If you like doing something, then do it more than once.

If you like doing something, then do it more than once.

You don’t have to do it all on the same day. Take your time. You can do the same thing every single day if you so desire. Just do it again and again if you like it so much. Never settle for just once. This includes things that freak you out—asking people to be your friend, making plans, learning new skills, and writing stories.

If you like a story, then write it more than once. Read the same books over and over. Rewatch movies. If you like something, then why on earth would you only do it once?

In September, Venus goes direct and will be moving over the third decan of Leo again. Shortly after, Jupiter stations retrograde. Mercury goes direct as well mid month. Except for the Sun and Moon, there are no new ingresses in September. The Sun moves into its fall and the Moon does its usual thing.

You know what happens if you do something more than once? You acquire fineness in perception. Watch a movie that you’ve seen before. I promise you that you won’t see it the same way. You’ll notice all kinds of symbols and details that you missed during the first viewing. Read the same book again and the same thing happens. The words haven’t changed but you have.

So much of life happens through repetition. Cook the same meal again and again everyday and it changes for you. This is how you learn to cook, by the way—not by cooking different meals all the time but by cooking the same meal again and again until you develop your own style of variation. There are things you do every single day. You wear the same clothes again and again. You take a shit. You brush your teeth. You take the same commute. You even have some of the same conversations again and again.

This is the meat of life—this practice in repetition. If you couldn’t repeat certain actions then you couldn’t live.

Remember when you were a baby and just learning how to digest things? You struggled to find food with your hand. You struggled to find your own mouth after you found food. You struggled to metabolize and you struggled with pooping. You learned how to do all of these things by doing them again and again.

Here’s the thing—if you don’t do something again and again, then you won’t get good at it. That’s actually fine. You might not need the thing or like it very much. There’s no reason why you have to like something if you just don’t like it. There are usually things that we pretend we like or things we talk ourselves into liking. If we put those things to the test of repetition, we will see that these things fail to deliver. They’re just not things that we want to do again and again.

If you like something enough to not worry about whether you’re good at it right away, if you just do it again and again because you like it so much or because you actually need to do it (like brushing your teeth) then there’s no way you won’t get really good at doing the thing. This is called refinement. This is what repetition gives you. It gives you a refined sensibility over something. It gives you depth of perception and complexity of opinion.

You’ll develop a refined approach to life if you live again and again. You’ll find startling intellect within yourself when you think through the same thing more than once, when you talk about it more than once. You’ll suffer less if you remove the burden of doing it perfectly the first time from your first try and settle for doing something more than once.

Mercury and Venus are going direct. These are the gleaming planets that hover close to the Sun and they represent talent. Jupiter is retrograding soon. This is the planet of big ideas. September is about small ideas, about repeating ideas. It’s about attunement and refinement. Get busy (not too busy) and do something you like again and again.

Virgo

Get precise. Get picky. Your pickiness is not about you liking something or not liking it. That’s simply too heavy handed for the likes of you. You’re the type of person who uses pickiness as a tool in discernment. You use your tastes to get to know what is what. This is because you are interested in describing the world as it is, in fully engaging with your senses, and in all of the multifaceted ways that a thing can be known.

The more specific you can get, the more excited you will feel about something. Do you like to be caressed very softly on the hand? With which finger do you prefer that loving caress be orchestrated with? At what hour? A caress at dawn is not the same as a caress during dusk. Neither of those are the same as a caress at midnight. How much fingernail do you like when you are caressed?

Get specific not because you have to be. Get specific because it thrills you. How can you not describe a thing as sliver when it captures your fascination? You have too much brain to simply dismiss something with half of your heart. If you like it, like it fully. If you dislike it, dislike it fully. Understand the why and let your why shift.

Questions for Virgo for September 2023:
How specific about your desire do you tend to be?
How specific do you think you can be?
How specific would you like to be?

Libra

I think you should do something shocking in September. I’m not sure what you could possibly do. I don’t think that it should be too meaningful. Choose something halfway between nihilism (shock for shock’s sake) and self empathic (doing something for yourself).

There’s a really easy way to predict the future. You want to know what it is? It has nothing to do with reading palms or the stars. You can predict the future easily using your own habits. Habits are the actions you take to move around the things that you have gotten used to.

Here’s the thing about being a person: you can get used to a lot. We possess the ability to normalize a huge amount of injustice. We can even get used to daily violence. Even if we don’t stop feeling pain, we learn to expect it and we let those expectations shape our habits.

So do something shocking. Break yourself out of your assumptions about what you are doing and what you have at stake. It takes years to change a habit but just a moment to understand one.

