In the conga line passing through Virgo over the past weeks and months, the Sun has taken up the rear. That means it’s also the last planet to wheel into Neptune’s deluge on September 14th.
If you’ve ever been toppled by a wave while swimming in the ocean, you know how it feels to experience a Neptune transit. Suddenly “up” and “down” are made from the same frothing wet, and you lose all sense of direction. While the wave will recede, and you eventually bob to the surface, there’s a seemingly endless moment when you are both suspended and submerged.
When Neptune crosses a point in your natal chart, this disorientation can last for years — so long that you eventually find ways to breathe underwater. When other transiting planets confront the waterworks, however, the disarray is brief — but that doesn’t mean communications, schedules, and technologies don’t get usurped or seriously rerouted.
This week begins on a note of rerouting. It’s not that you won’t be able to conquer what you set out to conquer, but if you can proceed in a way that absorbs change, and which models Neptune’s fluidity, you’ll get where you need to go sooner.
Later the same day, on September 14th, Mars enters Libra, where it lacks its usual pluck and resources. For the first leg of this transit, Mars and Venus are essentially doing an apartment swap. Neither of them know where all the kitchen supplies are kept, and they can’t easily text each other to ask questions. Still, they’re making do.
On Mars’ side of things, it’s not easy being a god of war house-sitting for a bougie artist slash lawyer friend. In Libra, Mars does its best to not break the delicate vases or ruin the picturesque table arrangements. Instead, Mars attempts to mask its anger with some approximation of grace.
Mars might manage to be surprisingly effective in this terrain once it gets into a groove. We might get more done attracting flies with honey, and working within the bounds of social contracts can help us reach our goals even faster.
Meanwhile, Venus in Scorpio doesn’t form trusting bonds with others according to dominant social norms. Nor does Venus in Scorpio believe your compliments or love notes 100% of the time.
On September 17th, as Venus squares Saturn, the things in our lives that have broken under pressure over the past year are further stirred by this moody season of discontent. Under this particular expression of Venus, our underlying insecurities become raw to the touch, we are less easily placated by breezy affirmations, and we might wallow in the gap between what other people say and what they genuinely demonstrate.
At the same time, we find ourselves inclined to put everything on the plate, the savory and the unsavory, as we bond with each other more completely.
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 Steph Koyfman (The Daily Hunch) and Eliza Robertson.
Aries & Aries Rising
It’s not always going to be crystal clear whether you’re on offense or defense, but these next few weeks will present you with opportunities to practice good sportsmanship and occupy the middle of both extremes.
If other people test your patience, know that you have more of it to draw on than you think. If there’s a disagreement in the midst of a tricky negotiation, know that a certain degree of compromise can push you through the bottleneck of what could have been an impasse.
Conflict takes you deeper into the heart of any relationship.
It might be time to let yourself depend on others more completely, or it might be time to check in with your copilot regarding the shared burdens of time and buying the groceries. Life gets lighter when we don’t have to do everything alone, but it also gets more complicated.
Trusting someone with your credit card, trusting someone with your heart, and trusting someone with your life are all very different steps along a similar gradient of fear to love.
This whole year has been about disrupting familiar modes of self-reliance and offloading some of your individual burdens onto the sturdier bedrock of community. These next few weeks might confront you with some of your worst fears around surrendering to this change completely, but they also help you live in the uncertainty that comes with cohering into a network of care.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Taurus & Taurus Rising
The anger you normally conceal from others (and yourself) is asking for your diligence. What is normally folded into the hidden reaches of your awareness is now sitting on your desk for you to troubleshoot, work out, and grapple with beneath the fluorescent lighting of your most mundane affairs.
Even the things we work on in therapy must eventually be tested on the battlefield of everyday life. For you, this prolonged lesson in conflict remediation might be about a relationship in need of work. It might also find you deftly navigating a minefield of office politics or feeling burned out from trying to do too much.
Trying to be all things to all people is a fast track to feeling depleted. Still, cooperation is as much a tactic as it is a genuine human need.
As your relationships sweeten with Venus’ strut through Scorpio, they demand a little more of your life force. As you become more fully wedded to yourself, to another, or to the mundane necessities of life, it might be fun to play around with the concept of succumbing to a hot vampire (but like, in a totally supportive and mutually beneficial way).
