Despite all the gloom of deep winter the movement of Jupiter into Aquarius on the 5th January blew an optimistic breeze into the New Year. After the bold and buoyant opportunist planet has laboured hard through careful and diligent Capricorn these past couple of years, a welcome fresh sense of liberation and hope is again possible. With all the difficult and uncomfortable events that are occurring around the world Jupiter’s new position offers a vital potential for change. As retrograde Mercury bumps backwards into Jupiter on 18th we get a chance to revisit our personal goals for the year, review our hopes and ambitions and maybe come up with some inventive ways of achieving them. There is plenty more energy around later this month to get the inventor or innovator in you working as feisty Mars tunes in to the Saturn Uranus opposition that we’ve been getting to know about lately. This combined planetary effect suggests a time to really begin to move things forward and out of a rut. Again we will be shown what really isn’t working for us as a human race here on planet earth and the time is nigh to start doing something about it. The New Moon in Aquarius on the 26th is also the first of two solar eclipses occurring this year. Traditionally this signifies a time to close one door and open another. In altruistic Aquarius we have the prompt to design something quite visionary for our collective future. If you are still mulling over details at the end of the month you might find the pace notches up a gear when Mercury starts its forward motion once more on the 1st February, just in time for St Brigid’s day!