Questions for Libra for September 2023:
What are the habits you know about?
What are some habits you don’t know about?
What comes to mind when you think of a shocking thing you could do?

Scorpio

Try to see, in September, what your favorite words are. Do you know? Are you the type of person to really enjoy using the word “really” in every sentence? Do you like to brush things off with a sweet and casual apology? Are you the type to ask compounding questions because you’re reluctant to share statements?

Most of the time, I don’t even really know what my favorite words are. The shape of a word becomes a habit and that becomes an expression, a shape and a vowel, that I get used to. I forget that word selection is a bit like a magic spell. It charms those who hear you speak and it invites deities into your home.

Try to see what your most used words are. Maybe you’ve very unique and there aren’t any words that you’ve come to lean on. Maybe you have an idiosyncratic way of speaking or typing and there are words that you simply can’t do without. Maybe some words only come out in certain scenarios. Try to read yourself the way you would read anyone else. See if any of your words are doing the work of constructing your reality for you.

Question for Scorpio for September 2023:
What is your favorite word that you commonly use?
What is your least favorite word that you commonly use?
What are some words you never ever use?

Sagittarius

September is the month of yearning. We typically yearn for things that we want to become, not things that we want to have. Your yearning is like a magic mirror. Look into it. It distorts your perception and creates all kinds of illusions so that getting to know yourself becomes ever increasingly more complicated. That’s life—it’s a trickster.

Yearning—yearning happens with our crushes, with our adversaries, with our rivals. It’s unfair to describe any person as a simple mirror. That’s a whole person over there. It’s your behavior with that person that is your mirror.

Maybe you yearn to become a tree. Maybe you yearn for a bright and open sky. Maybe you yearn for the chance to take off your pants without worrying about the shape of your legs. Mirrors aren’t windows. You can look into one but you can’t look out of one. Never confuse the person you sometimes want to become with the person you will become.

Questions for Sagittarius for September 2023:
What do you think you yearn for?
What becomes inevitable when you yearn?
What does your yearning hide from you?

Capricorn

Like a cat, you’re good at moving through the night. The less you think about something, the more you know about it. The less you know about a thing, the more you are willing to act. This is because you possess intuition. Intuition is the thing that helps you see in the dark. It doesn’t work in daylight. You’re a winter baby. You possess intuition like a rib bone.

September is the fall equinox. It’s time to seize your intuition. Include at least one divination practice into your life’s work. Include at least one open variable that only time can tell you about—one brutal thing that no one except for time passing can reveal for you. Don’t rely on opinions. Lean only on the circumstances that shift.

If you have a fully thought out plan, rest assured that one thing will always go wrong. If you have no plan at all then everything will go wrong. That’s not a fact but a guess. In September, do mysterious deeds. Tune into your ability to guess correctly. Trust that ability but only half heartedly. There’s only so much you can control.

Questions for Capricorn for September 2023:
What do you need your intuition for?
What don’t you need your intuition for?
What can you pretty much guesstimate?

Aquarius

At the end of the day, your friends are just the people you see again and again. When I believe in the divinity of willpower, I sometimes believe that we can will friendship into being. We can choose our friends. We believe in all kinds of principles around friendship—we should be friends with people we like, people who share identities with us, people who don’t share identities with us, people who do certain things and people who don’t do certain things.

But friendship is circumstantial. You have to see someone around six or seven times before you start to feel familiar with them. Your habits will tell you who your friends are. Usually, we just make friends with people we habitually meet with or run into.

You might break things off with someone. This rupture will cause you to change your habits. You can deepen a relationship. You’ll get more accustomed to certain habits the more time you spend with someone. If you can’t control some of your habits like most of us, then you have less control over who your friends are than you think. In September, try to see if you understand all of your habits. Describing your own habits can tell you a lot about who your friends are.

Questions for Aquarius for September 2023:
Who do you see often?
Are those your friends?
Who could you see often?

Pisces

September brings about some kind of departure. There’s something really interesting that happens during departures. Departures are when you feel bonds become closest. This isn’t some kind of illusion. It’s actually a phenomenon that happens. When you get ready to depart from a place, a person, or just a particular way of thinking things through you tend to feel your heartstring cling on.

I used to do a lot of community programs. These were temporary programs with a start and end date. Even if the beginnings of some of these programs were slow, the departures would be a whole event. People tend to come out for departures. They feel called. They want to be around and they feel their heartstrings pull them in.

Nothing is really defined until you have departed from it. That means that departure is a method of celebration. If you depart from nothing and you celebrate nothing then you never define things for yourself. Depart, celebrate, and cherish. Feel your heartstrings tighten right before you cut them loose.

