The first time that you honor someone’s death anniversary is as awkward as a first impression.

Fall is a scary season. I don’t mean spooky, though there’s plenty of that to go around this year as well as past years. No, this fall in particular is scary because these last few winters have been hard. There has been a lot of death—more than usual.

There are neighbors and friends of friends or dear loved ones or parts of you that are tensing up, gearing up, as the nights grow longer and air grows colder because we are getting ready to remember those who we have lost last winter in annual memorial for the very first time. I know that death is all around us all of the time but there is a lot of new death that demands to be remembered this year.

The first time that you honor someone’s death anniversary is as awkward as a first impression. You have no idea how your physical body will react. You are worried that you will not do the date justice and that this first remembering will set yourself up for failure in the years coming. You’re not sure whether you should work that day. You are not sure yet how to talk to this dead person out loud. You’re still figuring out what their memory means and you are still grappling with the freshness of their absence. You still remember what it felt like to hear the news—to hear that they have died. You know that you will never forget what you were doing at that very moment and feel sorry that you chose to do such a mundane and unimportant thing at such a time.

Three planets go direct this October—Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn. Mars meanders in Libra before setting one foot into Scorpio at the very end of the month. That same red full moon in Aries that hangs over our heads every fall finds us again as we make our ways home at the end of a very long day.

Mercury retrograde is a period of rest. It’s a period of getting up later than usual, of taking whole days to do nothing, and of not being able to work on the things that make you feel the most productive. Jupiter and Saturn is about choices being in limbo. The period of uncertainty that we were in this summer about so many of our choices come to an end this month. It’s time to make a decision.

As planets move direct, they move slowly and so should you. Remember—you are picking yourself up and out of rest. You are noticing how you move without momentum so that you know the ways in which you must adjust yourself so that you are able to move forward.

Moving forward, surviving, and being alive is a complicated thing. Survival doesn’t always feel worthy of celebration. Survival sometimes feels guilt soaked and it sometimes feels like committing yourself to a life waiting in purgatory. Survival means that you sometimes feel as though death is monumental but that life is mundane. But survival has options. It has the choices that you have access to as well as the choices that you have the creativity to build. Survival gives you agency.

Libra

Get out of the house. Get moving. Get back on a schedule. Talk with people who you are unfamiliar with, with people you fear do not understand or know the motives around what it is that you do or say. You’re facing fears that you thought you got over after you grew out of your teenage years again. Feeling old fears doesn’t mean that you have not moved on. It means that you know how to.

Remember that you have nothing to prove to anyone. Remember that you have already realized that there are things your heart speeds up at that you do not truly care about. Remember that social anxiety passes when you do the things that make you feel the most anxious again and again.

Scorpio

It’s not really a great time to work, to conduct meetings, to hammer out articles, or to track spreadsheets. It’s a good a time to have sex. Schedule your other responsibilities around your responsibility towards sex and pleasure instead of the other way around in October. Make fucking the centerpiece of your day. Plan your sleep schedule around it.

You’re a freshly opened oyster this month—sensitive, quivering, and vulnerable. You’re ready to be stroked, to be pounded into, and to be destroyed. Pay some attention to yourself. You’re not bored. You’re horny.

Sagittarius

If you are used to dreaming big, then it is time to make those plans tangible. You must begin to talk as though you believe that your visions can become plans. Your imagination is not just a metaphor. Your imagination has the ability to create new life.

Everything that you want is possible, given a set of parameters. What are those parameters? What needs to happen so that your vision becomes an option? You believe in miracles because you understand that being alive is a miracle. Don’t be afraid of being a child. This is the most powerful part of you.

Capricorn

It’s time to just try things. You don’t always need an overarching strategy or a Big Goal. In fact, these are the things that tend to give you tunnel vision. Think about it. Your most valuable life lessons have been earned through the art of wandering. October is a time when you are really busy without knowing exactly what you are doing and why you are doing these things. Embrace it.

