November is about flagging and essentialism. When we have a lot of things going on at once, it can feel like we are just going through the motions. When does stripping away become a depressive episode?

An archetype that I want you to think about in November is the staff. A staff is a bare tree. It is also the pole that a flag is mounted on. A staff can be any size—small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, like a wand, or taller than a tower. What the staff symbolizes is power.

Because power is always ridiculous, laughing at it like Harry Potter laughs the boggart away, always makes it change shape. Sagittarius is about a face that tries to frown and smile all at once. This is the face that power makes when it is confounded. 

Venus is having a hell of a time this month. Since we’re closing in on the solstice, Venus gets pretty far from the starry belt that we know as the ecliptic in the last half of November, leaving the belt officially on the 14th. When a planet travels out of bounds, it can behave a little unpredictably. It’s not traveling with everyone else and wants to go off, doing its own thing for a while. Not only that but Venus also closes in on Jupiter in Sagittarius. These two benefics come together just as it’s almost time for Jupiter to leave its year long stint in Sagittarius.

While both planets are benefactors, they’re not always the kind of characters who tend to get along. Jupiter can feel a little didactic to Venus, who seems to have superficial interests rather than straightforward ones.

The disjointedness of November is heightened with both Mars and Uranus are inconjunct to the planets that come into Sagittarius. When we lose aspects between transiting planets, sometimes it feels like we have fingers and toes in all kinds of buckets and we don’t really understand how to bring them all together.

Furthermore, the retrograde Mercury this month closes in on the Sun, becoming fully invisible behind the Sun’s rays on the same day as the full moon in Taurus—November 12th. The week of November 10 to 16 is full of all types of activity. On the 16th, Mercury leaves its cazimi phase and becomes visible again, beginning its phase as a morning star of anticipation and reception. Since Mercury was an afternoon star of review in the last few months, those few days after the 16th can be a great time to make decisions about things to strip away so that you can focus on what’s next.

November can mean relationship losses and relationship additions. In a battle, the flag bearer is the most disposable of soldiers, marching ahead of the line to signal the arrival of the army to everyone else. The defining aspect of a staff is that it’s naked. Power is really about vulnerability and what relationships do is challenge our shields. How you decide to break your shield is an exercise in deciding how you want to be tamed.

Questions to ask yourself in November:

How big does your staff/power need to feel right this moment?
How does vulnerability, the taking away of pretenses, make you more powerful?
Whose flag would you wear and for how long would you wear it?

Scorpio

Your dreams aren’t glitchy. They’re serendipitous. A lot of information buzzes around you like an infestation of flies and it’s only chance that makes some of the reminders trigger long lost memories that you may not feel like you have the time for sitting down and processing. You won’t lose the demons that you don’t exorcise but it’s up to you whether you consider them devils or angels in the first place.

Though it sounds counterintuitive, spend more time on the things that you want to let go of and less on the ones you want to keep. You want to ritualize your releases and make what’s integral to your functioning so rote that you never have to think before you’re suddenly and already doing.

Sagittarius

The last thing that you should do is make up your mind. Just because you wear someone’s logo doesn’t mean that you believe in its principles. You can wear all the wrong colors and have your heart in the right places or you can loudly proclaim your solidarity on issues but deprioritize them from your life.

It’s time to integrate and that means stripping away and adding on. It means that you can probably lose some assumptions, people, and habits but take on several more. Make your cleaning out happen in early November and save some energy to try new ways of being in the later part of the month.

Capricorn

If you find yourself catering to other people more than you expected you would when you were a little kid, find a way of forgiving yourself when you don’t have the capacity to spend all of your time on other people. If you find that you readily react to vulnerability with suspicion, find it in you to cater to others regardless of whether they’re taking advantage of you without punishing yourself for getting manipulated.

You’re learning to react to others in a different way and that’s ultimately about self forgiveness. You don’t have to react the same way all of the time and, sometimes, just by changing a self assumption, you surprise yourself into exercising a little self pity.

Aquarius

Don’t try to anticipate the future of everything that you’d ever known all of the time. You can’t possibly plan for everything and a lot of your speculations are time wasters. Instead, simply make sure that your decisions in the here and now reflect the baser desires of your heart. You can’t betray yourself in the present for a projected selfhood that may never come to be.

