August Horoscopes

I'm aware it's almost September.

Am I aware it is the end of August? Yes. I haven’t had time for free writing because I am trying to improve my academic writing and simultaneously being hypercritical towards my free writing. Oh well. It’s Mercury Retrograde anyways.

I’ll treat today’s horoscope as more of a reflection on the past month than anything. Except, there are still valid points about the future I’ll be making. We are in the middle of some hefty transits.

Jupiter & Mars recently met up in Gemini where our mental energy could have been experiencing some real exhausting and expanding cycles. They formed a hard square to Saturn in Pisces, signifying a shift in where our mental energy is being focused. Mercury, the planet of the left-brain, is retrograding through Leo and was in Virgo previously. This asks us to refine our creative calling and approaches in radical ways. Uranus is squaring Mercury, challenging us to think bigger and more outside-the-box.

Stressed? Excited? Questioning your mental capacities and limits? Improving the mind shows up as a major theme right now. The best solution is to take things one bite at a time. Although, this is hard, because when Gemini is stimulated by Mars, there’s potentially a ton of drive to learn and overload oneself with stimuli.

Let’s go sign by sign. As always, check your Rising, Sun and Moon (in that order) to get a sense of where you are on the cosmic spectrum right now.

GEMINI

Remember, a career is just an extension of who you are. As many career opportunities or social roles there are to fulfil, the fundamental matter is who you are bringing into all of those spaces. Lucky for you, Jupiter and Mars are giving you a chance to drastically improve your self-concept. This invokes a necessary selfishness. Selfishness is about uninterrupted instincts. Children are selfish because they are instinctive. Where do your instincts take you and not take you? Where are you letting your social obligations limit your instincts? How can you merge the two? Herein lies your creative calling.

CANCER

Is there true objectivity? Or is there only our ability to be super self-reflexive about our own perceptions of the truth? Truth and justice are a necessary entanglement. The truth we choose is about giving justice to ourselves, and is what we think will provide justice to others. What truth have you chosen and where are the shadows of injustice it has created? Both towards yourself and towards another. Confusion is a symptom of becoming your own person. It is a necessary step before we step into our next illusion of truth and rattle it off to find another one. Confusion moves us forward, backward, and into the present.

LEO

Intimacy is a big theme for you, right now. There are so many people to collaborate with! Touch! Feel! Play with! Where and why is collaboration so scary for you? What are you afraid of people seeing? What is it about people that attracts you and repulses you? Ultimately, this is a question about the attraction and repulsion of your own dreams. What are you dreaming of for yourself? Is it selfish to dream? Is dreaming supposed to be a selfless act? Grounding yourself in the presence of another who will listen to your existential dramas is likely to snap you back into your true purpose, which is just to be you. You’re a dream, existing, in the eyes of someone out there, helping them find their way home.

VIRGO

Has this been a winning year for you, or what? Maybe it hasn’t. It will all depend on all the other elements of your chart. But right now’s transits show an upgrade in how people treat you and receive you. This is ultimately about gaining more confidence within yourself. I’ve always been confused how confidence means privacy and pride all at the same time. Perhaps part of gaining confidence is learning what about ourselves we wish to conceal, and reveal. Are you revealing too much? Concealing too much? Being in the public eye is necessarily a construction of other peoples thoughts and our thoughts about other people. You get to be the architect, but then you must let people inhabit whatever you build. Whatever you build is whatever you choose to share and not share.

LIBRA

Why hide your philosophies about life when we’re all figuring out? Being a student does not mean being a slave. I get so confused why I get nervous in my uni classes. I have to remind myself the professor knows more than me about some stuff, but I know more about other stuff. Anything we’re going through is something we’re seeing through. What philosophies have you conditioned yourself to see through? Which of these doesn’t make sense? Where are you made to feel like a slave, when you know you are actually meant to be a public servant? Where can you go to receive more than one truth? Where are you safe to be your own mind?

