Horoscopes Sept/Oct 2023

You don’t always have to make a choice. Two things can exist at once. Many ways, with modifications. Compromise is exciting. It’s necessary, and nourishing. Some choice feels impossible for you right now. You don’t have to make a choice.

You are good at protecting yourself, and now is a good time to do that. Wear your armour. Protect your nest. Cushion your fall. If nothing risky comes, you’ll be prepared and comfortable. If something does, you’ll be in the halo of your own responsibility.

This autumn, I want you to be led by the pleasure of others. We’re all very inclined to our own tastes, whims, and sometimes forgo our power to give other people pleasure. Notice what brings strangers and loved ones joy. Try what they enjoy, or help it happen for them. Watch what generosity does to you.

When someone is not being fair, your own fairness won’t be compromised if you explain to them what you need. There’s a difference between self-advocacy and bulldozing. You deserve to confront those who are unkind or unreasonable. Beyond the fact that you are enough, you should have enough, as you firmly believe everybody else should.

Keep secrets, but not from yourself. Having special, unshared knowledge will not incinerate you. It can be a treat. Allowing private knowledge to hover while you decide for yourself how you feel can be like the spaciousness of meditation, a double consciousness that is protective rather than destructive.

You’re a worrier, and a carer. You tend to comfort yourself by soothing and preparing. What if, this year, in your most anxious moments, you did something that reminds you of your vitality? Your face in a bucket of ice, your body attempting to leap up a wall, a big huge gulp of the evening air in your lungs? Living can be the best solution to concern.

This year, I want you to succumb to a meaningless obsession. There are two rules: nothing intimate and nothing destructive. But otherwise, I want you to spend time preoccupied with identifying birds, redesigning the toothbrush, listening to ancient music. Make it yours. The Libra wants to please everyone, and can lose sight of the pleasure in strong tastes and pastimes. Enjoy the world.

The beginning of a friendship, a job, a relationship is its experimental stage. You are not quite sure yet. There’s the excitement of mystery and a learning curve that challenges you, but also the irritations of personal threat and opacity, the worrying over what somebody means. In those moments, remember that you, too, are someone’s experiment.

How does it feel to make an effort, rather than pretending you can do more than is humanly possible or giving yourself a hard time for not completing more than you’re able? Experiment with scaling your ambition. Notice when you get just a bit further on a given goal, and be kind.

If you were to make a cabinet of wonders, what would go in it? Or rather, what are the objects in your possession that would go in it? They don’t need to be expensive, but they must be meaningful objects you can hold in one or both hands. Could you order the objects to tell a story? Think about the story as you move around your space.

Your guiding principle this autumn is peace. Not as in avoiding all confrontation, but as in what brings you stillness when you’re alone. In moments of anxiety, bring this word back to mind and consider what brings you there. There is always much suffering, and we always deserve peace.

This fall, go to a place where something bad happened, a physical location that makes you, a loved one or a late loved one uncomfortable, and give it your blessing. Your blessing is simply observation. Notice the material details, the present reality. Witness what caused harm, and what is incidental. Detangle the past from the future by being a bridge in the present moment. Take pictures if you must.