Satellite of Love

Imagine someone incredible — so attractive and interesting and astonishingly perfect for you that after just a few conversations, you’re feeling like maybe the universe read your diary and answered your secret wishes. Have you had this experience — that excitement followed by what is invariably a sense of panic? It’s deeply uncomfortable to hope. It’s downright horrifying to be faced with the possibility of getting what we really want. After a few dates with this incredible new person, you may start wondering: Is this too good to be true? No one can be this great, right? Can I actually trust this? Some might find it easier to delay those questions (I’m looking at you, Pisces and Sagittarius), while others might be suspicious on day one (ahem, Capricorn, Scorpio). At some point, though, each of you will have to ask yourself: Can I trust that what seems good is actually good? And how will I know?

Welcome to Scorpio season, the time to ask what’s underneath appearances. It’s a time for the deep questions, for getting under the surface, for understanding what’s at stake when we let someone into our hearts, our beds, or both. When we first meet someone, there’s not much at stake yet. But the more we hope for with them, the more we build together, the deeper we go—that’s when we enter Scorpio territory. There’s the risk of betrayal, of loss, of not being loved and understood. But there’s the equal risk of being loved and understood. When you are deeply seen and recognized and loved, just as you are, something changes for you. To receive that kind of love, you have to transform. You have to face all the monsters you carry inside — the demons of self-hatred, of shame, of avoidance, of bullying. You have to love parts of yourself you never thought you could. It’s a profoundly vulnerable undertaking, and also one of the most beautifully courageous things we get to do together.

What does it mean for you to dig deep and drop your guard this month? Do you have stories about love that you need to ditch? It’s common to protect yourself by projecting your past onto your future: “I’m always left for younger women, so I’m bracing myself for that to happen again,” or “I always get bored with a partner, so I’ll leave before I get too attached,” or “Lovers always fetishize my gender/body/differences, so it’s easier to play into that than ask to be seen as a whole human,” or “No one will ever really love me because of this one thing about me that I know [because our culture tells us] is unlovable.”

We’re carrying a lot, my friends. All the marginalized differences we wear visibly in our bodies, all the invisible disabilities or histories we also bring to intimacy. It’s a high stakes game, letting anyone in. And it’s so profoundly human to protect ourselves this way, from the risk of being seen and being loved. We’ve experienced enough of the opposite to be wise to the game.

But what if the future — or even the present moment — isn’t anything like the past? How do we find the courage to see beyond our old stories and notice what’s happening now? Above all, who do we find the courage to make sure the future is better than the past? How do we build trust over time, piece by piece? And how do we choose the people that deserve that trust, that can make mistakes but will never dehumanize or dominate us? What if that perfect person is possible for us? Or if we already know them? Or if there are many, many more than we’ve been led to believe? What if we get to create deeper love and trust than we realized was possible?

These are the deep questions we’ll be getting into in all our beautiful and messy relationships this month, as Scorpio planets (processing! exposing old wounds! learning what’s real!) share the sky with Sagittarius planets (optimism! enthusiasm! adventure!). This month will also bring this year’s third and final meeting between Saturn — planet of commitment, definitions, and light BDSM — and Neptune, planet of romantic fantasies and self-sacrificing love. What happens in your relationships when these two get together? The best case scenario is you start making your dreams real — the ones you actually want to come true. The worst-case scenario is confusion about what’s real and what’s illusion — are you my dream lover or some sociopath? Are we building a life together or are you catfishing me? Tap into your grounded analytical skills as you keep navigating toward your heart’s desire.

As you steer toward these tempestuous and siren-filled waters, feel free to reach out to me for guidance and support around your relationships and relational needs. And if you’re looking for some fancy astro-art that encapsulates your important relationships, check out my Astrograms. Starting this month, each order will include a free interpretation!

Remember that what you’re uncovering this month will teach you truths that are worth knowing, but be gentle with yourself and others as you pry into those well-protected hearts. And, as always with these relational horoscopes you’ll get best results reading your Moon and Venus signs first. Have fun out there this month—go deep, get consent, take breaks, stay hydrated!

