Satellite of Love

What happens when we’re always rushing forward, on to the next thing? The tidal wave of information, responsibilities, crises, celebrations, news cycles, social media updates — all this urgency can push us past those places in our lives where we might be able to take shelter, take stock of the situation, and find a different perspective. For our relationships, this constant rush means we end up frustrated and stretched thin, or not quite there, or always stressing about scheduling or running late, always weighing how much time and energy we have to be fully present with the ones we love most.

Libra season is a time to pause and connect; it’s when we reach for balance after the frenetic energy of summer, before we find the different rhythms of winter (in the Northern Hemisphere). Libra is the sign that rules our relationships — how we encounter the other, how we are able to understand someone else and make ourselves understood. This is generally a time for solving problems and coming to better agreements in intimacy, but this year brings us a bit of a wrinkle: Venus, ruler of Libra, is moving retrograde from October 5th till November 16th. When a planet moves retrograde, it’s like the tide sucking back to the shore and exposing all the shells and sea glass at our feet. As Venus is the planet of relationships, what’s getting exposed this month is what we need to reexamine, reconfigure, and reestablish in our relationships.

Many of us will want to reconnect to people from the past — especially ex-partners — or will find those people popping back into our lives. Some of us may need to hit pause on relationships in progress to assess how well they’re really going. Retrogrades can feel frustrating if you want to keep moving forward at full speed, but they can actually be beautiful times to retreat from the rush of life and go back to find what we lost along the way. Above all, Venus is the part of ourselves that helps us love ourselves and know what gives us pleasure. It helps us choose connections that enrich our lives and drench us in sweetness. Venus retrograde is a time that asks us where we’re lacking meaningful connections, where we’re putting up with scarcity instead of seeking abundance, where we’ve gotten stuck or shut down along the way.

The best way to make use of this retrograde energy is to commit yourself to healing what’s been broken and find what’s been lost in the last year and half. Resolve issues from the past that are still festering, reconnect with those you’ve been missing, and resist the urge to start anything new right now — signing contracts, getting engaged, tattooing your boo’s name on your neck — anything you might want to renegotiate later on.

Book a reading with me this month to get a peek into relationship patterns you need to resolve and how to find the love you deserve. After a summer of travel and creative retreats, I’ve got expanded hours this fall and I’m looking forward to talking with all of you! As always, for these horoscopes read your Venus and Moon signs first, followed by your Sun and rising. Use these for what they can give you, and discard anything you don’t need. Good luck out there!

Aries

Something about intimacy has you feeling trapped right now, like you can’t actually grow and change without losing love. Earlier this year you made a deal (with yourself or someone else) to prioritize stability, to chill out for awhile. You don’t have to break any contracts, but it is time to reclaim the part of yourself that can only grow through taking risks and exploring the unknown. Where can you make room for that impulse without too much disruption to the calmer patterns and rhythms you want? A part of you starts to wither and starve without healthy doses of excitement and adventure. Don’t accept the either/or premise that healthy love requires a part of you to starve.

Find what you left behind: Your adventurous self. Your courage to take emotional risks. Your capacity to transform what you touch. Sailing into the unknown with a sense of excitement.

Taurus

Whatever partnership means to you, this is a month for reviewing and reckoning with the choices you’ve made about it so far. You may be tempted to reach out to an ex-partner for closure, or even to rekindle something. You may want to review commitments you’ve made recently to see if they still feel right. The impulses that are making you pause and gather more information are in tension with the part of you that wants stability and smooth sailing — don’t be afraid to name what hurts right now or what isn’t working. Taurus is a sign that loves to keep the peace; with your ruling planet retrograde in Scorpio, now is the time to look at what you’ve been avoiding.

Find what you left behind: The people who know you better than anyone else, but might still not understand you as well as you wish. The ones who hold a mirror to you. The conversations you haven’t yet had about how to understand each other better.

Gemini

You live for possibility, but this month brings you up close and personal with reality. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, necessarily, but it might catch you off guard. You may even be grateful later down the road about what you’re learning right now. Keep that in mind if the going starts to feel too rough: what you are learning now will help you make better choices in life and love forever after. Anything that feels like an obstacle or a limitation is actually a friendly reminder that you need to focus and tend to yourself first, before you reach out to anyone else for validation. You still get to connect in all the ways that feel good to you; you may just need to limit how often and with whom.

Find what you left behind: What it means to tend to your own needs, to fill your own cup, to assess how much energy you have and how much you’re giving.

Cancer

Romance is hella in the air for you right now, even if there are some complications. For established relationships, you may be working through what’s blocked you from feeling as free and alive with each other as you once did. For new connections or people in many different kinds of intimacy, this is a time when you may want more big adventures and grand gestures — practice giving them, first, to see if they’re reciprocated. For everyone, this is a beautiful time to blur those boundaries between romantic partner and good friend — not by having sex with your BFF necessarily, but by making everyone you love feel really special. You’ve got a spark right now that can lighten up the whole sky. This month won’t all feel easy, but you can keep coming back to that place of brightness and joy.

Find what you left behind: Joy. Flirtation. Laughter. Earnest confessions. Dazzling and being dazzled.