During your extended version of a goth Valentine’s Day over these next few weeks, your devotion makes the heart of the whole thing beat a little faster. Though you might question everything more than once or twice, your misgivings invite you deeper into the fray of the relationship itself.
This is not an isolated episode, but a continuation of an epic (and tumultuous) saga of self-becoming that you’ve been on this year. Everything about who you are and the work you’re here to do in the world has been subject to the tectonic shifts of 2021. Venus in Scorpio reminds you that as much as this is your focus, it’s still never entirely about you.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Gemini & Gemini Rising
Your lust for life is cranking into a higher gear, but you might not feel particularly empowered to be direct about what you want. You’re so used to having to draw out football play diagrams with the whole team in mind that the thought of moving unilaterally in your pursuit of good times might jar you at first.
Let it.
Your diplomatic instincts aren’t wrong. They might actually be the right thing to draw on when you’re asking for what you really want from a lover, or weighing how your next creative production might provoke feelings in onlookers you can’t fully anticipate. The only mistake would be to let your deep consideration lead you into a sort of indecision paralysis where you never make a move.
Though tempestuous, Venus in Scorpio cares deeply about every facet of what you’re accomplishing and how you’re taking care of your body. This shorter layover for Venus is connected to a longer journey you’ve been on this year concerning your education, your cosmology, or your politics (and how those things square with your efforts to liberate yourself from the inertia of your comfort zone).
Right now, the mundane requirements of your day-to-day existence could use some extra affection, even if they’re hard to love sometimes. Your wellbeing is the engine that allows you to show up with consistency for this larger process you’re in. Shower it with kisses, TLC, and goth glitter bath bombs.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Cancer & Cancer Rising
Nothing brings out the passive-aggressive behavior in people like cohabitation. Instead of getting stuck on how annoying it is to be on the giving or receiving end of a group text reminder about the dishes, this could be an instructive opportunity to gain insight into the ways you feel empowered or disempowered to express yourself honestly around your family.
Take notes from the version of you that so easily calls the shots in your work life. Appreciate that so much of what you’re unpacking right now ties directly into what you’re building this year around trust, sharing, grief, and inheritance.
Some degree of playing politics is necessary, even among kin. Learning when it makes sense to be direct (and when it doesn’t) is a fine art, and you’re in an MFA program right now.
Over the next few weeks, get intimate with your creative impulses in ways that you haven’t dared to before. Extend love to the parts of yourself that don’t immediately trust your own happiness, and develop a taste for the astringent flavor of desires that are perhaps tinged with a little fear.
Though this is a fine excuse to merely blow off steam for a while, your efforts to reacquaint yourself more honestly with what you like are part of a longer journey you’ve been on this year.
As much as you may be focused on building mutual aid networks or investing your resources in collective efforts, your own enjoyment, and your own creative progeny, is worth your deep investigation.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Leo & Leo Rising
Translating your most provocative ideas into well-considered prose isn’t so much about diluting your message as it is about taking your time. There’s a delicate art to introducing a potentially threatening concept to people in a way that patiently honors their knee-jerk defenses. You’re not here to equivocate, but you’re not here to yell at a brick wall, either.
Engaging in intellectual jiu-jitsu over these next few weeks can teach you a great deal about relating to others in general. Disagreeing with others within the bounds of social etiquette isn’t necessarily “playing politics” if you’re not trying to get something from the other person. Perhaps a willingness to hear you with an open heart is enough.
With Venus in Scorpio, things are getting close enough, or perhaps too close, in your underground lair. Depending on how much you personally enjoy snuggling in close quarters with your cohabitants, this will either present as an opportunity to bond more deeply with kin or feel mildly suffocated at home.
Or maybe it’s both? Whether you’re personally predisposed to take pleasure in this process is a lesser issue than whether you can extend love to the parts of yourself that were shaped by the various forms of intimacy you were raised with, however flawed they may have been.
This is not a small feat, by the way. You’ve been on a larger journey this year around relationships and identifying the freedom and support you need to flourish within them. Right now, the underworld journeys you take down the rivers of your earliest memories help turn the wheel of your becoming.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Virgo & Virgo Rising
It would probably make things easier if you could ask someone, point blank, to pay you or return that book they borrowed from you and “forgot” to give back. However, expressing your needs or your irritation directly might not feel like an option that’s available to you right now.