Aries

Your mission this month, my courageous friend, is to get under the surface of what sex means to you. Whether you’re loving it, hating it, fumbling through it, in a rut, wanting more, wanting less, or deeply confused about it, now is the time to take a deep breath and let yourself in on what your body already knows. For most of us, this means facing some old trauma still kicking around in your nervous system or in certain parts of your body. It may also mean complicating your understanding of how you express your gender sexually. For some, this month could be that thunder-and-lightning AHA time of discovering something momentous about sex. Each of us invents sex again and again, each time. We’re all geniuses when it comes to our own bodies and imaginations, and the infinite ways those can combine (or not, in the case of asexuals — for whom this month is about excitement and danger in a broader sense). When it gets too hot, cool off with a larger perspective that can help you ground what you’re learning.

Go deep: Get weird with desire. Let pain and pleasure teach you where you feel a yes or a no or a maybe. See that part of you that needs to be seen.
Take breaks: Remember you’re one piece in a much larger puzzle. Remember it gets to be fun! Remember to clear your head by paying attention to something outside you.

Taurus

Brace yourself, my stalwart friend, for a month of discoveries. In your ideal relationship, each happy time would be followed by another equally happy time, and you would ride the crest of these waves without ever dipping into the troughs. From joy to joy, from ease to ease, from calm to calm. And yet you know this is impossible — and maybe even some parts of long for the turbulent depths. Your goal, this month, is to let these waves wash over you and be fully present for the highs and the lows. This means pay attention to how it feels when you’re disappointed, sad, or scared, and pay attention to what helps you come back to a place of connection and joy. Above all, trust that movement is possible, that you won’t get stuck down in the depths for too long.

Go deep: Let the people you partner with teach you about how to ride the highs and lows together. Let yourself feel the vulnerability of loving. Let yourself feel safety when vulnerability gets too hard.
Take breaks: Where you rest this month is in this rhythm itself — in letting yourself float and dip and rise again. Don’t feel the need to fight against it!

Gemini

You may feel there are too many requests on your time — too many people wanting to connect, too many social obligations, too many intriguing don’t-want-to-miss-it opportunities. If you’re feeling overbooked, torn in many directions, and vaguely guilty all the time — if you’re wanting relationships to feel more relaxing, this is a time for you to start making choices. Theoretically, you may have time for every potluck and roller derby game and reading group and queer dance party. Energetically, you also need to rest and sleep and be alone sometimes. Emotionally, you may be able to love twenty to forty people with equal devotion. In our linear version of space-time, you can only give consistent focused attention to a handful of them. So, granted that your love is infinite but your time is not, how do you start setting limits so that you have some of you left for you? This is a month of choosing what feeds you most and saying no (or at least “not right now”) to everything else. Luckily, you have some allies in this: the people that are most committed to you. Focus on your strongest, most stable relationships right now and let everyone else know you’re temporarily unavailable.

Something in your relational world needs some fine-tuning. You’re overbooked and ignoring the kind of maintenance love needs, and it’s time to sit down with a calendar and start planning out long blocks of uninterrupted intimacy time — this goes not just for romantic relationships, but all your core people. When this gets too heavy, lean into others for support and let them know how to help you ground, slow down, and understand what their real needs are. Sometimes you’ll get too anxious to know what’s needed — thinking you should be available for someone every day when they might just want to check in with you every few weeks. Remove the guilt from your social calendar and start tending to the connections that restore you.

Go deep: Check your FOMO at the door. Rethink your time management. Say yes to what feels most lifegiving and relaxing. Practice saying “love you, bye!” to everything else.
Take breaks: Let your committed friends, sweeties, and collaborators have more of your time. Draw on the support that’s available to you there. It’s okay to be a little bored sometimes!

Cancer

If you’ve got planets in Cancer, there’s a part of you that wants love to be an eternal cuddlefest — tenderness and snuggliness that’s available anytime, without you having to ask for it. You’ve also got a part of you that understands emotional closeness always comes with risks. So you stay poised between these desires — the security of closeness vs. the security of solitude. This month, you’re learning how to move fluidly and confidently between these. How shall this happen? By naming what you’re feeling, as you’re feeling it, even if you don’t yet know what you want. By naming what you want as you know it, without pressuring anyone to give it to you. By naming what the needs are beneath the desires, and finding ways of meeting them with or without anyone else. In short, you’re learning to center yourself. This is how you build trust with yourself, and how you can be trustworthy for anyone else. Notice which relationships encourage this, and which ones feel threatened by it.

