Let's Just Say The Cosmos Isn't Going to Be Blowing Confetti Out Our Butts This Week

We move this week to a somewhat sobering and quite enervating square between the Sun in Capricorn and Saturn in Libra (January 19). With both planets on the final degrees of those signs, there's no time to mess around. 

We consciously and conscientiously advance through the last few steps of Sun in the sea-goat as we're brought to a relative (yet tension-filled) resting point on the anaretic plateau that is Saturn's retrograde station February 7. 

Our forward motion on the relationship structuring front is officially slowing - yet highly potent over the next three weeks - with every step eked out from here an effort as we grind out the last bit of progress, firmly planting ourselves in the new and exalted social/relational positions we think, hope, and fear we've earned. 

New standards in relationship, new platforms, new boundaries, new frameworks: the last steps forward have to be ground out with certainty now as Saturn prepares to look over its ledgers one last time in the sign of the scales. Its retrograde - February 7 to June 25, 2012 - will inform us of the progress we've made in real terms, the position we've concretely earned, as well as the areas that will require more diligence during Saturn's final pass direct. 

The difficulty of planting each step grows over the next three weeks, and the weight drags at us, requiring that we fully prove our mettle, our maturity, and our readiness for new relationship frameworks and a new relationship rulebook. The stern and all-business Sun-Saturn square makes for a very odd atmosphere, indeed, as Saturn in Libra continues its just-a-hair-short-of-exact trine to Neptune in the last gasp of Aquarius. 

We meander in and out of this state of conscious responsibility. One moment we're hitched to the Saturnine plow, most assuredly aware of the limitations and tiresome requirements of physical life on this planet, and the next moment life is characterized by a fluid, dream-like surreality, and it seems we might just slip out of it altogether (Neptune). 

Saturn will be testing us on all points during its retrograde, carrying Neptunian siren song and nostalgic sentiment with us, tempting us to give up our hard-won new position by compromising ourselves and our relationship principles detrimentally. 

The anaretic degrees are vibrating with tension and import. A lot can be gained here with adherence to the principles, and even more can be lost if we break under the strain. Under this anaretic tension, one misstep, and we slide down a chute that squanders at least some of our hard work. 

We're taking a trip with the Ghost of Relationships Past during this Saturn retrograde in Libra, to be certain. We'll be looking back and even going back physically in some instances, meeting again with those who have had a place in our lives in the past. 

But this is a trip purely to show us how far we've come. There will be no staying, no matter how glorious it feels to be blanketed and comforted by this glowing, dreaming phantom love. 

Within the pages of an English novel, Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester find blissful union, at last, long last, as two halves of the same soul meet in holy matrimony. A fictional love to make your heart ache, feverish that you may never find its equivalent. 

And in real life, its author Charlotte Bronte marries a clergyman she is merely fond of - no great, melting love of her life - after watching her entire family perish one-by-one, only to die herself while pregnant soon after being wed. 

The high romanticism of the Neptunian love story is very dangerous at this tail-end Piscean era, threatening to submerge us, to shroud us in its gauzy myth for 30 years more. 

How many of the great historical love stories, so implanted in the collective psyche and so sought after, have been myth? And yet, the crushing emotional weight of Saturnine reality is just as dangerous now. We require our carefully meted out Neptunian dreams in order to withstand our circumstances, and you see just how carefully we have to tread with the current significators in the zodiac. 

Love, sweet love, is still the thing. But a love that is real and sustained is worth more than every fictional love story ever written. 

The Sun in Capricorn moves through its square to Saturn in Libra and into Aquarius January 20 (10:10 a.m. Central) where it will almost immediately form another square - this time to Jupiter in Taurus - to further pee on our parade. Tense and difficult aspects to both the restrictive and the expansive this week. We get it both coming and going. 

Mental exhaustion is still apparent from two months of Mercury in the sign of its detriment, followed by a conjunction to Pluto, which powerfully flooded our circuitry with the deep, the dark, the triggered, the paranoiac. 

Communications retain their Plutonic edge into this upcoming weekend. Hidden emotions can easily show themselves in moments of impatience or temper, and that could be catastrophic. 

Our social responsibilities are heavy and our relational challenges complicated with Saturn stationing retrograde on the last degree of Libra. Our challenge is to keep things as harmonious as possible while not compromising ourselves or our positions. 

Do everything in your power to remain socially pleasant and above reproach this week by neutralizing the Pluto-poisoned mind, tongue, and ear (Mercury).