What if, you didn’t need anyone’s permission but your own to do what you actually want to do?

For 2021, I want you to imagine this: what if, truly and actually, your desires are your destiny? What if, in order to do all that you ever dreamed of doing, you don’t need the approval of any gatekeeper who prioritizes the integrity of their institution over the changing and live world of community? What if, you didn’t need anyone’s permission but your own to do what you actually want to do?

What do you actually need to do the things that you want to do?

Do you want to make a lesbian horror film that is more grotesque and tender than anything that is out there? Do you want to write a mystery novel with no killer? Do you want to outlaw parking lots so that the land can be used for plant life? Do you want to create virtual portals between parts of the colonized world so that farmers can talk to one another?

Figure out exactly what you need to make your visions real and then develop the audacity to ask for all of it.

Try this homework exercise out: raise $1000 towards your project and give yourself just a month to do so. Figure out how to do it. Believe that the resources to make all that you want to do exists out there and that it is all just waiting for you. Don’t waste these resources that are just out there waiting for you. Give them life. Animate them with the force of your will.

Do this whether your project is a month long sideshow or a lifelong pursuit. No matter where you are in life, whether you're a professor approaching tenure or a kid just out of high school, everyone should know how to shape their immediate surroundings just enough to redistribute $1000 towards the things that they know to be important.

Once you have raised $1000 towards your project, raise $10,000. If you need it. You’d be surprised. Sometimes, the biggest visions need very little to get started.

2021 is the year of the Great Conjunction. This is a once in a lifetime kind of transit, with Jupiter and Saturn hanging in Saturn’s house. The eclipses are in Gemini and Sag. This is a year for visionaries to get incredibly realistic about how to make their dreams both collective and real.

This year, neither Mars nor Venus retrogrades and, instead, Mars hangs out in the signs where it is debilitated three times. Venus is combust for the early months of the year, getting too close to the Sun just when it enters the place of its exaltation. Mars isn’t combust until the fall, where it slips under the Sun’s rays just before it goes from it’s detriment to its domicile rulership. When it enters Scorpio, it’s already a frustrated Mars.

Relationships aren’t loud this year. They really can’t be. When Mars is frustrated, it can only change its surroundings. When it’s in its place of debilitation, it can only move with other people. It’s your quiet relationships—the ones where there is no trauma bonding, the ones where there aren’t any butting of egos, the one where care isn’t transactional—that guide you to your visions. It’s not the loud relationships. You don’t have time for the loud relationships this year. You’re supposed to be doing exactly what you were made to do, remember?

Use this year for a breakthrough. No one, not an institution or residency or a lover-muse-object, can ever give you a breakthrough. You are the only person who can give yourself your breakthrough. Unconditional love thrives in the forever growing site of self sovereignty. Your only task, this year, is freedom. Define this well and for your always changing self.

Capricorn

Somewhere along 2020, your life curved and sent you in a direction that you didn’t even know was possible. Now, you’re working with impossibilities. Surviving with integrity in capitalism is an impossibility that you prove to be possible each and everyday you stay alive.

You’re no longer the person you used to be before Saturn and Jupiter transited your sign. You don’t have the support systems that you need to make the new person that you have come into an infinitely developing extension of the universe but you will.

Support the changes that you have made—not your security mechanisms. This is where all of your learning is being done. You don’t have time to repeat the same changes that you have already made so there is very little sense in making the same, obvious choices again and again. It’s your duty to thrive in places that make you feel uncomfortable. Your immaculate backbone makes this achievable for you.

Time is not linear. Choose future time. You live in it already so how could future time possibly be a place where you can’t figure out how to survive?

Aquarius

Why do you shrink back when people ask for your opinion of things? Is it because you truly believe that someone else has a better opening for dialogue or it is because you are terrified of the feeling of being thought to be wrong about something that you are invested in? Is it because you want the people around you to take up space with you or it is because you are fearful about what it means when your presence makes an impact on the environment that you find yourself in?

It’s possible for all of the above to be true at the same time. It’s possible that you dispose of personal authority precisely because you seek self sovereignty.

Contrary to what Mao thought, it’s okay to have contradictions within one solid vision. People respect contradictions because we all share the burden of the universe’s complexity. The point of you speaking is not for you to be right or wrong but for you to begin a conversation about a lens through which you view the world so that other people can tell you how you can mutually inhabit the same world together. This will be the thing that heals your community-wounds.

Say the wrong things at the wrong volume. Make yourself seem foolish because you are so deeply in love with the people around you. All you have to do in order to give yourself permission to speak is to also prove that you have the eager capacity to listen.

