February 29

Who you are

Your birthday arrives once every four years and you learned early to keep something in reserve between them. Long stretches where nothing visible happens, then a season where everything comes at once and at full strength. People who only see the good year assume it came from nowhere. You know exactly how many quiet ones paid for it.

You move when conditions are right rather than when the calendar says so, which is Pisces and Water in you. What you store is never money or property, because Jupiter and Neptune do not deal in those. It is attention, feeling, and unspent devotion, and when you finally spend it you spend the whole supply on one person or one thing.

Your gifts

• Deep reserves. You can go a long way on very little recognition, which keeps you with work and people others would have left.
• Total commitment. When you do commit, nothing is held back, and the person receiving it knows they have all of you.
• A different relationship with time. Years that produce nothing visible do not bother you, so you attempt things that need decades.

Your shadow

Waiting for the right conditions is wisdom until it becomes a way of never starting. Unchecked, the reserve turns into a life spent preparing: the ordinary years treated as rehearsal, the real one always slightly further out. You give in floods and then disappear to refill, and the people who love you learn to expect the drought.

Your soul work

Learn to give in small regular amounts as well as in floods. Nobody needs your best year every year, but they do need something more than once a decade. Spend a little of yourself in the quiet stretches, and the extraordinary seasons will find you already in someone's life.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The twelfth sign swims in both directions at once: boundless feeling, porous edges. Pisces carries the ocean, and the lesson of the riverbank.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

Check a friend's day, or your partner's, and send it to them.