SCORPIO

What does action mean to you? Is it about running from death, or running into it? Right now could be a moment of being faced with your own mortality. If you were going to die in a week, what would you create, do, or say? Let yourself sit with the disturbing, horny, exciting fantasies this generates. See where they symbolically reveal dreams and desires that have been repressed. Repression is necessary in a global world, in a giant town square. Find small groups you can be a freak in and experience the ecstasy of life-death in. This is a time to do as you please. This is a time to take off the suit and explore your nakedness.

SAGITTARIUS

People often say what makes a home is our community. I think communities come together out of necessity, rather than desire. Seriously. Who wants to deal with other peoples complex emotions, demands, and judgments? What is a necessity for you right now? It could be all the way down to survival, to the desire to become spiritually enlightened. Whatever you feel is a necessity is where you will find your community. Whatever connects you to yourself is what will connect you to others.

CAPRICORN

Work is a distortion of human curiosity. We don’t want to work, per se. We want to discover. What do you want to discover? How can you discover this through your work? For example, a lot of actors work jobs as waiters so they can osmose new characters and dialects. How can your work be a strategic move in expanding your deeper curiosities? Work doesn’t have to be your job, either. Work is the daily experience of trying to play out all of our desires with a fixed number of hours of daylight. What’s your relationship with daylight? What is the daylight revealing to you? What does this become at nighttime?

AQUARIUS

I always remind my artistic friends that creativity as we have come to know it is inherently Europeanised. Writing has only been around for 1,500 years. Painting and sculpting, maybe 2,500. Cave-etching, okay, way longer. But most self-expression used to take place verbally. It has become the norm of modernity to equate “creativity” with “material creativity.” I often find I’m the most creative with the least amount of resources. Why else do we have bodies? Hands? Feet? Larynxes? How can the body, the thing you were literally born with, become your art? How can you let what you have sustain your legacy? What perspective informs your “needs”, and what is it that you actually need? You actually need nothing. You already have everything.

PISCES

If your personal life truly feels unbearable, then redefine your personal life. Your personal life, in my opinion, is everything nobody else can see. Your personal life is your secrets, your wishes, your inner battles. Which of these do you just keep for yourself, and which of these do you tend to overshare? Right now, I encourage you to experiment with keeping secrets. Laziness is about preserving our energy levels. Secret-keeping is also about preserving our energy levels. If everything has to be explained, there is a constant guilt that is demanding that of us. When we keep things to ourself, we preserve our sovereignty. We reject the guilt that tells us we must be free-loving, open, and constantly authentic. Sometimes what’s most authentic, or simply right for you, is having nothing to say.

ARIES

Isn’t it a sick joke that we want connection, but everybody is built to see things differently, which makes it difficult asf to connect? How do you hold space for ambiguity in social circles? It’s hard when everyone seems to have a contrasting opinion. Imagine everyone in their underwear, shitting on the toilet, or experiencing death anxiety. Remember that what makes us love each other isn’t necessarily love itself, but deep fear. In this respect, everyone is trying to preserve themselves. They love you only until it begins to threaten them with death. The way to hold onto these people is remind them, you’re scared, too. Through admitting our fears to each other, we welcome the space for love to flourish. Like Brene Brown says, nothing courageous (love-powered) can happen without deep vulnerability and honesty. When in doubt, try to reframe the situation as everyone trying to negotiate vulnerability and fear to access love.

TAURUS

Wanting depends on perceiving lack. What’s hard is there is lack. There is so much lack! There are only so many hours we can make it without food, without sleep, without daylight. We can’t help but want amidst all these limitations. The human experience is a journey of learning to work within those limits. There’s a great quote from A Course in Miracles that our curriculum cannot be chosen, we can only choose how we engage with it. To me, that means whatever is being dropped at your feet is what you can deal with or ignore. It will never vanish. It will still be there, and you can either smudge your foot in it, or pick it up and throw it in the trash. What must you deal with before you dream? And how is what you’re dealing with the unfolding of the dream itself?

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This month’s horoscope writing turned into a lot more questions than answers. Hopefully these questions help prompt introspection and make you feel less crazy. The Mercury/Uranus/Mars/Jupiter/Saturn mashup is not a peachy flight through the mind. It is full of turbulence, but also excitement and anticipation. It is not the destination, but the bumpy journey, that makes arriving in ourselves so gratifying.