For Aries, life is a proving ground. It takes you to your edges, tests your courage, and sometimes shoves you in the chest and dares you to do something about it. This is the energy of the Warrior, the Pioneer, the Daredevil, the Bodyguard.  With Mars and his Ascendant in Aries, poet Walt Whitman’s warrior energy was apparent in his explosive bursts of temper. Once as a youngster, Walt was fishing when a neighbor boy threw stones in the water and rowed over his fishing line.

Marianne Moore isn't mentioned in the Lawrence biography by John Worthen, but she published his poems in The Dial and they exchanged numerous letters. After his death, Moore wrote privately that she had a "deep, indeed reverent regard for him." Marianne Moore was often characterized as a spinster, yet she learned from frequently-censored D.H. Lawrence that there's "dignity and mystery even in carnality," writes Moore's biographer Linda Leavell. And when Moore heard that some

There’s a Cesar Millan video about an un-neutered family dog whose unsatisfied mating instinct leads to food aggression. An astrologer would note that aggression is a quality of Mars. In our own lives, when our passions and energy are not directed constructively, they can run amok as the dog's does in the video.  Imagine Mars is transiting through your busy 9th house in Libra. You become aggressively dogmatic about the way your family makes sandwiches. You are suddenly passio

The rooster was Rumi's favorite symbol for "wanting." “You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep.” (Rumi, "A Great...

What initially struck about this book is the dull, ordinariness of the narrator's voice. There's an everywoman quality, not unlike the...

Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays are filled with quiet insights, so quiet that I had to read them in the mornings, when my mind was fresh...

I took my time with this book, steadily working through the exercises, using them to think about books I’ve read, to explore complicated...

There aren’t many likeable characters in Memento Mori . I counted three. But death comes for the likeable, the despicable and everyone in...

Benjamin Taylor’s brief biography of Willa Cather serves as a useful companion piece to Cather’s novels and letters. Taylor offers...

Reading these letters —  just a few at a time on most evenings —was like hearing from a distant friend who is by turns cranky (especially...

This collection was my introduction to Alice Munro's work and it taught me that the true pleasure in reading short stories is to take...

In Lauren Groff’s Matrix, there’s a wonderful character called Nest. From her name to her every action, she embodies the healing,...

“ A Worn Path ” is one of Eudora Welty’s most powerful short stories, and if you've read it, you know the epic journey Phoenix Jackson...

Having just had a thunderbolt knock me out of my routine and off my comfortable perch, I’ve been thinking about Uranus, the Lord of...

In one of Steven Forrest’s books, he mentions that every astrological sign could be reduced to a few clichés. That cliché might be a...

“The position of unmarried women—unless, of course, she is somebody’s mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the reader of modern...

Writers write about writing a lot more than I realized. Take The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . According to an article in The Guardian ,...

Great Story Coaching * outlines the 3 ways we tend to narrate our lives to ourselves. The victim story (similar to Parul Sehgal’s...

About halfway through My Lives by Edmund White, I expected to give it a two-star rating. White spends so much time narrating his abject...

Barbara Pym wasn’t a Penelope Fitzgerald fan. In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Pym writes , “I read Penelope Fitzgerld’s The Book Shop,...