Leo

There’s no shame in needing to come home and curl up in someone’s lap from time to time. You’re good at being visible, being big, being the force in the world that only you can be. Most of the time it’s fun to use those skills, to shine as brightly as you do — but sometimes you need a retreat. Coming home could mean a lot of things, depending on your relationship to you birth family and the place you came from and the home you’re living in now. What it will most likely mean for you this month is the need to sit with the pain of having lost something along the way, and the pain of what your family and ancestors have lost, and the possibility of creating loving bonds here and now that will heal at least a part of that pain. That’s your mission right now, and you don’t have to share it or show it off to anyone.

Find what you left behind: Your past, your family roots, your ancestral pain. Your capacity to be still and quiet with memories. Your capacity to heal.

Virgo

Whatever age you are, once you’re an adult you’re always able to look back at a past version of yourself and say, “That was a really cool version of me. What happened?” Maybe it was when you had the coolest haircut or the most fascinating friends or when you had the time and energy to teach yourself how to play the violin. Maybe it was pre-technology-you, reading books and writing letters to friends instead of texting. Maybe it was I’ve-just-come-out-you, high on a new identity and ready to take on the world. Whatever self you once inhabited that you miss, now is the time to go find them and bring a piece of them back to the present with you. The secret for keeping them there is to change whatever you can in your environment that’s shaping you in ways you’d rather not be.

Find what you left behind: The stories you used to tell yourself about who you are and who you’re becoming. Knowing how to crack yourself up. Knowing how to change the story you’re in.

Libra

Even as you are gaining greater clarity, this month may throw a few curveballs at you. Libra season is when you get to shine, but with your ruling planet retrograde this month your full power is still a little blocked. Issues of trust and scarcity are up right now, and the more you can face your anxieties and name them for what they are, the better you’ll be able to receive the real benefits of this time. Love isn’t all or nothing, win or lose. You have more love than you usually remember, especially when you’re focused on what’s missing. Stay with the trouble and let it lead you to a place of calm.

Find what you left behind: The conviction that you will have enough, that it will be okay, that the abundance of life won’t pass you by. Knowing that you will not starve for love, whatever deserts you land in temporarily.

Scorpio

Some relationships entirely engulf you, so much that you begin to love what your partner loves and dress like them and laugh like them and imagine the kind of world you think they’d want to live in and try as hard as you can to make that world real. Other relationships grate on you, lodging in your psyche like a piece of grit that you can’t dislodge, leaving you irritated and resentful and borderline obsessed with how to reach that person, block that person, evade that person, or get that person to finally understand you. Both the immersive and the irritating are kinds of relationships where you lose yourself and lose your power. This month, your only assignment is to find where you’ve gotten lost and get yourself and your power back.

Find what you left behind: What you love most. What is true about you that isn’t true about your friends or partners. What you want that isn’t anyone else’s desire. What feels good to you, what makes you laugh, what makes you feel strong.

Sagittarius

Sometimes waking life can’t possibly give us what we can find in our dreams. This doesn’t mean you have permission to retreat entirely from the pleasures and challenges of your less-than-perfect relationships. It does mean that taking some time away will help you replenish yourself. There’s no need to get grumpy at your friends and lovers for their very human limitations. To be alive is to be touched with an unending dissatisfaction about what you cannot find, or what you cannot hold onto if you’re lucky enough to find it once or twice. Your assignment this month is to recognize that sometimes longing is just longing, and to find ways of honoring those longings without upending what is real and good in your life.

Find what you left behind: Dreams and fantasies. Desires for something different, for the life you want to create or a life you’ve left behind. What is still alive and pulling you forward in these; what you can use as a reliable compass toward the future.

Capricorn

Remember a time in your life when you felt uplifted and sparkly about a certain group of friends? Remember a time when you felt inspired by a mass movement, or a subculture, or even an historical moment you missed out on? Because queer history hasn’t been preserved and shared the way other histories have, you may have been surprised to learn of certain writers or activists or communes. These sparks of light, these potential friends and mentors and lovers, may feel sparse right now — like trying to see the stars through city light pollution — but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. This month, remember you are connected to all the stars you can’t see, and that your own light adds to our collective brilliance.

Find what you left behind: Inspiration and connection. Faith in what you can’t see. A sense of history and continuity. Love as a network that includes you.

Aquarius

Whether or not last month left you feeling refreshed and restored, it’s time to get back to work. You want to have something to show for yourself right now, something to offer the world as proof that you’re on the right path. In relationships, you may be tempted to be the one with all the right answers, but a better use of this energy is to surround yourself with the people who help you feel aligned with a sense of mission. You need to feel a sense of purpose right now. Don’t waste your time fussing too much about people who don’t respect what you have to offer.

Find what you left behind: What drives you to leave your mark on the world, whether that’s something big and bold or subtle and private. What kinds of love help you feel directed, supported, and able to offer your very best.

Pisces

We all cycle between more open, adventurous times and then times when we want to get small, pass unnoticed, do our internal work. You’re being called right now to step back into a larger version of yourself, to remember the larger worlds you’re in touch with — the people you’ve been inspired by and learned from as well as the people you’re able to teach and inspire. Where is your energy right now? Is it far out in the future, buoyed up by fantasies of what could happen? Is it dragging behind you, stuck in the past? Is it sideways somewhere in an alternate reality? Go gather up the pieces of your energy and attention that you need to be present with relationships that are asking you learn something new right here, right now.

Find what you left behind: All those scattered pieces of your energy that float away from you when you aren’t looking. The centered, grounded version of yourself that can conduct the complex orchestra of your attention.

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