In a city where the forecast shifts by the hour, the planets offer a different kind of timing. Here's how to read the sky—both above and beyond.
The Setup: When Lake Effect Meets Mercury Effect
There is a particular quality to a February sky in Chicago. It hangs low over the lake, a steel-gray lid that presses down on the skyline and turns the air into something you have to push through. Locals know the feeling: a heaviness that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the light—or the lack of it. But this month, that atmospheric weight isn't just weather. It's also a mirror.
Right now, the Sun is moving through Pisces, the sign of deep waters, hidden depths, and the kind of knowing that doesn't need words. It's a transit that asks us to turn inward, to sit with what we find there. In Chicago, where the wind cuts through excuses and the lake effect can turn a clear morning into a whiteout by noon, that introspective pull feels less like a cosmic suggestion and more like a local condition. The external forecast and the internal one are speaking the same language.
This is the core thesis of reading the winds: weather and astrology are both systems of timing. One tells you whether to grab a heavier coat; the other tells you whether you're emotionally equipped to handle what the day will ask of you. Together, they offer a more complete picture of what's ahead—not as fate, but as a map of the terrain.
The Celestial Weather Report: This Month's Transits, Decoded
The planetary lineup this month is relatively quiet, but quiet isn't the same as still. The transits in play are working on the emotional undercurrents rather than the surface waves.
First, the good news for anyone who tracks these cycles: Mercury is direct. The planet of communication, travel, and technology has completed its recent retrograde shadow and is now moving forward at full speed. This means the snarls, delays, and crossed signals that characterize the retrograde period are clearing. The path for conversations, contracts, and connections is opening up again.
Meanwhile, the Moon has settled into Taurus, the sign where it is most comfortable and grounded. This is an exalted position for the Moon—a placement that supports emotional steadiness, comfort-seeking, and a slower, more deliberate pace. It's the astrological equivalent of a weighted blanket. Decisions made under this influence tend to be more considered, less reactive.
The Sun in Pisces, however, adds a layer of dissolving boundaries. This is the last sign of the zodiac, the place where distinctions blur and empathy runs high. It's a creative, compassionate, and sometimes confusing transit. You may find yourself more affected by the moods around you, more prone to daydreaming, or more aware of what remains unfinished from the past year.
The Chicago Factor: How Local Weather Amplifies the Stars
Astrology doesn't happen in a vacuum—it happens in bodies, in places, in the particular quality of light on a given morning. And in Chicago, the weather is never just background noise. It's an active participant in the emotional texture of the day.
Consider how the current transits map onto the late-February forecast. The Sun in Pisces is a water sign transit, associated with emotions that flow, seep, and sometimes flood. When the actual weather turns wet—whether that's rain, snow, or the damp that seeps through every layer—it amplifies the internal state. You may find that a gray, drizzling day hits differently under this sky. The melancholy isn't weakness; it's resonance.
The Moon in Taurus, by contrast, is an earth sign influence. It wants solidity, warmth, and sensory comfort. This is the transit that makes you want to stay in, cook something slow, and let the world wait. In Chicago terms, it's the deep cold that grounds you—not the dangerous wind chills, but the still, stable cold that makes the indoors feel like a legitimate choice rather than a retreat.
And Mercury direct, moving through the chart with increasing speed, is the air element's contribution: clarity returning, wind clearing out the haze. When the actual wind picks up off the lake, it can feel like a physical manifestation of that mental movement—ideas getting unstuck, conversations finally moving forward.
Your Decision-Making Barometer: When to Act, When to Wait
The value of reading the winds isn't in predicting the future—it's in timing your engagement with it. Some days are built for bold moves; others are built for staying put. Here's how the next few weeks break down.
The key is agency. These transits don't dictate outcomes; they describe conditions. You still decide whether to go out into the storm or wait for the break in the clouds. But knowing what kind of day it is—externally and internally—gives you better information to make that call.
Closing: The Forecast as Permission
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from pretending you're not affected by the weather—either the kind that shows up on your phone or the kind that shows up in your chart. But the forecast, properly read, isn't a sentence. It's a set of conditions you can work with.
If you've felt the weight of this gray month, you're not imagining it. The Sun in Pisces and the Chicago sky are in conversation, and they're both asking the same thing: what have you not yet let yourself feel? The Moon in Taurus offers a container for whatever comes up—steady, warm, unhurried. And Mercury direct means the channels are open again when you're ready to speak.
The forecast, in the end, is permission. Permission to move slowly when the sky is heavy. Permission to act when the wind clears. Permission to trust that you know the difference.