Hour of the Goat

The secret self

Those born in this double-hour carry the Goat as their hidden hour-self, the private creature only the closest people meet. The clock remembers it like this:

• Born in the Goat hour, your secret self is tender, creative, and far more enduring than the gentle face suggests. There is a sure-footedness in you that finds the grass on the bare rock.
• The afternoon animal in you absorbs other people's moods and sometimes calls them your own. The gift is empathy; the shadow is the resentment that stacks quietly until one slight tips the rest. Set it down before it stacks.
• Your hidden hour is the long slow graze of the warm afternoon. There is a daydreaming streak in you that some read as drift and is really a way of thinking, slower and longer and more pattern-finding.
• Inside you is real spine, made of the bone that bends and does not break. Your secret self has survived the lean months with a gentle face that fools people into thinking it was easy. It was not.
• The Goat in early afternoon gives the last spoon of stew, lends the money it cannot afford. Your secret self wants to be cherished and rarely says so. Make the small decision instead of waiting for the big one to make itself.

More on the Goat

Soft fleece, careful step, eyes that go wet at the small good thing. The Goat has been called gentle for so long that the other parts get missed. There is a sure-footedness here that lives in the hillside, a body that knows how to find the patch of grass on the rock, a creature that has learned to live in places other animals would call impossible. You will hear about kindness, about creativity, about a dreamy mind. All accurate. The fuller story is endurance. The Goat survives the cold months, the lean months, the lonely months, and does it with a gentle face that fools people into thinking it has been easy. There is real spine here, made of the kind of bone that bends and does not break.