As you’ve been learning a lot this year, you can only structure your life the way you want to when you’re adequately resourced in the areas that matter. Defending your time, defending your bandwidth, and defending what’s yours can work better in some cases when there isn’t a blunt instrument involved.
Meanwhile, the next few weeks will invite you deeper into relationship with your closest friends, siblings, extended family, and neighbors. It’s inherently vulnerable to reveal the parts of yourself you’re convinced make you unlikable, and there’s no guarantee you’ll feel safe after the fact.
Still, you might be craving the thrill of disclosure. There could be potholes on the road to the potluck, or cryptic silence on the other end of your broadcast if you’re turning yourself inside out in a blog post instead. The larger ask is to stay with the process when it starts to feel awkward.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Libra & Libra Rising
Asserting yourself can feel like an awkward dance when you’re still trying to get the choreography right. Sometimes, what really helps is not false bravado, but a subtle posture correction to bring you back into alignment with yourself.
Another person’s idea of bravery doesn’t have to be your own. Besides — the sort of mad-dogging that often passes for strength doesn’t suit your nuanced, deliberating ways.
You might have more steam to blow off at the moment, but if keeping your composure is important to you, you have some creative license to shift things around inside the frame of how you’re composed.
Equilibrium is steady, but never static.
Meanwhile, you might be feeling testy when the bill comes due, and you have to persuade others to settle up their scores. Some of these reactions cut deeper, raising questions around possessiveness. What made you covet something for the first time, in the first place?
Try sinking your tender hooks into the survival instincts that feed your insecurities, as well as the stubborn passions that make you cling to the objects that house your memories.
Any exploration you’re willing to do around these topics of security and ownership will push you further along in your 2021 journey of freeing yourself from arrangements that stifle your creativity. You’re finding your footing as a generative force to be reckoned with, but at some point, you might have to question what it even means for your output to belong to you.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Scorpio & Scorpio Rising
You’re tired, and that is enough on its own. But beyond prioritizing rest during these next few weeks — real rest, not the kind where you feel bad about not getting more done — you might also be entering a period of strategic retreat that gives you time to carefully work out your game plan.
That’s not to say you won’t feel frustrated, at times, by the hushed imperative to move covertly. Or by the strain of anger or irritation that is trying to conceal itself for the sake of politeness. But if you can muster the patience to conserve your energy and keep things under wraps just for now, you might very well leave this period with a clarified sense of how to move.
With Venus in Scorpio for another few weeks, it’s time to grace the rest of the world with your most legendary smolder and try taking a compliment for once. Anyone can be cute, but not everyone can do sultry the way you can. And besides — you’ve been holding out if you never let your thirst traps out from beyond the protected garden of your private camera roll.
You also probably realize this is about more than just a good selfie. If you have an easy time seeing the beauty in everyone else, yet not your own, if you have a habit of externalizing the lovely qualities you think you lack, if you can’t recognize what other people see when they look at you, show some love to yourself by making it easier for others to do the same.
This is no momentary blip on your radar, either. It ties into the story that’s been unfolding this year as you replant yourself in new soil, establish firmer roots, and navigate the resulting shake-ups in your relationships. After so much change in such a short amount of time, do you even feel the same way about yourself anymore? It’s time to feel yourself and feel it out.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising
There’s tension in the group chat — perhaps some discord in the particular corner of Twitter you happen to inhabit. That on its own is not particularly eventful, but you are getting some pretty valuable lessons in how to navigate organizational politics, or how to manage conflict in social settings where a direct confrontation wouldn’t be appropriate.
This is not so much about sending passive-aggressive emails as it is about polling the room to arrive in the middle ground of what everyone wants.
A certain amount of quid pro quo can unstick you from a stalemate that doesn’t appear to have anywhere else to go. People will reciprocate both what you do and what you don’t do. Learning to anticipate a focus group’s reaction helps you move with a more deliberately calibrated gait.
With Venus now in Scorpio, you’re on the other side of a one-way mirror, and you can’t know how other people are perceiving you as you tangle with your insecurities or gaze at what you think are your unlovable parts.
