Over the past few weeks, Mercury has been gathering speed, blowing through Leo and Virgo in a month flat. When Mercury enters Libra on August 29th/30th, however, it plans to get cozy. Mercury goes retrograde three times a year, always in the same element. This year, it’s air signs, and that includes Libra.
Mercury will linger in Libra until November 5th. While the retrograde won’t begin until the end of September, the radio interference begins on September 6th when Mercury enters its pre-retrograde shadow. For now though, Mercury in Libra offers balance and structure to dispel last week’s Neptune-induced fog.
Neptune tends to make life feel like a tsunami hazard zone, and that remains true this week when Mars opposes Neptune on September 2nd. Here, your decisiveness gets quagmired in a swamp of disorientation. Your GPS claims your destination doesn’t exist, and your analog map is soggy from the downpour.
This is an initiation into learning how to tolerate situations of uncertainty. Despite all social messaging to the contrary, there is wisdom in inaction this week, or waiting for the signal to come back online.
Mercury’s trine to Saturn on September 4th restores something like clarity. For a blessed moment, the sign you’ve been waiting for materializes — be it an email, an affirming tarot spread, or the belly-swell of your own inner-knowing.
Consider that Mercury’s entire journey through Libra this year provides training for how to trust yourself. Some days, that may look like trusting yourself to wait, listen, and observe. Other days, it involves obeying the tingle in your gut that says it’s time to act now.
Your horoscopes are meant to be read as inspiration. If you know both your rising sign and sun sign, please read both horoscopes. You’ll know which one resonates more for you from week to week. Take what works for you, and leave the rest. If you want to share this work, please credit the source by quoting it and providing a link to this post and website.
Thank you for your support and for spreading the work around. We really appreciate it and you. The following horoscopes were written by Thea Anderson and Eliza Robertson.
Aries & Aries Rising
With Mercury in Libra, your love language involves actual language. A well-timed compliment exalts your team of two; you redistribute confidence through random acts of flirting; an embarrassment of heart emojis flushes your text-speak.
When your closest bonds aren’t solely transactional, they bloom petals of reciprocity. This is a relationship of I and Thou, where you encounter your besties, beloveds and collaborators as whole beings, and step into an intimacy premised on mutual integrity.
Even if that involves a little surrendering.
You are not asked to surrender your sovereignty, but your judgments, assumptions and projections. We all come with an armory of these — they help us cope with the situations life flings at us, and it may be harder than you realize to release them.
Still, there’s a place for your instinctive knowing. Mercury is the planet of information, and when it goes retrograde at the end of the month, your information could root from within, rather than from outside signals. But how do you distinguish well-detected redflags from fears based on past hurts or heart-aches?
On Thursday, you’re tested on this path of discernment. If you’re inclined to prod the situation, consider whether this threshold is one you can un-cross again after. Is the urgency you feel real or imagined? What’s lost by waiting a little longer to see how it all shakes out? What wisdom manifests after a few nights’ sleep?
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Taurus & Taurus Rising
For the next two months, the mental gears churn to help you balance productivity with generativity. Yes, there’s your sense of duty — devising systems that help you feel more organized or efficient. But with Mercury in Libra, there’s also an artfulness, which affirms your devotion to beauty in all forms and finding pleasure in what you do.Go ahead and whistle while you work.
Your creativity will be a virtue around September 2nd, when your meticulously bullet-pointed plan gets drenched in a downpour. There will be an urge here to bulldoze ahead through the horizontal rain, but there may be more gained by biding your time. If the Magic 8-Ball says “Reply hazy, try again,” consider waiting a minute before you re-ask your question.
Part of your creative life includes stasis, and some of your best insights will arrive, not by forcing it, but by letting your mind relax into other tasks. This is a call to retrace the steps back to your inner judge. Give yourself the time you need to recognize the heft of your own certainty.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Gemini & Gemini Rising
Grown-ups too can play Truth or Dare. Starting this week, say yes to trivia nights or games designed for adults. While the suggestion to pull out a Pictionary board may be met with a few groans, it almost always ends in laughter and hijinx. If you feel averse to this proposal, consider: when in your life do you play? When did play become groan-worthy?