Be random this month. Pretend to be a filmmaker one week and then a professional chef another. Don’t waste time with self pity simply because you don’t have all your answers. No one does and you never will know everything that there is to know. Choose aimlessness and fun instead.

Aquarius

There is a difference between those who feel hurt when witnessing oppression and those who feel moral superiority because they could have easily been the ones to inflict harm but were not this time that outrage politics hides away. Sometimes, loudness does not solve problems because problems show you not what you need to put more time into but the places that you must walk away from.

You are stronger than ever because you have spent so much time simply walking away. You have more time than you ever have when you walk away. You are more inspired than you ever have been. You have been solidarity when you walk away. Find a way to understand this complicated power that you have found within you.

Pisces

It’s about time that you took a break. You’re been breaking your spine, trying so hard to be all the people who you were told you could either be or who you were told you could not be that you have forgotten the richness of being you. What kind of flowers do you like? What is your favorite color these days? What foods have you been craving?

Remember yourself by committing to only doing things as slow as possible if you must do them at all. You’re a slug this month. You spend hours having sex and you must move with intention because it is hard for you to shift your slime. Much of your time is spent considering your tenderness and lack of shell.

Aries

Your genius does not belong to you only. This means that you will feel stuck when you try to function at odds with other people and that you will prosper when you feel like there is mutual support around you. You thrive when you know that you can trust yourself and other people.

It’s time to move with the intention of collaboration. Create new knowledge and new respect. Invest your money in mutual aid funds. Get five or ten people together and find a way of buying health care together. Make your genius possible by coming into the agreement that it exists as true and pure as you know it does with other people.

Taurus

You’re one of those people who sit around for years pondering and wondering over what you want and then jump into action, creating miracles in a span of just a month of two. October happens to be a period of production for you, not pondering. You’re excited enough and you have prepared enough. It’s time to put on a playlist and get to work.

Work carefully and considerately. Your work is a ritual that pays homage to what you care about. You make decisions best when you make them mindlessly, when you make them with a body fully in flow. Protect your momentum against distractions. Remember that you will always have enough time.

Gemini

You are no longer as lovesick as you have always assumed yourself to be. This means that you do not have to hide your pleasure in shame, that you must compartmentalize it, and that you do not have to protect the whimsiness of your feelings by keeping it a sorry secret any longer.

Integrate your lust into your ambition. Integrate your biggest desires into your daily choices. Integrate your limerence into your writing practice. When you decide to do anything at all, feel the gravity of that choice with your whole body. You make choices because you are alive and you feel alive when you remember that your importance is heavy.

Cancer

Indulge in the nights. Indulging in the night can sometimes mean going to bed at sundown. It can sometimes mean reading love stories until 4 AM. It can sometimes mean sitting in bed with a face mask and day dreaming with your phone turned off. It can mean being swaddled in big blankets with a window open to the chilly air outside.

Indulge in the nights because that is when you will never be told what to do. Indulge in having your phone on Do Not Disturb mode. Indulge in being unavailable. Indulge in reading childhood books. Indulge in lavender tea and in midnight snacks.

Leo

The reason why you’re not afraid of anything is because you are aware that magic is on your side. You understand that you are able to create new options just by stumbling across two people with two different plans who have not had the chance to know each other. You understand that you have what it takes to put money into the hands of the generationally poor.

You understand that there is magic in the everyday, that is sometimes takes a little heavy handedness and a little courage around the awkwardness of doing things that no one has done before. But you are willing to do these things. You are willing to find ways to do things that no one has thought of yet.

Virgo

October is about control. It’s about recognizing what you have no control over so that you value your control, so that you do not throw it away or treat it as anything less than what it is. Your control is about responsibility but it is also about freedom. Your control is about the choices that you have. Sometimes it is inherited, sometimes it is earned, and sometimes you have control that you have done nothing at all to deserve.

Do not fear your control. Understand it. Understand it as though it were just a tool in your hands. Think about the things that control can do and about how it is designed to work. Think about how you can use it in ways that it was never designed to do.