Questions for Pisces for September 2023:
Is there anything that you are departing from?
Is there anything that you celebrate?
Is there anything that you cherish?

Aries

I wonder what relief in relationships would be like for you. Maybe you feel weighed by responsibilities and just want to cut some away. Maybe you hide some inner truth deep in your gut as a secret and relief is about liberating this unspoken, wild thing. Maybe relief comes in the form of a well timed question. Sometimes relief is delivered as a blunder.

You are who you say you are. That’s always been true. September is an opportunity to restore this self knowing. You are who you say you are and, if you cannot be, then you will buckle and wail and fight.

If you think that you can’t be who you are because you have to be what someone else wants you to be, then this is the month to wail and remove that burden. Do it in any way you think is possible. Don’t worry about what people think. Some people might trash talk one action while others might praise the same thing. That’s just how discourse works. Live as someone who incites conversation and you will have fewer regrets than someone who lives quietly. Remember that you are an Aries. Most people are willing to forgive you for a bit of tactlessness because you are well intentioned at heart.

Questions for Aries for September 2023:
What do you want people to say about you?
What are you afraid of people saying about you?
What is something you want to say?

Taurus

Do you know what fire hates most of all? It hates to remain in one place. This is something that fire actually just can’t do. It’s in fire’s nature to move around. If it stays in one place then it will dwindle and die.

Venus has stalled in a fire sign and is ready to move again. The warmness in your heart hates to be suffocated. It wants to be released. It wants to give people beautiful compliments, to seduce and rest, and to walk hand in hand. Your heart wants to be stoked like a campfire.

The only reason why one would hold warmness in place is because they fear that the outside world is too cold. Believe in the strength of your inner warmth. It takes time to grow but it can melt a mountain if given enough years. A single fire can burn for decades if taken care of. Pretend that your heart is a fireplace and figure out what it needs. You don’t need to burn a field when you simply want to roast a marshmallow.

Questions for Taurus for September 2023:
Who do you want to give your warm side to?
Who do you want to give your cold side to?
When does your warmness cool and when does your coolness warm?

Gemini

In September, I want you to re-establish your connection to your mother tongue. We all have languages that we learned when we were babies. We also all have languages that we learned primarily as adults. Some of these languages are taught to us. We associate some of our languages with school, with restlessness at a desk, and with notes. Not our mother tongue—we learned our mother tongues when we learned about the trees and the sky.

You might be one of those people who say that you’re really bad at your mother tongue. This feeling of badness might get between yourself and your claim to cultural authority. That’s fine. Your mother tongue is still your mother tongue. If your relationship with your mother tongue is full of mysteries, you still know that relationship with a depth that no one else can instruct out of you.

Learn how to phrase your secrets in your mother tongue. This tongue holds mysteries that you sleep in. Roll over and see if any of your secrets cut you, if any of them hold you. Sometimes your mother tongue holds a hand over your nose and mouth. Breathe.

Questions for Gemini for September 2023:
What is your mother tongue?
What is your sister tongue?
What is your uncle tongue?

Cancer

In September, I want you to rewatch your favorite movie from childhood. What’s the movie? Did you enjoy an age appropriate cartoon or one of those 90’s sitcoms that has every tasteless joke in the book? Did you love weird and abstract movies from an early age? Did you relate to the characters in your favorite movie or did you find its strangeness compelling?

When you rewatch your favorite movie from childhood, you find yourself in your childhood body again. This is a body that likes to curl up in small places and read books in peace. This is a body that likes to run not for any reason but because you were possessed by the spirit of the zoomies.

When you rewatch your favorite movie from childhood, you see it with adult eyes. You never know who you are as an adult until you learn to gaze upon your childhood self. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? To have sharpened insight and the wisdom of several years lived? To bring that into a memory of a person you used to be?

Questions for Cancer for September 2023:
What was your favorite movie as a child?
What are the parts you remember before rewatching it?
What are the parts you forgot?

Leo

September is about cultivating your easy going spirit. This is a fantasy that I think many of us have: a hot lover leads us around by the hand or the collar. They give us sweet things and show us cool stuff. We try many things for the first time. The light returns to our eyes because we’re not taunted for our openness but simply teased lovingly.

This month is about openness. When you’re open to anything, you sometimes get hurt. Not every texture in this world feels that good. Some things soothe you and caress you. Other things prod at you and cut you.

And, still, you are open. You are open because you believe in love. That’s the simple fact of it. There’s nothing that you can do about that one. If you believe in love, no amount of persuasion will get you to change your heart. This isn’t something that you can talk yourself into or out of. It’s just something that is.

Questions for Leo for September 2023:
Who do you allow to guide you?
Who do you allow to tease you?
Who do you allow to love you?