Now, there’s a distinction between the fun and pleasure we all deserve as humans and getting plain old distracted. Like any medicine, play is something to dose in moderation. Are you the excessive toiler who could use more time in the week to honor moments of indulgence? Or have you started to rely on fun and pleasure to exit the trials of earthly reality?
Later this week, you’re tempted to check out early. Some situations will be out of your hands, such as cancelled appointments or delayed emails, which force you to wait for other people. But there’s also a chance you’ll encounter some self-generated distraction, which deflates your sense of direction or motivation.
In this instance, making a mindful choice to not force the process could be just the decisiveness you need. Does that give you permission to totally tune out?
No.
“Vigilance,” like “vigil,” comes from the Latin word for staying awake. Just because you’re not moving forward on a plan doesn’t mean you’re not paying attention. You’re paying radical attention, even if you’re reserving judgment, for now, on how to act.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Cancer & Cancer Rising
Mercury in Libra gathers your thought processes around your roots and your abode. The messenger is fluent in all languages, and over the next two months, you explore how to be in right relation with your cohabitants and chosen people.
To an extent, this may involve starting conversations with young and elders alike to bridge the gap between generations (as any good interpreter can do.) But it may also involve a certain communion with family you’ve never met in your lifetime.
Research the teas your ancestors might have sipped, and pour them a cup at your altar. Tell them about yourself or read aloud your favorite poetry. Identify the symbols through which they’ll talk back to you: this yellow scarf, that urban fox or heron or starling.
We learn language in childhood, but as we grow, we develop our own unique vernaculars. This is how we convey love, closeness, and soothe the inevitable conflict.
Your nuanced communication style gets tested this week, but you’ve been here before. Over the past few weeks, your urgency to find precise answers has given way to something more numinous or less easily counted. On Thursday, your desire to move forward on certain terms will be met with a deluge of ambivalence or uncertainty.
The impulse may be to talk yourself into a corner, but it’s prudent right now to pause. Listen. Formulate decisions on your own time, not anyone else’s.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Leo & Leo Rising
Even if your commute has been shortened to crossing your living room, consider the daily reach from just behind your keyboard. Starting this week, you bring extra allure to your hubs of influence. Your communication skills include nuance, body language and sparingly-dropped GIFs. Who says work correspondence has to be artless?
Still, your east wind of charm doesn’t always hit the mark. While Mercury drifts through Libra, you’re invited to turn the mirror on yourself and your words, even if that level of self-scrutiny can make you squirm. How else to rectify having said one thing when you meant another?
On Thursday, the action you hope to take around money or resources meets an amber light. A situation that once felt clear to you loses its defined edges, and the tide rinses away all lines in the sand. You’ve been here before, recently, and if you can trust the muscle memory that’s developed, you might find you already know what to do.
Rather than fumbling forward, consider the action involved in deciding to pause. That doesn’t mean idling so long the decision is made for you, but making an incisive choice to gather more data or to reevaluate your notes.
Maybe you’re waiting for an external situation to clarify itself, but you’re also listening for that spark of your own certainty. You’re building your own trust in that voice and you’re readying to act.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Virgo & Virgo Rising
Starting this week, the Messenger stops pulling weeds in your place of self and starts growing dahlias in the neighboring sign of Libra. Now and for the next two months, your closet of unworn block pumps or starched shirts waits to be rediscovered, and you pride yourself in rising above the messy discourse of wants vs. needs.
Still, Libra is a “both and” kind of sign, and sometimes attaining satisfaction with your have and have-not states can feel like a high-wire act. Your true value is never contingent upon the baubles, gadgets or pearls you own, and your riches are more than material — even as the numbers in your account inform your sense of security.
