — but in the ways that help you remember a slow, vast, mysterious center in your own being. If you can find that deeper sense of self through Netflix binging, more power to you, but for many of us this is a time to turn off devices and start listening to what wants to come through. Let this be, above all, a romantic exploration. If you find parts of you that are in pain, massage them. If you find parts of you that are hungry, feed them. Be curious, and believe that you are worth falling in love with, in your full wholeness of being.

How to be your own Valentine: Let yourself sleep in. Turn off the sound on your phone. Book a sensory deprivation float. Pick up an instrument you don’t know how to play. Let yourself drift. Let yourself wonder.

Pisces

This month asks you to take your social world more seriously, and shift your focus from the love of your life (or the loves of your life, or your longing for that great love) to the friendships and networks you already have access to. You don’t have to be worried about belonging: just start inviting people to the things you want to see happen. Your best way to shower yourself in romantic, gooey adoration this month? Recognize that when you’ve had enough introverted bath time and brooding and reading, you get to gather your people and make something gorgeous happen.

How to be your own Valentine: Whatever you’re facing, don’t do it alone. Find your bliss in being part of a crew. Gather wherever you can, like a flock of magnificent gay birds. Start a roller derby team. Join the struggle. Host potlucks. Take over the gym. Start something beautiful that can spread.

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