Instead of recoiling deeper into the privacy of your own fun-house of mirrors, why not try to see what they see — to appreciate yourself the way you’d gas up a friend who was being unnecessarily hard on themselves?
It might be easier to convince yourself that you’re ultimately alone in this, but Venus in Scorpio is also really good at sensing intimacy where it isn’t easily detected. Even if no one else can feel your feelings for you, dancing with your shadow puts you deeply into connection with the world wide web of other people doing the same.
In some ways, this transit might bring a respite or break for you. But the time you take to yourself now is also contributing to your greater process of breaking old habits in order to firm up a more sustainable way of structuring your days. Scheduling rest into your calendar may feel like overkill, but it may also be sorely needed right now.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Capricorn & Capricorn Rising
You wouldn’t be entirely wrong if it’s starting to feel like it often falls on you to set a good example. As you assume that particular mantle once more, committing to a balanced expression of tact and restraint may prove challenging, especially if there are things you’re tempted to express in a less equivocating manner.
Think of it this way: you might be the only person in the room who can be a composed spokesperson for the collective grievances of the people looking to you as a leader. Your social intelligence is one of your great gifts to the world. Part of wielding social intelligence is knowing how to be occasionally disagreeable in a way people can still receive.
Over the next few weeks, your social calendar will probably get busier and your pleasure centers somewhat overtaxed. Our minds are only wired to maintain connections with so many people at one time, and you might feel more drained than usual by exchanges that don’t feel authentic.
You can have meaningful connections with people who are just acquaintances, so it’s not necessarily about how well you know the person. You’re craving kinship with that special ring of truth, and this might as well dictate which invitations you accept. Community is an important part of this puzzle, but generating the right sort of intimacy might require you to believe yourself when you sense the vibes are off.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Aquarius & Aquarius Rising
Defending your principles is a different ballgame than getting defensive about your beliefs. If you’re feeling a strange social pressure to lay out an elaborate defense like a lawyer working a trial, it’s never a bad idea to make sure you’re doing all that labor for a reason.
The impulse to over-explain can sometimes point to deeper wounds around belonging and abandonment. Even if it’s your job to lay out a well-developed thesis in response to an argument, it might serve you better right now to identify what values actually feel meaningful for you, rather than simply try to be right.
Feeling secure at your roots doesn’t always guarantee that you’ll feel steady in the limelight, but the task of embodying your own talents seems to demand a great deal of self-acceptance from you on occasion, if only to steel yourself against the online trolls.
Your authenticity is stunning and provocative in equal measure, and not everyone understands the response you elicit in them. Pulling from the stability of your foundation helps you take it all in stride, as well as grow to enjoy some of the attention. Revealing yourself is both an art and an exercise in bravery.
The beauty you offer to the world these next few weeks will come with important consequences, particularly as they relate to the personal journey you’ve been on this year. As you become further uprooted, yet firmer in your sense of who you are, it might be the right time to let the world in on your process.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.
Pisces & Pisces Rising
Sharing can be a form of caring for you. Far from being merely transactional, the movements of give and take in your life strive to stay in balance. Right now, though, some of that equilibrium might be threatened by unexpressed frustration or resentment that you may not even feel entitled to.
Yes, it’s true, feelings are not facts, but disowning your anger isn’t necessarily doing yourself, or anyone else, a kindness.
Rather than getting caught in a web of abstractions that do nothing to help you process what you’re feeling, can you parse out what feels appropriate to communicate and what’s best left to digest on your own?
Stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone is one of the more powerful things you can do these next few weeks with Venus in Scorpio. Opening your heart to unfamiliar faces might stir something inside you that you didn’t know needed stirring. While you’re at it, you might have to gently decouple these impulses from the assumption that any of it has to feel good in the moment.
As you lean into a more experiential, exploratory side of love, you might find that it brings you closer to the beating heart of your values. As you embrace the discomfort that can arise when we sharpen our cross-cultural awareness, you might find that it pulls you into a more honest form of connection.
These experiences will inform the larger process you’ve been undergoing this year around claiming the space you need to feel at home in yourself, while recognizing also the belonging you find in other people.
This week Mars enters Libra encouraging grit and determination via arts + crafts. Reflect on where this is happening for you with the reading for the week ahead on the CHANI app.