Go deep: Confront your shyness. Put yourself in the spotlight. Name what’s happening as it happens. Don’t jump to conclusions.
Take breaks: Tend to your body and nervous system as you practice these new skills! Take pleasure in being embodied. Notice when it’s time to rest and time to move.

Leo

Even though you are a bright and beautiful being of pure light that the world has never seen before, you didn’t come out of nowhere. And while you may have reinvented yourself, you still bear the imprint of the people who raised you, who taught you, who loved you. Whether that love was sufficient or toxic, whether your family is close or estranged, you are carrying in you a whole history of love that goes back many generations. Do you know what love meant to your parents? Your grandparents? Farther back? Do you have queer ancestors and role models, by blood or by a sense of kinship? How are you able to love now that offers healing to the stories you were given? How do you get to be braver? Where do you get to experience understanding and compassion? How does this affect your current relationships? Something beautiful can come through this investigation, so stick with it as you are able.

Go deep: Dig into the closets of history. Consider family relationships, and where you have queer role models, or at least complicated allies.
Take breaks: When history gets too heavy, come back to the here and now through playfulness, joy, and creativity. You have cosmic permission to flirt, to dance, to get fancy, and to remember that the queer love you have found — even when it’s complicated — is medicine for the future.

Virgo

My dearest little worrier, this is a time when your thoughts may be more whirly and non-stop than usual. With the Scorpio energy of this time, you’re getting a little hit of endorphins each time you face something hard and try to solve it. This could mean you’re pushing for more processing, writing letters to exes, or staying up all night gaming out conversations. Parts of this could feel really good, and bring meaningful improvements to your life, and parts of it might be useless fretting or attempts to control what can’t be controlled (e.g., your friends or partners). How can you tell the difference? For each problem that you address, ask yourself how much of it is your responsibility, or in your power to solve. If solving a problem ever relies on convincing someone else to do something, you know you’ve veered from creative to controlling and it’s time to hit the brakes. But you get to be transparent about what you’d like — just hold onto outcomes lightly, and have a backup plan for meeting your own needs.

Go deep: Write those letters, schedule those mediations, have the talk you’ve been meaning to have. Air it all out. See how much of it is yours to solve.
Take breaks: Coziness is your friend this month. Don’t be afraid to say no to more socializing than your system wants, and if you’re lonely invite someone over to Netflix and cuddle.

Libra

I guarantee that you are more powerful, more magical, and more beautiful than this world wants you to believe. It’s dangerous to know your own worth in a world like ours — so many people are threatened by that powerful kind of self-love. We grow up among so many lies about who has worth and who doesn’t. Where are you still holding on to those dehumanizing ideas about yourself? About your loved ones? About groups of people? When you can face them in yourself you have a chance to break their hold on you. Remember that you’ll only find real safety right now but looking at what feels dangerous. Dare to love all of you. Dare to love people you’ve learned aren’t lovable. Don’t let love mean lack of boundaries — find a way to make it mean the opposite.

Go deep: Dig under all your ideas about how you should be, and locate your real sense of self-worth. You are, I guarantee, more magical, more creative, and more powerful than the stories you’ve internalized about who you are.
Take breaks: Find ways to bridge difference. Find your sense of humor. Use your words.

Scorpio

This is the time when your superpowers are strongest, and when everyone else is feeling a pull to do what you do effortlessly: dig deep into the hidden layers of the heart and gaze unblinkingly at what you find there. The trick about Scorpio energy is to know what to do with the information you find. You can go into survival mode — fight, flight, freeze — or you can roll up your sleeves and start moving the energy. In your relationships, this means not getting stuck in pain. Seeing it, acknowledging it, and then FEELING it enough that the feeling actually moves, and you’re left with a way forward. This could mean really burning off your anger, or really crying out your grief. While you do this, though, you’ve got to be holding space for a larger perspective — “When this feeling has moved through me, I will know myself better on the other side. When I know myself better, I will know what to do. When I know what to do, I’m not afraid.” Connection is your goal this month, but you need to center your most honest sense of self in all your relationships.