While you normally navigate your affairs with a healthy barometer of prudence, Mars’ influence right now tilts you toward uncharacteristically rash decisions. It’s frustrating then when the urgency to barrel forward is met with a wave of befuddlement from the opposite direction.
Your partnerships could be the source of confusion right now, especially if you’re on a strict timeline for when certain decisions should be made. The thing is, you tend to look to relationships for this kind of ritual weirding, or ego-loosening. The unmooring that follows isn’t entirely unfamiliar — or unwanted.
For you, this week unlocks another module in your apprenticeship to trust. What decisions must be made now, and what could benefit from a little more reflection? What does certainty feel like in your body? What does it look like in someone else’s?
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Libra & Libra Rising
Your social graces find an eloquent mouthpiece this week as Mercury enters Libra. Now and for the next two months, you neutralize conflict through acts of poetry and diplomacy. Both skills come naturally to you, and both are elevated at the moment, helping you find the melodic refrains that put everyone at ease.
Still, your devotional tact loses impact if it attempts to honey-coat over real problems or concerns. The conflict you’re experiencing right now might be of an insidious, internal variety, where you feel undone by bouts of self-generated uncertainty or doubt. Come Thursday, situations at work, or reactions you experience in your own body, may leave you feeling like you’re not sure where to go.
There’s a difference between niceness and kindness. There’s a difference between pleasing people and helping them by acknowledging difficult facts. Also: it’s alienating to pretend everything is okay while you feel silently terrible, and human connection is only possible if you can let yourself admit something is wrong.
Now, if anyone can prioritize honest connection with others, it’s you. Practice weighing concerns that really matter to you and assess which way they tip the scales. Caring a lot is ok. Being partial towards one outcome over another is wonderful. The right relation you seek is mutually symbiotic between you and the cherished others in your world.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Scorpio & Scorpio Rising
Mercury in Libra dials up the frequency of your subtle and subterranean realms. Like a treasure hunter at the beach, you tune your ear through the noise, toward all you cannot see. Over the next two months, your internal whisper network becomes audible.
Dreams and intuitive hunches task you with sorting fiction from fact, up from down. A part of you wants to reach reason and rationale, but what’s really needed is a left brain/right brain tiebreaker.
Maybe it’s time to revamp the inner dialogue and restore your 6th or 7th sense to its former glory. Fine art restorers work this way, applying new materials to what was worn and distorted. It’s not quite the original, yet it has been remade anew.
This week also brings a call to honor the breath between lyrics of a song, the whitespace on a page of poetry, and the emotion-laced pauses in a conversation. While you may arrive at your night out with a crisply enumerated game plan, others prefer to improvise.
Either because you’re sensitive to group vibes, or in spite of this fact, your social life is one area you tend to micro-manage. Come Thursday, you have more to gain by surrendering control over the outcome and letting yourself relax into the current of other people’s preferences, creativity, and yes — “going with the flow.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising
Your opinions are allowed here even if they go against the grain. The world and the affinity groups within it are built on an experience of subjectivity — yours, and everyone else’s too.
With Mercury in Libra, it may be easy to forget this. It may be easy to abide by social expectations — not because you’re not opinionated and sovereign (you are both), but because it’s often easier to sidestep the kerfuffle of rubbing people the wrong way.
Even if you’re in the right.
It takes energy to tell someone they got it wrong. It takes even more energy to swab their dented ego in the aftermath. But the reverse also is true. If you slide into the habit of effacing your authenticity, you’ll find yourself leading a double-life: one in your mind, where you can be as adamant and choosy as you like, and one outside, where you prune your edges to fit someone else’s ideals.
The charade gets taxing after a while.
Over the past month, you haven’t struggled to be assertive in a professional context, but on Thursday your essential drive gets whispered through a figurative oil diffuser, and your ability to act is, for a moment, compromised.
