Mars is chugging along in Virgo all month, sharpening our attentiveness to tasks. Use this transit to streamline your handling of quotidian matters: how you water your houseplants, schedule your shopping, trim your nails (if Mars is aspecting your natal Venus, go ahead and indulge in a full-on manicure.)
Kinship
Jupiter moved into Cancer last month, initiating a year-long transit that changes our sense of who, in this wide world of ours, deserves protection.
This placement takes aim at provincialism. Consider whether you have erected any psychological white picket fences around your domestic circle, in an effort to – so you thought — keep yourself and your loved ones safe.
You may start feeling differently towards previously excluded groups. Jupiter’s message is that we are all, ultimately, part of the same clan.
Venus moves into Cancer, too, at the end of July, adding her personal touch to this idea. Jupiter, a conceptual planet, provides an ideological understanding; Venus, an emotional planet, provides a heart-based understanding. With both of them in Cancer, we expand our sense of family partly out of moral principle, and partly because it feels good.
Butterfly pleasures
But for most of the month Venus is in Gemini (7/4-30), a quick-witted and restless placement. Don’t expect your pleasures to stay focused on one thing.
They’ll flit around like a butterfly, attracted by mental stimulation and clever people.
Question authority
The big ingress this month is Uranus’s entry into Gemini on the 7th. It’ll head back into Taurus in November, for a while, but right now it’s dipping its toe into a whole new element. The world will feel an elemental change, from earth to air.
If you have natal planets in the first degrees of mutable signs, you’ll be especially sensitive to this shift in the wind. Something in you is itching to break away. Probably more abruptly than you want to.
When an outer planet like Uranus changes signs, it’s an epoch-defining marker. Seven-years’ worth of natal charts have Uranus in the same sign, so these placements describe generational tendencies. Your Uranus cohort reveals the particular way you and your peers question authority.
Electrified intel
Gemini is about language, communications systems and the way society approaches language and the linear mind. Natives born under this placement – i.e. 
those born 84 years ago, and now — constitute a group that shakes up the means by which societies handle information.
For the world in general, education, transportation, writing – all methods of moving ideas around – will be quickened and electrified.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that a given native will personally act out these urges. But if Uranus falls on an angle of your chart, or closely aspects your other natal planets, you’ll likely feel it acutely. You’ll feel the need to respond, as an individual, to the urgency in the air.
Check the house of your chart where Uranus is transiting. That’s where light bulbs will start flashing over your head. If you’re sufficiently grounded, you could become a receiver of important inspirations.
Time to commit
Saturn goes retrograde on the twelfth, forcing some kind of reality check (discussed in the last several SkyWatches).
Honor the station by making a commitment. You’re being asked to cultivate a more mature approach in some department of your life. You probably won’t have to guess where this demand is coming from; it’s something you’ve already been feeling particularly serious about.
But Saturn is tethered to Neptune for a while, so this call to responsibility may not be easy to pinpoint. It may be to a real-world project, or it may be to something intangible. You may feel driven by an amorphous, soul-deep yearning (Neptune) that you can no longer dismiss.
