July 13

Who you are

Generosity is your first move, not your reward for liking somebody. A stranger in your kitchen gets the same treatment as an old friend, and you have fed people you privately could not stand rather than let them sit there with nothing. You cook too much on purpose. Running out, in your mind, is a worse outcome than throwing food away.

You are also better at reading a room than you let on. You can tell within a minute who arrived upset, who is short of money, who has not eaten properly this week, and you handle it without ever making the person say so. That is the real gift. The abundance is only how you deliver it without anybody having to ask.

Your gifts

• Hospitality without conditions. People are welcome in your house before they have proved anything, and they can feel it.
• Practical comfort. You meet distress with something concrete, a meal, a bed, a lift, rather than with advice.
• Abundance instinct. You would rather have too much and share it than measure carefully and come up short.

Your shadow

Giving on that scale is also a way of staying in charge. As long as you are the one providing, nobody gets close enough to see what you need, and you never have to be the one in the chair being looked after. There is a bill under it too. You rarely name it, but you notice exactly who never reciprocates.

Your soul work

Your work is to keep the table open and to sit down at it yourself. Let one person cook for you this year and do not fuss in their kitchen. Generosity that can only flow one way is a kind of control, however good the food is.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The fourth sign carries the gift of deep feeling and fierce care, and the lifelong lesson of the shell: protection that must not become a prison.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

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