Your love is tougher than you think it is. Trust! When you can.

Before I get into my horoscopes for 2025, I want to bring a quote from Octavia Butler’s essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future” to your attention:

“If we’re in a period of prosperity, then in the future, prosperity it will be. If we’re in a period of recession, we’re doomed to even greater distress. Of course, predicting an impossible state of permanent prosperity may well be an act of fear and superstitious hope rather than an act of unimaginative, straight-line thinking. And predicting doom in difficult times may have more to do with the sorrow and depression of the moment than with any real insight into future possibilities. Superstition, depression and fear play major roles in our efforts at prediction.”

I’ve been reading this quote again and again. There’s an idea floating around on the internet that the astrology of 2025 is really bad. I’ve seen a lot of people start to freak out about some transits or events happening in 2025 that I think is based more on the present than anything that I would read as astrological doom. This is what is happening in the present: Trump was elected and is all chummy with Elon Musk, multiple genocides are still ongoing, and late stage capitalism is running its course. The world is burning and drowning. What is going on with avian bird flu? With the trade war? What if I get sick? What’s going on with the solar cycle? The airplanes?

It’s easy to freak out about the future. But the hardest truth in life is that we don’t know what will happen in the future.

We don't know what will happen in the future. If we did, then action would be pointless. Our actions matter. Our actions can change the course of the future.

We don’t use astrology to manufacture doom. We use astrology, which is a divination tool, to help us narrate the futures we are building. The future isn’t something that happens to us. It’s what we build together. That is what we use astrology to narrate—a determined vision of the future that supports our inventiveness.

Here is what’s happening in the astrology of 2025: Mars starts super slow this year. Last year, Mars was moving fast in Capricorn at the beginning of the year and then slowed down. This year, Mars starts super slow in Cancer. It makes this funky little mixed reception with Venus in the spring. First, Mars is retrograde and then Venus is retrograde. The two planets support each other, Venus being about negotiation and Mars being about conflict.

So, intimacy. Showing up to fight alongside people. A focus on local problems and on building power where you are. Do you use picking fights to try and solve the problem of political loneliness? Do you use loneliness to try and solve the problem of being angry but too afraid to fight? What makes you feel empowered in conflict and what makes you feel empowered when together with other people?

In the summer, Jupiter moves into Cancer and Saturn into Aries (just for a short time). Saturn moves back into Pisces in September. Jupiter in Cancer is about imagination. Saturn in Aries is about action. You can make things happen if you take action. That’s the magic of Saturn in Aries.

I know that most people won’t like this but I think about getting tougher. To me, getting tougher doesn’t mean that you shut all of your emotions off. It means that you build capacity and that you make this capacity building a priority. A lot of people don’t like Saturn in Aries because Saturn in Aries tends to make fast decisions and take on a lot at once. But guess what? This type of skill, this skill of toughness, is necessary sometimes. Toughness can get you really far. Being tough doesn’t mean that you lose your tenderness. It means that you give yourself another option other than feeling everything all at once. You can be tough or tender depending on what you think will be most helpful in the moment at hand.

Life is tougher than we think it is. One life is fragile but many lives interwoven together becomes resilient and tough.

Neptune will enter Aries in 2025. Last time Neptune entered Aries was 1861, the official beginning of the American Civil War. Jupiter in Cancer will be the United States’s Jupiter return which happens every twelve years. Saturn in Aries will be the US’s Saturn opposition.

The eclipses in 2025 will move on into Virgo and Pisces. For the last year or so, the eclipses in Aries and Libra were asking us to think about who we are and what we owe. This year, the eclipses will be about belief and sacrifice. I’m a bit of a daoist about this. I do believe that every single belief you have requires some kind of sacrifice. I also understand that I am writing this in an era where there are a great deal of cults. Be careful about who asks you to believe and what you are asked to sacrifice. Always weigh your beliefs based on the sacrifices that they are asking for.

Finally, the Mercury retrogrades this coming year will remain in the fire signs. You know how you rethought some aspect of your life last year? 2025 continues to provoke you using the same questions. If you are a fire sign rising, then you rethought your identity. If you are an earth sign rising, then you rethought your past. If you are an air sign rising, then you rethought your friends. If you are a water sign rising, then you rethought your goals. You can expect similar questions to return in 2025.

