May 13

Who you are

You give other people room. Someone nervous talks more freely with you sitting there, someone clever gets cleverer, and a thin idea fills out into something worth doing, mostly because you did not interrupt it. You add weight without taking over. It is a rarer skill than it sounds, and almost nobody who benefits from it can name what you did.

Silence does not bother you. You can sit with a friend for twenty minutes saying nothing and feel that the visit went well, which unnerves people who need constant noise. Your body is calm and it makes other bodies calm. Children and animals work this out about you within a minute of meeting you, long before the adults do.

Your gifts

• Presence without pressure. You make people better in your company without ever running the conversation.
• Ease in silence. You can be quiet with someone for an hour and have it count as closeness.
• Physical calm. Your steadiness settles a room before anybody has said anything useful.

Your shadow

A life spent making other people's things work can leave you with nothing of your own. You put your effort into your partner's career, your friend's crisis, your team's plan, and when somebody asks what you want, you find the question genuinely hard. Being needed is not the same as being known, and you have accepted the first as a substitute for years.

Your soul work

Find out what you are like on your own. Make something, learn something, go somewhere with nobody watching, at least once a season. Someone who has only ever supported other people's work eventually forgets they have a shape of their own, and the shape is the whole gift.

Days you get along with

Your sign

The second sign turns the spark into something that lasts. Taurus carries the gift of steadiness, the love of the senses, and the lesson of letting go.

Someone else

Look up another birthday

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