Go deep: Where have you gotten stuck? What needs to move? Who are you becoming through letting things move?
Take breaks: This huge energetic work demands rest and pleasure! When you’re not doing that deep emotional work, fill yourself up with all that is warm and cozy. Your goal is to be like a purring cat by a woodstove.

Sagittarius

You’re on the beginning of a journey that is still a little unclear, though the horizon looks bright. Before you make that leap, though, there is an uncertain time you’re moving through. This month, where you need to go deep is into your deep intuitive sense of what’s shifting. Let surprises be instructive. Let your conclusions be irrational. Trust your dreams and trust your gut. What do you do when answers get blurry? What changes are you on the brink of? What do you need for your journey? How do you find your groove in the wild uncertainty of it all? Luckily, what’s very clear for you right now is who you are and what’s best for you. Use that self-awareness as a compass for the times ahead.

Go deep: Make friends with the mystery. Resist easy answers. Don’t assume you know where you’ll end up.
Take breaks: Take breaks by centering what you know about yourself: your needs, your wellbeing, your non-negotiable requests from the world (and partners).

Capricorn

Okay, so I give you a hard time about being a self-sufficient beacon of cool whose inner vulnerability is begging to be explored, but this month I’m here to congratulate you on your idealism. Some of you may be saying, nope, not me at all, I’m as cynical as they come. And yet — what is cynicism but inverted idealism? You had grand visions and hopes for the world once, had them dashed, and found that too painful to endure again. Those hopes and visions are still there, just very protected. And that’s as it should be — your ability to protect yourself is one of your strengths. But right now, you have a chance to explore the vast realms of half-remembered hopes and dreams — for yourself, for your relationships, for the world. Be gentle, be nostalgic, but also be forward-thinking. You are a badass with serious skills. What can you make from this assortment of longing?

Go deep: Uncover long-buried ideals. Remember what gives you life. Recommit to making something beautiful out of the confusing chaos of life.
Take breaks: Take long baths. Sleep as much as you’d like. Play guitar for hours. Be as unproductive as you can be.

Aquarius

Your relationships are in the spotlight right now — you may feel everyone’s talking about you, or noticing you and your affairs more than usual. Maybe it’s cause you’ve got some things to celebrate, but maybe some of the attention has you feeling anxious? This month brings up a lot for you about how you are seen — as well as holding a mirror to how you see yourself. Get right with yourself about how much you’re doing to fulfill an image of yourself, and how much you’re trusting your own wild and strange heart to lead you where you’ll be happiest. When in doubt, trust that your community at large has your back even if some individuals are really working through their own issues in ways that may not be supportive.

Go deep: Rise to the challenge of being your best (i.e., least conformist, most confident) self. Notice how it feels to be noticed.
Take breaks: Lean back into the friendships and communities you can trust.

Pisces

Your challenge this month, dearest empath, is to get curious about what’s underneath your belief system. Whether you’re a practicing psychic or the world’s biggest skeptic (reading this for laughs, I’d assume), you’re living out the stories you believe about the world. So is everyone else, but you are in a position this month to see behind the curtain as it were. Usually, you lead with your sensitivity and the information that comes in can get jumbled. This month, practice separating out all the tangled strands of stories — about love, about partnership, about what makes you valuable, about what bodies are lovable — and examine them. How many are worth holding onto? What about the ones you wish you could ditch but don’t know how? Here’s where your superpowers of sensitivity are useful again: Once you’ve understood what you can and transformed what you can, just bottomline having compassion for what you can’t yet change. This goes for your own patterns, your partner’s patterns, and the way your relationships are shaped.

Go deep: When you find a belief, don’t stop asking why it is. When you see a story (about love, self-worth, romance, etc.), ask yourself if it’s useful. Keep holding a place of open-mindedness, as long as you can.
Take breaks: When this gets too exhausting, you have permission to return to your greatest strengths as a friend and lover. Do what’s hard, then do what you’re really good at to relax.

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