July is a bit weird this year. I keep looking at it. Saturn will be in Aries. July will also be a Fire Horse year. Fire Horse is the pinnacle of yang or solar energy. Actually, July 2025 is supposed to bring the peak period of solar cycle 25. A lot of sunspots and solar flares. The northern lights should be very visible.

So, that’s the astrology of 2025. Take a look. Some aspects are impacting the United States’s natal chart specifically and I’m looking at those because that’s where I’m located. Mars and Venus’s exchange asks us to use conflict as a tool in building trust. The eclipses contest belief and contest sacrifice. Mercury asks us the same questions as last year.

What do you want to build?

What future feels imaginable to you right now?

What actions might you take to grow your capacity for the future?

2024 was the year of the Wood Dragon. 2025 will be the year of the Wood Snake which doesn’t start until the first spring solar term, called lichun, in late January. Dragon year was about flooding. We saw both metaphorical and literal floods in 2024. Snake year is about medicine and pathmaking. Our world is full of medicine. Every single living thing is a form of medicine and living things like to move. Using medicine takes knowledge. Practicing medicine takes observation, work, study, and care. All of these things are also needed in pathmaking.

I think that 2025 is about cultivating toughness. Snakes are tough animals. Care work is a tough job. Care work is physical and it can be grueling. And, yet, take a look around. There’s so much that needs care. Don’t let that overwhelm you. Don’t let any astrologer’s ideas about the future freak you out. Just take things one step at a time. That’s how you build the future. That’s how you nurture toughness.

Your love is tougher than you think it is. Trust! When you can.

Capricorn

Your relationships are asking you for slowness. Can you hear the requests? For something just a tad bit slower, not more hesitant but braver. Slowness takes bravery. We tend to rush when we get worried. Moving at the pace that you need, however you need, takes a deep breath and a lot of courage.

Your relationships are also asking you for belief, for faith. Do you believe in the people around you? I feel like that’s too divisive of a question. Let me rephrase it. With all of the people around you, who do you believe in? And what got you there to that place of faith?

In 2025, you’re going to look for the potential in your relationships. Not what exists now and not what feels good in the moment. You’re going to look for the potential for transformation. Think about not what you need now but the person you see yourself becoming and what that person may or may not need.

I think that pop culture tries to make us feel defensive all of the time. Pop culture sells us confidence but confidence is actually just a form of self defense. Friendliness is really just fronting, is a form of social dominance. You don’t need to be confident to initiate relationships or to disrupt old patterns. You do need slowness and the perception of faith. You need to see what something can become if you put slow effort in. Observation. Faith takes observation.

This year is about trusting the people around you. Some of them. That’s a beautiful thing. You’re going to have a beautiful year.

Questions for Capricorn for 2025:
What does it sound like when a relationship asks you for slowness?
What does it sound like when a relationship asks you for faith?
What is overrated in relationships?

Aquarius

2025 is about trusting your discipline. Believe this: you know your own capacity for work and you are good at assessing how much time it takes you to do the things that you need to do. This means that you can trust the schedule that you have set up for yourself. You don’t need to constantly try and give yourself more and more time to do something. Doing that just gives you more time to procrastinate.

You have enough time to live your life. You are self aware about what you can get done and you consistently give yourself enough time. If you didn’t give yourself enough time once or twice, you still give yourself enough time most of the time.

I’ve found that, when you trust that you have enough time, you end up actually pulling through and doing the things that you set out to do. If you constantly think that you don’t have enough time to do things, then you lose faith in yourself and you end up not doing anything. With time management, a lot of it does come down to belief. You can make time, even hundreds of hours for something, but end up thinking that you still need to make more time and resisting in the back of your mind.

Resist being too busy. You are in control here and, if you don’t have enough control over time, then fight to claim enough control. Embrace laziness. Lazy people get things done because we figure out how to do things quickly so we can have a little relax. Don’t think too much. Make sure that all of your thinking can translate into some kind of action.

