On Thursday, Mercury goes direct and the sun enters Libra: Feel a return of balance, maybe, of the cool clear light you’ve been missing. In place of clouds, a bright clarity in your dreams, in your voice, in your blood. On Friday, Venus enters Scorpio: Will you let this pull you toward intimacy, or toward passion, or toward truth? Will you let it make you vulnerable, or will you let it make you wild?
Aries: This is a week for moving, a week for seeking your place in the world. Even when the road is lit, this isn’t easy. Sometimes the place you’re looking for is hidden, and sometimes it doesn’t exist at all yet. Sometimes the place you’re looking for isn’t a place at all but a person, a feeling, a song. All this really means for you, this week, is don’t despair. Keep searching. You’re where you need to be, and your imagination grows brighter with each step you take.
Taurus: It’s weird and difficult, when the world outside doesn’t seem to match the world you live in, the world you dream in, the world you feel yourself moving through. It can make it hard to believe your own eyes, your own nerves, your own skin. This week, spend time with someone you trust. Spend time with someone who trusts you. The conclusions you draw and the stories you tell can be worth doubting, but never the raw material of your heart. It’s heavy and real. You can believe in it.
Gemini: Almost everything will find a way to be okay again, eventually. Almost everything has a path back to rightness, but sometimes the path is twisting and long. For now, this week, it’s okay to harden your heart to the memories that haunt you, if that will help you survive. It’s okay to turn your face away. It’s okay, too, to sit still and quiet with your sadness. None of these actions mark an endpoint. None are the last thing you’ll do. The sadness won’t last forever.
Cancer: When you walk outside in the morning, look around you: What’s different from how it was yesterday? There is life in the dirt under your feet and life in the cracks of the sidewalk. There are people all around you who’ve been suffering in this hot summer, just like you. And now, as the spin of the earth feels slower, as the air around you becomes sharper, less hazy: What can you see? This new landscape means a chance to change the way you live. This new landscape means an opening door.
Leo: Delight carries its own weight in the world, separate from goodness and separate from progress. This week, you don’t have to justify your hunger for joy. You don’t need to attach meaning to every sound and color that calls to you. When a song lifts your heart, quivering and full in the cool green morning, it doesn’t need to have any other purpose. This week is for the moments that leave you without words, without stories. You have your seriousness, you have your brilliant mind, but for now, let yourself be held by the sheer delight of living.
Virgo: This is a week to let other people into your life. It’s a week to watch for the strange bright shapes a friendship can take. Something you thought you’d lost might come back to you. Something that was taken from you might be returned. Look out the window at night and watch the faraway stars. How wonderful it is, after all the loneliness you’ve lived through, to see again the light inside yourself. How wonderful it is, to be reminded of the way other people can make you shine.
Libra: You might feel divided this week, tugged by opposing forces, split by invisible desires. This is a week for finding your balance, a process that sounds light and graceful, though it rarely is. There can be something better than lightness, something muddy and strange, dizzying and wild, in learning again how to stand firm on the earth. You can climb without falling. You can love without losing hold of your core. You can be pulled in different directions, and you won’t be torn apart.
Scorpio: Sometimes desire only leads to melancholy, but sometimes even melancholy tastes sweet. Sometimes an open heart only makes you feel lost, but sometimes getting lost leads to new streets, or new towns, or the ocean. Whether you invite it or not, vulnerability will find you this week. This isn’t bad, so try not to be afraid. This is where love comes from, and surprise, and joy. It won’t destroy you and it won’t hollow you out. If you let it, it can show you new ways to live.
Sagittarius: It’s easy, in weeks like this, to start dreaming of escape from the smallness and the familiarity of a real human life. Try to stay where you are. There’s so much to see here and so much to feel. Even on the slowest days, there’s still a sky. There are still other people. Your life is building, up and up and up, and you can’t know where it’s going yet. All you can know is the shape of your days. All you can do is the everyday work of being alive.
Capricorn: The days are getting shorter and the nights already getting colder, and even with the bright new clarity of autumn, it can be hard to know where you’re going. Colors change in the sky and the trees, and colors change in your dreams, too. You can’t see all the way into the future. You can’t predict all your own weird desires. This can feel like fear, but try to take a walk outside, somewhere new. It can feel like freedom, too.
Aquarius: This might be a week where your thoughts dance too fast for the world, or the world turns too slow for your bright mind — either way, your days might feel a little off. There’s nothing wrong with this; it just happens sometimes. You can’t always move to the same rhythm as the whole world. That isn’t your job. Strangeness and static can interrupt our connections, and what you have to do is keep trusting yourself. What you have to do is keep moving anyway.
Pisces: Listen: You don’t always have to turn sorrow into sunlight. You don’t need to find magic in every long day. If you feel constrained this week, if you feel hemmed in, remember you’re allowed your bad feelings, your anger, your frustration. There are things in life worth apologizing for, but not this. You’re full enough of life and energy; you don’t need to channel every emotion into something good. There’s such a wide messy range of ways to be human. Sometimes, it’s enough just to feel.