Does that thing you’re releasing at work align with your principles? Does the things that you’re spending the most amount of time on hold your fascination enough? Worrying about these things are better than worrying about long term growth because they’re instinctive ways of measuring your priorities.

Pisces

The tension that you’re navigating right now is that delicate balance of pureness and jadedness you always seem to find yourself between. You know everything about everybody, which means that you’re bored, but you also know nothing about anybody, and that keeps you interested. Starting a new page means that you’re pulling from both your knowledge and curiosity.

Success is coming to you this month. It’s up to you to receive and define it. What an opportunity means is completely dependent on how much you think you know about the world that you’re putting yourself into. And there’s merit in knowing everything as well as nothing.

Aries

Remember all of that chaotic energy you felt for the last seven years? Well, it’s over. Done. You’re in a new phase of life and mind now, one in which you’re not expected to be constantly reacting to the most world-changing of situations. And your entire job, now, is all about convincing yourself that you are the most supported person in the whole world.

Your friends love you. Your money is coming. And your ancestors give you wisdom. All of these things are true when you make sure that your heart is in the right place despite anyone who gatekeeps your away from their resources and approval. Be like teflon. Bounce.

Taurus

Whether your desire for something is small or big is up to you. That’s something that you control and no one else. Desire is the force that makes the world magnetic and no one has the authority to tell you what it is you want. That being said, putting desire into practice is something that you will never be able to achieve through isolation. Receiving and taking is always an agreement.

Listen to the suggestions of people who care about you. It’s not that they’re telling you what to want, because you know what you want so incredibly well. It’s that they also have wants and no one is going to get what they want unless they team up. 

Gemini

Let someone, just for once, just get to you what you asked for. You’re in a receptive phase of life and right now, you’ve found the best bounty. What makes your reality most fantastical is when you share the parts that you’ve become so good at playing with other people. You don’t have to mean everything and anything to yourself. Let someone else play the role of the advocate or devil.

That might mean that you’re acting less, or just more sensibly. Pick the disguises that make sense to you. Wear a dress or suit when you feel like it and not because you have to. Dress another person in your banners and let them sing your praises.

Cancer

Time is the most crucial ingredient of the day and you’ve got to figure out how to get more of it. Take a week of work so that you can stay at home and focus on the project of your choice. Use your time well so that you feel a genuine sense of accomplishment. Don’t fill time with needless battles or mindless productivity.

Part of accomplishing something means that you have to choose the things that are hardest for you to do. These types of decision create lifetimes from minutes. You’re a time wizard this November and you can make time out of nothing, if you understand that it takes some guts to do so.

Leo

You’re lovely, which means that you’re well loved. Do you even know this about yourself? Love is not about needing someone to save you because you’ve never been the type of person who needs to be saved. You’re strong and you can love yourself for your strength.

Being strong and loved doesn’t mean that the world is without structure. Learn to differentiate between a manic episode and joy. When you love yourself quietly, you aren’t worn out by the end of the blue night but have plenty of life left to put into the pink morning.

Virgo

It’s time to deal with the past, with selves who you’d rather not be anymore and with things that you’d rather not remember. A person without a past looks like chaos. That’s not you. You have an authentic tail that follows you around but you’ll trip over it if you don’t acknowledge its existence.

Sometimes, acknowledging the past means feeling sad, just for a little while so that you don’t have to carry that sadness around for a lifetime. One thing that you have is a very good head for figuring things out and your impulses are the best place to begin. When all is done, clean your room so that it’s a nicer place to come back to at the end of every day.

Libra

You have so much power at your disposal because of the sheer amount of language you have inherited. Sometimes, crass and vulgar language is what is needed to get the job done. Other times, refined and euphoric words work. Much of what you’ve learned wasn’t taught to you. It was earned through the sweat and brow of experimentation.

November is about healing your institutional wound. It’s centered around that feeling that the words at your disposal aren’t really your word and that by using them you’re playing the part of a farce. You may always feel like that because of the legacies of modernity but it’s time to realize that you’re stellar at remixing and that your reactions are always yours to own.