Questions for Aquarius for 2025:
What do you have enough time for?
What do you think too much about without that thinking translating into action?
What actions have become so second nature to you that you don’t need to think about them at all?

Pisces

2025 is a year for invention. What do you do when you encounter a problem? You invent something. What do you do when you talk with a friend and find a new idea together that you’re both just so excited about? You invent something. What do you do when you’re just sitting around and bored out of your mind? You invent something.

Invent things. Use all of your creative joy until you’re flowing and ready for more. Seek freedom. Use your mind, heart, and your hands.

Invention isn’t just a skill. It’s also observation. It’s social. It’s playful. Invention is actually about having fun. Your body actually just knows how to invent things so spontaneously that you just need to give it a little encouragement and…boom. There you go.

Don’t be precious. Some people make creativity too precious and I don’t like that. You don’t need to go out and buy things to be creative. You don’t need to apply for things and you don’t need permission. If you want to invent a structure, then you just need some sticks. If your invention is no longer needed, then let it dissolve.

Invention is a process of change. You can always keep going. It asks for energy from you but it also gives you energy back. Never forget that you are an inventor. Get excited, get frustrated, or get bored. Use all of those phases to cultivate your inventiveness.

Questions for Pisces for 2025:
What does inventiveness feel like when you are excited?
What does inventiveness feel like when you are frustrated?
What does inventiveness feel like when you are bored?

Aries

2025 is a good year for relying on the actions that you took in the past. I find that a lot of people like to tell Aries to be patient and wait for the actions that you are taking today to take bloom. But patience is also about noticing what you have already done in the past and revitalizing those practices as we move forward.

What were you doing five years ago? Ten years ago? What was interesting to you back then and how have those interests brought you to where you are today?

Actually, I find that Aries tends to discount all of the really cool and wonderful work that you have done in the past because you like that energy of trying something new all of the time. Give your past self some credit. Read your old writing. Learn from your past mistakes and from your past victories. Remember that the past you was onto something.

If an old project starts to take bloom today, don’t shut it down because the teenaged part of you is automatically embarrassed about anything that has passed. Let the old you show itself. Let your old friends remember you and tell you about who you have always been. Cherish the things that have not changed in addition to the new.

This is about letting your experience show. You are innovative because you have experience. You know what you are doing because you have learned. Honor your own code, your own rules for doing things the way you do them. Respect your experience.

Questions for Aries for 2025:
What are your personal rules for life?
What do these rules reflect about your experience of life?
What helps you remember and honor the experience that you have accrued?

Taurus

You’re about to enter a hermit era but you’re not there yet. In 2025, you’re still in your social judgment era where you are looking at your friendships and trying to figure out if they still feel right for you. At the same time, you are going through a major inspiration of your mind.

There’s something that you’re thinking about that you want to debut. You have brilliant ideas. Your mind is churning.

2025 is about planning—making preparation, scheming, and studying the world around you so that you can make a vision about where to go. Draw maps about your process of thought. Make step by step outlines about what you are trying to do. Ask people questions about the groups around you and spaces that you move through so that you are equipped with information.

Never act on your suspicions about other people right away. Let time tell you where those suspicions are coming from. People will show you who they are in time.

What you’re not going to do is you’re not going to allow either peer pressure or your suspicions about people make any decisions for you. You’re going to use both your curiosity and your discernment to gather information. Then, you’re going to use that information to create a series of plans. 2025 is about preparation. Only you know what you are preparing for.

Questions for Taurus for 2025:
What kinds of research does your curiosity bring to you?
What kinds of research does your discernment bring to you?
What information are you using to make your plans?

Gemini

2025 is about resourcing. You have a lot of wisdom when it comes to resourcing. You know what you need and what you don’t need. If you have a goal that you currently don’t know how to resource, you know who to ask. You know how to trade and you know how to look things up. You’re an investigator. You know how to find the things that you need.

Trust that. Trust yourself. You’ve been navigating this world for a long time and you have some tricks up your sleeve.

You know a lot of things about how to resource yourself but there is also always more to learn. You’re a Gemini. You know that already. Are you absorbing all of the sources of knowledge around you? You are allowing food to move through your body and move you? Are you letting all of the people around you who want to help you actually give you help?

