I'll be watching this Capricorn New Moon month very closely for a microcosmic preview of the next couple of years of my life. My progressed Moon just entered Capricorn, for only the second time in my life.

The first time, I was a Junior in high school. Overweight and unsophisticated, I was more or less invisible on campus until the end of my sophomore year. Then the music director of my school discovered that I could sing, a stealth skill I had nurtured in private for nearly five years. Several months later - indeed, the exact week my progressed Moon entered Capricorn - he installed me in the most elite vocal group on campus and gave me a featured solo. Coincidentally, it was a song I'd been practicing for years, almost as though I knew this moment was coming. When the group eventually performed the song at a school assembly, the entire student body gave my performance a standing ovation. Literally overnight, I became a kind of minor campus celebrity.

This gave me a certain caché in the music department, where I immediately became a very big (literally) fish in an extraordinarily small pond. But while I was a capable singer, I was not good at much else and had few social skills. I was shy and awkward and had spent years holed up in my bedroom every single afternoon, singing along with records. I had overdeveloped one tiny talent to the exclusion of all others, and I leaned on it far too heavily.

Forced into a collaborative environment, I became a bit of a stereotypical Capricorn tyrant (specifically Nixon) in the service of musical perfection. Oh, I had a reasonably good heart. But the fact was that I valued music above everything, including other people's feelings. I grew impatient when my classmates whined about extra rehearsals, and I made sharp comments when they were off pitch. But it wasn't malicious; I simply assumed that my fellow musicians were willing to drive themselves as hard as I drove myself.

But they weren't, usually, because unlike me, they had lives. They were young kids - dating, getting their first jobs, their first cars. They went to Friday night football games and Saturday night movies. They lived three-dimensional lives, and they didn't have twenty or thirty extra hours each week to devote to singing.

Luckily, I have the moon in the seventh house of my birth chart and an accommodating nature. I quickly learned to conceal my impatience and perfectionism and to grease the wheels of social interaction, mostly with humor. As a result, I managed to form some friendships that persist to this day. But even these kindhearted people, when we recall our high school days, damn me with faint praise. "I always appreciated it when you told me I was singing flat!" insists my good-natured friend and fellow soprano, Heidi. "You always challenged me," says Claudia, who survived a full year singing in a trio with me. But although my friends are too nice to say it, I suspect that if I had known someone like me in high school, I would be saying, "Yeah, you were a total bitch, but I respected you as a musician and we had some laughs." That's the legacy of my last progressed Moon in Capricorn season: I was a good singer, but kind of a sucky person.

Capricorn and the price of exaltation

Unlike a girl who becomes "famous" in school because of her good looks or loose morals, at least I had the good fortune to achieve high school fame based on hard work. But it was luck, because when you get right down to it, we have little control over our public image. Capricorn, as ruler of the tenth house - the most exalted in the natural horoscopic wheel - describes our ability to attain status. But the fame represented by Capricorn has as much to do with what other people make of us as what we make of ourselves. You might become famous for doing something well, but you might just as well become famous by accident - by being the son of someone famous, or being beautiful, or doing something stupid. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar and a two-term president, but he'll always be known as the guy who got a hummer in the Oval Office.

But achieving status is only part of what Capricorn is about. Capricorn also reminds us that, regardless of how you come to the attention of the public, you have a responsibility to use that attention constructively. Even people with no knowledge of astrology are familiar with the Capricornian concept of "noblesse oblige," the belief that the wealthy and privileged are obliged to help those less fortunate. We do exalt people with a certain expectation that they give something back in return. We like it when obscenely wealthy people give huge sums to charity, for instance. We may sneer at Julia Roberts romping around with apes in a documentary, but part of us grudgingly concedes that, yes, at least she's using her fame to call attention to an endangered species. The unspoken message is that altitude comes with a price: If we lift you up - make you famous, help make you rich - you owe us something. Those who respond well to the challenge recognize this obligation and choose to repay it on their own terms, instead of letting Capricorn shake them down.

Sometimes, all we owe is a little graciousness. When I look back at my 16-year-old self, seeking clues to what this progressed lunar cycle will bring, I see a scared girl who was desperate to be noticed and then didn't know what to do with the attention once she got it. I worked too hard at music because I was uncomfortable dealing with feelings and with people. I drove myself ruthlessly, and so I treated others the same way. If I paid any Capricorn dues, it was in struggling so hard to curb my harshness and play well with others; I hope to do a better job of that this time around. While it's true that the Moon in Capricorn is a good season for career achievement, it's worth remembering that our bonds with other people - friends, family, and community - can also benefit from a little hard work.

Now that I'm older I don't have much ambition, and neither do I need the world's attention - at least not quite so much as I used to. Which is good, since I seem to be in no imminent danger of becoming famous, even in the smallish waters I wade in. Still, astrology does tend to make itself seen and felt; so over the next couple of years my little world will surely raise me up, if ever so slightly and ever so briefly, and for a moment or two I may reach unexpected heights. For that, I suppose the world will demand a payment, in the form of integrity, hard work, and graciousness. And when it comes to collect, the best I can hope for is that I have exact change.

© 2005 April Elliott Kent
All rights reserved