This is one of those situations where you may as well heed the impulse to daydream, because any effort to the contrary results in a dream anyway — then the after-tang of self-flagellating frustration.
Lean into the liminal moments of the day — such as making dinner or watering the herbs on your window sill. Distract your body with menial tasks and discover the ideas that take root when you’re not on the clock, waiting for them.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Capricorn & Capricorn Rising
Work tends to highlight your diplomacy skills. For the next two months, Mercury shows up as a brainy and eloquent ally, helping you juggle competing needs, gather agreement around a new brain child, and draft the memos that rally everyone onto the same page.
The problem with being hardworking and attentive is that it’s easy to forget you have needs too. Or if you don’t forget your needs — if they rasp against your skin like a scratchy shirt tag — you’re skilled in the art of downplaying them, because somewhere along the way you learned stoicism as a virtue.
Mercury will linger in Libra for longer than its usual flyby, and this period will involve some necessary self-reflection. What’s the difference between an honest expression of needs and “neediness”? Does your aversion to the latter ever lead you to dodge the former? What is important to unlearn here?
Over the past few weeks, you’ve gone through a few crash courses of “unlearning.” While you’re naturally discerning in how you gather wisdom, this week you’re stretched between perceiving the sea and grokking the septillion drops that comprise a whole ocean.
To an extent, your modes of acquiring knowledge always involve this balancing act between the miniscule and the mammoth, but this is a week where that oscillation starts to feel dizzying. Try resting in this place. Behold the multiplicity of truths, and your place in them. Let the blindfold of false certainty slip; this is how true insight arises.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Aquarius & Aquarius Rising
As Mercury breezes into Libra, you possess the acuity to absorb gigabytes of information and disseminate it to anyone digitally downwind of you. You also have a talent for finding structure right now, packaging your ideas in eloquent syllogisms that hook other people on what you have to say.
The path of the mind isn’t without potholes however. At some point in the next two months, you may learn something so startling you have no choice but to stumble. Know that getting jostled can be the sort of action that stirs you from your inertia, strengthens your resolve, and rights your instruments of navigation.
You are changed by what you know.
This week, your intellectual journeys will be relatively smooth sailing, but the boundaries between your resources and other people’s start to leak. While your joint-ventures possess momentum right now, they’re surfing a tidal wave of uncertainty when it comes to your felt sense of security.
Security is one of those qualities that tends to be both real and imagined. Just because we have enough in a material sense doesn’t mean that we feel safe. The future is bottomless and unpredictable — how can we account for that?
The way forward may not be clear right now, but you don’t have to force it. Sometimes the most valuable information arrives after you’ve decided to let your inner wisdom percolate through the ritual of rest.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.
Pisces & Pisces Rising
If your enchanted woods of collaboration and shared resources have grown too lush over the past two weeks, Mercury’s entrance into Libra will invite more conversation and active planning. You’ve got the word-mojo right now to restore equinamity to agreements you’ve made.
Over the next two months, you will find ample opportunity to review the contracts of your investments, accounts and jointly-owned possessions. As is somewhat inevitable in projects of love and sharing, frustrations may pimple out of the paperwork.
Discord can be unnerving when you’ve worked so hard to make everyone happy. Yet, conflict is really an opening for authentic conversation. True harmony isn’t the result of stifled discontent, but of peeling back the layers to get to a matter’s pith.
Schedule your intricate dialogues for Saturday, because midweek, you feel like you’re trying to Mary Poppins a tidal wave into your briefcase. The details are swampy, and every part of you wants to escape from the convo early to order smoothies or dunk yourself in the city pool.
While that’s not always an urge you should heed, more could be gained this week by giving yourself a moment.
Yet don’t entirely check out. Keep a notepad on hand to jot down the ideas or solutions that crystallize the moment you permit yourself to think about other things.
Mercury zips into Libra to weigh all the options as Mars-Neptune encourages a daydream break before making decisions. We’ve got you covered with journal prompts on the CHANI app.