Signs are the costume a planet is wearing. Houses are the room it is standing in. Twelve rooms, each one in charge of a different part of your life: your body, your money, your siblings, your home, your kids, your work, your partners, your secrets, your travel, your career, your friends, your hidden self. A Mars in your second house is a fight about money. The same Mars in your seventh is a fight in a marriage. The sign tells you how. The house tells you where.
The big four houses
The first, fourth, seventh, and tenth are the loudest. The first is your body and the way you arrive. The fourth is your home and your family of origin. The seventh is partnership, business and romantic. The tenth is your career, what you become known for. Planets in these four houses do the most public work in your chart.
The quiet houses do not mean weakness
The twelfth, the eighth, the fourth all hold the inner life. People with a lot of planets in those houses are often misread as introverted, when really they are simply doing more of their living inside. A heavy twelfth house is a person who dreams hard and remembers what was said in the kitchen when nobody else was paying attention.
Empty houses are not empty
If a house has no planets in it, that area of life is not absent. It is just not loud. You still have love, even if your seventh is empty. The action moves to whichever planet rules the sign on the cusp of that empty house. The chart is always whole. The volume just shifts.