Pisces

You don’t have to share everything with everyone and you don’t have to have clarity all of the time but you do have to have a process for getting there. Work on the voices in your head. You have several of them. All your life, you were told who you are and you might even have believed some of these people.

2021 is about realizing that you’re not the person who your mom, your sister, your best friend, and your boss thought you were. It’s about realizing that you were never that person and that any attempts to be that person came from actions that were not controlled by you. Whether you are told that you are hardworking or lazy or excellent or trivial—you are not any of these things. The entirety of the thing that is you is not any of these things.

Stop editing who you are to yourself. You inhabit real time with yourself. Remember your dreams this year. They don’t always speak the truth but they are always clear and direct. They always tell you things even if the things that they say are old reactions that must be parsed out.

Listen to yourself—make some quiet time for that. Turn off the music and the noise. If no one else hears you yet, that’s only because your stories have not yet become recognizable.

Aries

Repeat this mantra three times in three different forms after me: You were never meant to do the things that you are here to do alone. You are not able to do the things that you were put here to do alone. You will never be able to do the things that you were put here to do alone.

There are some things that you are ready for and some things that you are not. Your wisdom, as an Aries, is the wisdom of distinguishing between the two. In 2021, push yourself to notice, for a moment, the things that you believe you are powerless to change. These things, the things that seem so much larger than your own life, are things that you can only change with other people. They might seem immovable because they afflict generationally, because they take several generations to change, but they are as temporary as the tasks that you fill your weekday calendars with.

You’re a visionary but you think too small. Dream bigger. In order to think bigger, you have to teach yourself how to think with other people.

What could you accomplish if you moved in unison with a hundred people? A thousand? A hundred thousand? I know—working with people is the most frustrating thing in the world. It’s also as inevitable as the passage of time.

Taurus

You might enter 2021 no longer having the patience to do the things that you are already good at. This isn’t a bad thing but it can be incredibly destabilizing. You will have to do the things that you believe that you are bad at and, until you teach yourself how to do things that you don’t necessarily want to do anyway, you can feel uninspired about the worlds that you live in.

However, whatever worlds you live in, there are other worlds out there. If you are uninspired living life a certain way, it’s your duty to change. Nothing, not a relationship or job or housing situation, is worth sacrificing your ravenous hunger for life for.

Learn the difference between the things that you don’t want to learn because you will never be a person who knows how to do those things and the things that you don’t want to learn because you think that you are no good at them. Pretend, for a moment, that you can accomplish anything you put time into and, with that clarity of purpose, decide what momentous decisions you will make in the next year. Remember that things are only difficult when you have not put in the time and things are easy once you have.

You won’t be living in the same world after 2021. Saturn is moving through an angle. Choose the parts of your world that you are in charge of unmaking and the parts of your world that you leave to be left undone.

Gemini

It’s time for you to make up your mind about some things, as terrifying as that might feel. You’re not a trash bag that blows only where the wind throws it and your survival skills do not have to be tailored towards always having to expect disaster. You are also a tree, with roots entwined with other trees, and microscopic ecologies of fungi that thrive on your skin. Your life is told in eons and not minutes. When you get in an automobile and change everything, there is always something that dies.

Decide on the things that you need to decide on in order to make room for your continual change. You’re a Gemini, so you change your mind constantly. Committing to principles means that you commit to changing your mind. Thinking that you can choose a life plan where you have not made enough room for change if only you muster up enough of the required discipline is a recipe for nihilism.

You want to be free but only when everyone else is also free. It’s possible to commit to stable uncertainty if you trust that people care about you. Trusting that people care about you means that you do not need to exercise flattery and false charm to get what you want. You only need to let your curiosity become as contagious as it was built to be.

Cancer

Good relationships integrate you into your larger communities and hold you accountable for your complicities. Good relationships do not alienate you from your world but seek to develop it and paint it in colors that you didn’t even know existed. Good relationships don’t hold you hostage. Good relationships get better when you find freedom.

2021 is for good relationships. This means that it is also about all of the things that good relationships need to exist—trustworthy community, clear dialogue, emotional honesty, self sovereignty, and redistributed resources. Good relationships do not exist in isolation. They are not things that were sent to save you but things that you must figure out how to make. Good relationships do not truly exist. They are, just like you, always in the process of being made. They are not formulas that must be preserved—they are moments in life that become wrecked by time just like the rest of us.

You have good relationships and you will have good relationships. You will lose good relationships and you will also gain good relationships. These things have nothing to do with how valuable you are but have everything to do with circulation.