Resourcing is a form of education. Resourcing isn’t extraction. You’re not just taking things and doing whatever you want with them. When something resources us, whether that be a plant or a person or a place, that thing leaves an imprint on us. Our resources shape us and they often shape us physically. They leave marks on our bodies and on our lives.

In a way, 2025 is about learning. Resourcing is a type of learning. You’re really good at this so 2025 should be a year of pulling out all of your talents and enjoying them to the fullest. Great job.

Questions for Gemini for 2025:
What are you currently resourced by?
What kind of imprint are those resources leaving on your life?
What are you ready to learn?

Cancer

You’re kind of going to a reconstruction of selfhood here. You’re realizing that you can use your body to do really cool things that take you by surprise completely. You’re also realizing that the old goals you used to anchor your time are not Truths but merely just choices.

What kinds of protest do you want to train your body into? Protest is so physical. Your face heats up when you refuse your labor. Your fingers become warm and tired when you hang onto another person’s hands. You learn how to sit on the ground and how to root into the gravity of your body. You learn what pursuing liberation feels like in your lungs and in your feet.

Empower your physical presence as you start to rethink some of your older choices. Life is flexible because it is a series of choices. If you couldn’t rethink any of your choices, then life would be very boring. Thankfully, you get to rethink. That adds to your character.

What you are rethinking is really just the future that you want to build. Think about the future only a little. Don’t let your mind get too fixated. Thinking can really only get you so far and physical practice must accompany all thought. Take walks. Eat food. Enjoy where you are at even while you are thinking about where you might be headed next. Don’t let yourself deal in hypotheticals. There’s no sense in fighting future battles.

2025 will push you to get stronger. Your strength comes from your connections, from your trust, and from your knowledge. Your strength also comes from food, rest, training, and healing. Go take a martial arts class. Eat plenty of nutrients. Find your physical power. Physical strength is spiritual strength.

Questions for Cancer for 2025:
What do you enjoy most about where you are at right now?
What helps you find physical strength?
What do you want to train your body to do?

Leo

2025 is about empowering yourself with knowledge. Right now, we live in an era of really high literacy. For most of us, our grandparents could not read. They could not read written words but they had other skills. They could read the weather, the land, and they knew how to dig wells.

For our generation, the global literacy rate is over 80%. We have just moved through decades of globalization and nationalization during which we traded our people’s connections to land in exchange for institutional education. And, now, we hear all of these complaints all the time about people not knowing how to read. What don’t you know how to read?

For sure, we don’t know how to read. We no longer know how to read the way our grandparents knew how to read. We have lost a lot of reading comprehension over the years and a lot of us are trying to sense our way back.

Leo, you know things. I know that you know things. But the way that knowledge is institutionalized makes us all feel like we don’t know things.

2025 is about learning how to read and is also about honoring the things that you know. You know so much. We have also all lost a lot of reading comprehension. What makes you feel empowered in the knowledge that you have?

Questions for Leo for 2025:
What do you know?
What do you know how to read?
What would you like to learn to read?

Virgo

2025 is about understanding all of your sorrow and about celebrating all of your joy. I don’t believe in picking one over the other. You will always have both. You can feel both, sometimes at the same time.

Joy is your companion through hope. Joy helps you clarify hope. It helps you figure out how to wield hope in a pragmatic way. Without joy, hope would just be delusion. You have to let joy teach you what hope can bring you and you have to let both together give you more reasons for living.

Sorrow is your companion through hardship. Sorrow helps you anchor your suffering. It helps you understand why you suffer. Most of the time, we suffer because we love something or someone. Sorrow brings that to life.

Out of the two emotions, joy is usually the most challenging. We have so many feelings around joy—guilt, protectiveness, worry. Why should we feel joy? What did we do to earn it? Those kinds of thoughts come up around joy. Sorrow can be hard too but it seems to arrive so much more easily.

In 2025, you have both friends close by your side. Joy and sorrow are both your friends. You’re going to practice friendship with them both which means learning trust, respect, and space in your relationships to them both. These emotions are some of your oldest companions. Let them know you.

