Dear Friend and Reader:

Happy Equinox to you. The Sun has entered the tropical sign Aries and its rays are square the Equator. Today and for several days on either side of today, night and day are of equal length all over the world. This changes fast. It will soon be the land of the perpetual night down in South Africa and Antarcica, and the land of the Midnight Sun in Alaska and Yukon.

The new Planet Waves Astrology News is out. It's called "Aries Equinox and the Crisis of Confidence." The theme: the American people have lost their confidence; it may be all of us in the Western world who are feeling the drain. A constellation of the Sun, Pluto and several potent minor planets (Okyrhoe, Achilles and Kronos) are teaming up to say: pay attention. Get your mind on the job. Stop dreaming and wake the f*** up. This is life, and it's not getting any different until you make it different.

At Planet Waves, astrology is not something that happens to you. Rather, it's something we walk into like a kitchen and use to make dinner for a lot of people.

Today's edition goes into the psychology of the Iraq war and how this was used as an excuse to gut the world economy. It talks about our endless litany of fears: connected with money, with sex, with intimacy, with abandonment, with being bored, with being creative, with being dead and with being alive -- in short, if you look around, it's possible to get the feeling that everyone is afraid of everything, and committed to it. This may not be entirely true, but we're scared enough that the economy isn't the only thing that's frozen; it's our collective sense of guts and daring, our desire to get our lives in gear and go somewhere interesting, and our sense that life is an experiment.

I'm here to suggest you stop worrying about the economy and put your heart and soul into something creative. I'm here to say it's time to make contact with people who share your inner sense of potential -- I know you have it. I know because I've read too many of your charts not to know, and I know because I know about myself.

Today's edition also includes an expanded Equinox horoscope edition for all 12 signs, which looks closely at Venus retrograde in Aries. Venus will be backing into a square to Pluto in Capricorn, crossing the Aries Point and then dipping for 10 days into Pisces, when we find out what spirituality, love, sex and art all have in common; that is, if we want to know.

And for my readers here, I have one story that didn't make it into the edition, one of those late-night production things. I've been running a day late all week, which is a long time if you have two deadlines a day. So this issue of Planet Waves stretched into the wee hours; and somewhere in there, I asked Anatoly, our webmaster in the Ukraine, to find me some pictures of pro-war protests for today's edition, which gets into the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war.

He searched the Web for a few minutes and brought back a bunch of antiwar protest pictures. And I said, um, we need pictures of a pro-war protest. To which he replied, "A what?"

Right. I laughed so loud, I thought I woke up my neighbors. Fortunately a pro-war protest is a thing of the past. But not the distant past. Let's stop the war, and the war against ourselves.

For Planet Waves at the vernal equinox, this is