Welcome to the month made just for weirdos!

At 11:10am EST on January 20, 2012, the Sun entered the sign of Aquarius.

Aquarius is the oddball of the Zodiac. I am an Aquarian, and I promise you, we like being oddballs. If everyone is agreeing with what we do, or if everyone is doing what we do, we start to wonder what’s wrong. We wear shorts to a wedding and a tux to a picnic.

Aquarians are also the VISIONARIES of the zodiac. Thomas Edison was a water-bearer. So was Charles Darwin, Lincoln, and Mozart. Virginia Woolf and Rosa Parks.

Know the artist Jackson Pollock? (His art is featured in picture below.) He was an Aquarian, born on January 28, 1912.  In his lifetime, he was derogatorily referred to as “Jack the Dripper.”  Decades after his death, “Physicist Richard Taylor noticed that Pollock’s art looked like a work in fractals, so he checked it out and came up with a startling conclusion: Jackson Pollock was intuitively dripping chaos theory across naked canvas more than 10 years before the theory was even developed. He was testing the limits of what you would find pleasing to look upon; the difference between your ‘overgrown garden’ and Better Homes and Garden. And his artwork only improved as he pushed this limit.” (See Creating at a Visionary Level by Monica Wilcox)

Don’t have an Aquarian sun? You’re still not off the hook! Everyone has Aquarius in their chart. Take a look and see if you have any planets in Aquarius. If you do, then, some part of you is a weirdo (I mean, visionary) too. You may have an unorthodox approach to love (Venus) or fighting (Mars) or communication (Mercury). Or, you may have a North Node in Aquarius, which means you are to actively work toward cultivating Aquarian attributes in your life.

Also, if you have any planets in the eleventh house – that’s ruled by Aquarius and will give an Aquarian purpose to the sign and planets hanging out there.

If you don’t have any strong Aquarian placements at all, you don’t need me to tell you “it’s ok,” because, likely, you’re thankful you aren’t associated with us freaks. If everyone were a visionary, society would likely collapse. But, if no one were a visionary, society would have a hell of time evolving.

Aquarians are not visionary simply for the sake of being different. Aquarians serve people but in a very different way than, say, a Virgo. While a Virgo serves individuals, an Aquarian serves Humanity at large. Aquarians like to be “alone in a crowd.” We are different than the crowd – fitting in kills us slowly – but still, we want to help the crowd. To improve the human condition. Rosa Parks wasn’t a flamboyant Aquarian (she did have a Capricorn moon, after all) but she stood out, and did it for a larger purpose.

When, due to the pressures of society, however, an Aquarian (or that Aquarian part of you) CONFORMS, the greater good is lost. Here’s how Steven Forrest describes a conforming Aquarian in his book The Inner Sky. (He’s a Capricorn, which is probably why he makes conventionality sound so pleasant!)

The genius disappears. There is no rebellion, no revolutionary thinking. All that remains is one more nameless face in the crowd, leading a predictable life, colored only by a few exasperating but ultimately harmless peculiarities.

Conventionality is no sin. The vast majority of us are inherently conventional people. When we fit in with society, we fit in with ourselves too. Not so with the Water-Bearer. For her, conventionality is a mask. She may choose to wear it, but if she does, she pays a terrible price: the life she leads is not her own.

An Aquarian traveling that dark pathway may have the outward appearance of success. She may be poised. She may be graceful. She may be affluent and witty. But she feels like an outsider, like a foreign agent who has flawlessly adopted a false identity.

The Water-Bearer feels alienated…Behind those eyes, as clear and penetrating as a dagger of ice, there is nothing. Only a missing person.

Ok, Forrest is sometimes a bit over-dramatic for me. Here’s Stella Hyde’s description, in Darkside Zodiac, of a typical Aquarian home.

You may have a normal house, but who’s to know, as you’ve been in the shed since 1984 perfecting cold fusion in a bucket. If you live alone, as so many of you do, you use the kitchen for brewing rocket fuel and the bathroom for your gamma-wave detection array; the bedroom houses your mainframe and you sleep with the dog. Artistic Aquarians cannot access the muse unless they live in a freezing boho garret with just a desk, a pencil, and mice to train if things get slack.

Where there aren’t books, papers, revolutionary posters, and cannibalized computer peripherals, there are solar-powered refrigerators (in the developmental phase), stuff in petri dishes, paperclips linked together to demonstrate superstring theory, and a cat (cats love you); plus blackboard paint on the walls and plenty of chalk.

Aquarian Jackson Pollock was repeatedly ridiculed for his art. He became an alcoholic and died in a car crash, before the rest of the world could catch up with his genius. Galileo (also an Aquarian) was considered a heretic by the Catholic church and lived under house arrest for the last decade of his life. How different could their lives have been if they were given support? How many more contributions could they have made to Humanity? How many visionaries have kept their mouths shut, when they saw the treatment of others like them? What has Humanity lost as a result?

Let’s recognize and support the weirdos of the world, starting with the visionary inside of you!

Have questions about cultivating your personal visionary genius? Feel free to ask them below. (BTW, Aquarius is also the sign of ASTROLOGY!)