Questions for Virgo for 2025:
What does joy teach you?
What does sorrow teach you?
If you were to describe a friendship trio composed of you, joy, and sorrow…what would that friendship trio be like right now?

Libra

Don’t think about your career as your career, as a scary thing that will keep taking you out of your comfort zone. Think about the world that you want to build around yourself in the long term instead. What kind of world do you want to live in and what kinds of steps will take you there little by little?

I find that too many of us tend to think of our goals in the short term. I’m very guilty of this. We underestimate what we can do in the long term and overestimate what we can do in the short term, putting more pressure on a week or a day than on a lifetime. We think that we want certain things because of our immediate situation and we lose faith in ourselves based on the most obvious limitations.

Think about the life that you want to build in the long term. Think about how small, repeated actions will always take you somewhere. Determination is a habit. Hope is a practice.

You don’t actually have to leap out of your comfort zone all the time to challenge something. You don’t have to be someone who you are not. You can keep being yourself and do the things that you already understand how to do in a disciplined way. Slowly, you open up new questions. There’s surprises waiting for you five years into doing a practice that you just can’t anticipate or try to solve in your head on the first year.

What I’m trying to say is…just keep going. You know yourself pretty darn well. Keep committed. Make decisions that feel true to who you are. Even if you don’t make a decision, time is still passing by. You’re never going to choose something that doesn’t feel true to you and your body will meander if you don’t let yourself choose you. Be decisive. Trust yourself.

Questions for Libra for 2025:
What kind of life do you want to nurture?
What does that nurture look like day to day?
What helps you remain accountable to your practice of nurture?

Scorpio

Never let the things that keep you busy today keep you from cultivating your sense of future. You are really busy right now. You also have a lot of big dreams for the future and those big dreams will need big explorations, education, and time.

To dream is to live. And yet, you have all of these obligations and responsibilities here in the now. These responsibilities are also dear to you. They matter too. The present matters just as much as the future. Never let your dream of the future keep you from honoring the commitments that are due today.

I think that 2025 will be about finishing things. Not everything in life is meant to go on forever. A project is at its end point when that project is no longer able to stir up human energy. It’s no longer exciting. There’s no more discussion to be had. It no longer makes you think.

Finishing things takes a lot of energy. There’s whole processes that have to do with closure. What do you leave behind? Who do you leave things with? What feels like the right ending for you?

When you finish things, you make more room for the future. You never have to have a foolproof plan about what will happen next before you start finishing things. A lot of the time, the practice of finishing is what leads you into the next phase. Don’t worry about not being as busy as you were right away or about being busy with the same things. Remember that busy will come as a new practice builds. Wrap things up. Get less busy.

Questions for Scorpio for 2025:
What are you done with?
What would finishing look like right now?
What does finishing allow you to dream about?

Sagittarius

This is your task for 2025: you’re going to witness the people you love flourish and grow around you. You’re going to celebrate those victories because you know that success for your people is also success for you. You’re not going to take on more in competition. You’re not going to ask yourself what witnessing success says about you. You’re just going to witness.

This is harder than it looks. Why? Because, to witness possibility, you have to look for it. You have to observe your loved ones and see their potential with them without making it about you or what you can do for them. You have to be patient. Not everyone is ready to see their talents just because you can.

A lot of the time, we make nurture a whole big thing. We care so much about people and we just want them to know it! So we make a big deal about teaching them, gifting things to them, and about taking care of them. People, myself included, create whole identities about being a caretaker. But people don’t need a lot to enjoy a talent. They just need to be seen. If you can witness, then you can heal. Just witnessing someone do their thing is an incredibly powerful action.

Look around you. Notice when someone you love is doing great and just tell them in very simple words, “good job.” “Good job. I see you.” You’re not going to worry about whether you’re being a good friend or not. You’re just going to witness what is good about everyone you care about and let them know in the easiest way possible. That’s it.

And, if you like, you can do this for yourself too. You can take heed over what you are doing well and you can tell yourself in simple terms, “Good job. I see you.”

Questions for Sagittarius for 2025:
Who is one person you can think of who is doing some really cool shit?
What happens when you let them know what you see?
What does celebrating people’s talents feel like in your body?