PUSH ME BECAUSE I’M CLOSE TO THE EDGE: ASTROLOGICAL REPORT 7/23–7/30

…Y’all, it is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that the Leos are at it again.
Leo season pounces into being on Sunday; the New Moon will race past and fist-bump the Sun, Mars, North Node and Mercury before it hits the finish line late Monday. New Moons represent new beginnings, so if you remember baby Simba being held aloft — the animals down below presumably wondering why lions have to call the whole damn jungle every time one of them finds a penny — then you have a pretty good idea of what this season will entail.
So with all that aggressive energy pouring into their sign, the Leos in our lives are going to be more than a little extra this month. Planting their feet on their personal mountaintops, their ruling Sun casting them in gold, they will demand to be paid what they believe is their due. Woe betide any plebe who insists the Leos need to get out of the heat and check their numbers — this is *their* time, and anybody who denies it will be mauled accordingly.

And the worst part?
Not only are they doing exactly what they need to do in order to further their own development; with the North Node — a monolith pointing the way to our collective destiny — planted in Leo, they’re doing what we’re *all* supposed to do right now. If we want to evolve, we have to embrace our temporary overlords and *learn* from them.
While this may be galling to some, the North Node has left us little choice; we can either strive to be more Leonine or we can be shoved into their den unprepared. No third option.
But what is it we’re supposed to be learning? That differs from sign to sign and for the answers we have to look to the other side of the Zodiac and the South Node. If the North Node is the adventure we’re being called to, the South is the blanket we curl under when the world is being too harsh. It’s all things secure and unrewarding, the gravity that keeps us from reaching the stars.
Currently, the South Node is in Aquarius, forming a midpoint between Uranus and Saturn, both of which will be trined by the New Moon. Uranus — avatar of freedom and revolution — is the ruler of Aquarius, suggesting that a leavening of Aquarian innovation with Capricornian discipline is in order. Further, Saturn’s placement in Sagittarius suggests a need to ground the intellectual and abstract in material, tangible experience.
And this process may very well play out in the relationships we wish were closer, or those that once were. While merging its energies with Uranus, Saturn (never content with one task) will be opposing Venus in Gemini, prompting another balancing act between Air and Fire. This implies a great opportunity is at hand for us to deepen those relationships that have been defined by Gemini’s friendly distance; this month, we can transform acquaintances into friends and friendships into lifelong bonds. If we open ourselves up to Sagittarius’ sense of immediacy, we can share our greatest adventures with those who can most enrich them.
But in order for that to happen, we have to accept Leo’s guidance. Lucky for us, for all the shade thrown their way, Leos are generous souls — they have gifts for all of us. Whether we want them or not.

Congrats, Aries! You’ve emerged from the emotional depths of Cancer season (hopefully) in one piece. Lacking a proper outlet, your firey energy — your willingness to go anywhere, do anything and fight anyone — has been building for a month, threatening to consume you. But now, with your ruling Mars in a sign much more amenable to its talents, you can go out and set the whole world ablaze.
But should you?
Mars might finally be able to stretch its legs, but it walks alongside the Sun — in rulership and setting the pace. And the Sun likes to take its time.
That’s one of the key differences between you and Leo, Aries. The youngest of the zodiac, you’re driven to carve out a space for yourself in a world that seems alternately hostile and wondrous. You view any barriers to this process as an affront, temporary obstacles to be dynamited by your sheer force of character.
And that’s your greatest strength, but it highlights your deepest insecurity: For all your confidence, you worry that every foothold you find along your way will collapse, that the place you seek in the world will forever elude you. So you advance even when the situation demands retreat, because your greatest fear is that once a path is lost, you’ll never be able to find it again.
Leos don’t have these issues. They believe that a place in the world is their due, and that all they have to do is step forward and claim what is rightfully theirs. When that’s denied them, their anger isn’t that of a desperate striver clinging to everything they can; it’s the indignation of a king who’s been pickpocketed — these things just aren’t supposed to happen to people like them. But once their anger fades, they dust themselves off and continue on their way without so much as a dent in their confidence, because ultimate success to a Leo is only a matter of time.
With your ruling planet conjunct the Sun in its time of greatest power, Aries, you stand more to gain from this season than most. Leo is giving you one of its greatest gifts — its unbridled optimism. You can make great strides towards the security you seek, as long as you don’t treat every battle for it as your last.