Leo

You will never be able to do the things that you were put here to do if you continually make yourself wait for permission. Other people are not examples made for you to follow. You are far too original for this. You are a Leo. You shape the world that exists around you. You make your own world to live in. Anyone who tells you “no” or “not yet” is not capable of living in your world with you.

Your vision doesn’t have to include being liked by people who don’t like you. Trust love when it is reciprocated. This is love that will grow until it’s larger than just the group of people who know you. Anyone who tells you that you are too grandiose doesn’t, yet, understand the way that love moves between people and remakes them from the ground floor up.

Repeat this mantra in 2021: “I am a Leo. I am love. I do not need unnecessary protection and I do not need camouflage. I only need to make myself known in the places where I go. I have the power to make people notice their own capacity for change and I also have what it takes to make people understand the necessity of change. I am love and I become an utopia when I create my own future.”

You’re a Leo. There’s no sense of unimportance with you. Your importance is not giving to you by anyone other than yourself. Ensure that you are willing to give that importance to yourself.

Virgo

I’m sorry but you don’t actually have time for all of the things that you are currently doing if you want to become good at something. It’s impossible for you to be a good cook while maintaining an impeccably clean house and record at your job. It’s impossible to be the best employee at your day job while pouring your heart and soul into your passion projects. It’s impossible for you to be everyone’s friend and mother at the same time.

Time is not an empty thing that you have to fill but a living thing that constructs change. Time is something that is not in your control. You have to let go of time to let it change you.

Stop trying to push the person that you think you should be through using tasks and obligations. You can possibly plan for your dream self to take shape. Instead, look for synchronicity. Synchronicity happens when you forget about competition long enough to realize that it’s not threatening but actually pretty cool when you get the same idea as someone else even when, or especially when, that person has more access to resources than you. Synchronicity magic happens when you see your visions as larger than life things that happen beyond your control that you must commit to with people. Synchronicity magic turns your desires into destiny when you learn that all of the things that you have access to must be circulated if they are to have life.

Libra

Desire doesn’t work buffet style unless you want someone else’s cold leftovers. You don’t want someone else’s cold leftovers—not you, who is a connoisseur of desire.

Repeat this mantra after me: You will get everything that you want. You can only get the things that you know you want. You will not be able to get the things that you are not able to admit to wanting.

Stop giving your shame around desire so much space to flourish. You’re not the only one who has such shame and you’re also not the only one with such desires. This is a good thing. We are all cursed with capitalistic ambitions and blessed with ancestral yearnings. Your job is not to ensure that both the beginning and end of your desire aligns with every wider social structure out there. Your job is to simply move step by step and to have the wisdom to trust the steps that you can see.

That’s right, Libra—now is not the time for some great, big mastermind plot to change the world for the better. You are not capable of a plot this large and you will only exhaust yourself with frustration and nihilism if you plan too big but move too small. Now is the time to get comfortable in your own skin. That’s the only way that will make it possible for you to do the incredible act of changing your perspective.

Scorpio

You’re not going to be living in the same world as you were in 2020. We all changed in 2020 without having left our homes. There is no new normal because there is no longer any sense of the normal. As a Scorpio, you understand that the biggest changes happen before there is any movement. This makes 2021 the perfect environment for you to do what you do best—carry on as if all assumptions were already moot yesterday and keep thinking big ideas as if establishment institutions have already died.

Saturn is moving through one of your angles. You’re one of the lucky few who have the ability to understand change even when it happens in a vacuum. You notice when change happens even before it has affected anything concrete. This is called the power of anticipation. It is a prophetic use of time.

In reaction to change, simply move all of your love and attention towards the things that you believe in growing. You understand that the beginning of a thing is not what the entirety of a thing looks like and this applies to social change. You understand how to see the impression of an entirety where others only see a beginning.

Validate your prophecies. Understand your vision as a thing that makes the passage of time real.

Sagittarius

Honestly is not just about saying things that you believe to be true but also about saying things that you believe will change conversations and affect the world. That means being selective about where you share the power of your honesty. If honesty has become convoluted for you, then it may be that you are learning how to speak truth in places where you are trained only in how to lie.

Your vision should be clear and precise. You don’t have time for unnecessary mediations. It’s possible for you to be right and not listened to. It’s also possible for you to be listened to but not right.

Don’t speak in formulas, even if it seems like vagueness and cloudiness will make you seem smarter and more interesting. Use words that people understand and also take words back when they have stopped serving your purpose. Learn to value truth where truth might prosper. Don’t tell the truth on resumes, applications, and institutional statements but in real conversations.

You’re not confused. Your language may be and language is the thing that you use to recreate the world. When you’re uninterested in one thing, it’s your job to simply tell another story.