Hey, sleepyhead. You awake?
I hope so, because you’ve got a busy season ahead of you. Your ruling Venus remains in Gemini, where it would be utterly content to play socialite — a princess gracing every party — were it not for Saturn directly opposite in Sagittarius. The planet of long-term goals and obligations, it’s tapping its watch and reminding you that the rest of your life awaits.
(Saturn’s kind of a dick like that.)
But Saturn isn’t necessarily calling you to drudgery. It sits in the sign of the globetrotter and the jetsetter, the explorer who wants to see everything before they die. In this placement, it’s only asking you to build a framework that allows you to do that, and to decide who in your life you want to take along for the ride.
And decisions like that are scary for you, because they necessitate change, which in turn threatens the sense of solidity that underpins your existence. But as the New Moon trines Saturn this week, lending you a new sense of emotional clarity in these matters, it squares your sign along with every other Leo placement — Sun, Mars, North Node and Mercury. Leo is pulling you out of bed, because it wants to tell you something:
Change is just an adventure; it’s scary, but if you embrace it with a full heart, the joys you experience will outweigh the fears a hundredfold. And adventures are always more fun when you share them with those you most care about.
Leo is lending you its ebullient spirit this season, Taurus, that sense of a sun ready to dawn even on your darkest journeys. Embrace those people and things which promise you adventure; they’ll be by your side for life.

You get a bad rap, Gemini. People call you two-faced, and assume every word that passes your lips is a carefully-crafted bit of artifice that serves your nefarious ends.
And you *are* two-faced; in fact, your faces number in the thousands. But what people don’t understand is that every one of those faces is genuine, that in some ways, your life is an exercise in radical honesty. Where most people internalize their shifts in emotion and perspective while working (often struggling) to maintain a consistent facade, you externalize *everything*. Every ripple, eddy and flow in your consciousness is something to announce to the world. You hold nothing back.
But friction arises because of another key difference between you and most people: Their crucial shifts are much slower, taking a relative eternity to process. By contrast, your mind is lightning, bolts of inspiration processed with dizzying speed. You can change your mind about a core tenet of your identity in a day, then change it again once you examine it from a different perspective.
It’s this aspect of yourself that will be challenged the most in the coming weeks. Venus hangs in your sign, opposite Saturn in Sagittarius. And Saturn — master architect of the zodiac, painstakingly crafting whole lives — understands you least of all. It demands you cease your mutable nonsense and discipline yourself into consistency.
And for the short term, at least, that’s what you have to do. Right now, you’re due for a fairly deep examination of where both your relationships and your methods of relating to people fit into your long-term goals. And however many different perspectives you try to attack that issue from, at some point you have to choose one and stick with it.
Luckily, while Saturn is making these demands of you, it’s not in charge of your life right now; with your ruling Mercury conjunct the North Node and the New Moon set to conjunct both, Leo is. And Leo likes you a lot more.
Leos only show one face to the world, and it’s entirely consistent with their internal processes: Proud, regal, warm, loving. Leo is giving you the gift of this simplicity, so you can give it in turn to your loved ones. And when you do that, you’ll find perspectives you never even imagined.

Congratulations, Cancer! You survived your season! Now the hypercharged turbofeels of the past month can fade away into your regular turbofeels!
OK, but seriously: The zodiac is actually going to take it easy on you for the next couple weeks. Outside of your ruling moon’s normal transits. And Chiron in retrograde trining select Cancer placements. And Neptune doing the same, while Pluto retrogrades in opposition. And you just *know* the Scorpios in your life are planning something.
But these are all long-term things that won’t change much in the next month, and that you should be used to by now (the Scorpios are *always* planning something). And they’re overshadowed by the good news, kicking off with the New Moon conjuncting the Sun, Mars, North Node and Mercury in Leo. The Moon is your ruler and after a month of carrying the Sun, Mars and Mercury, it’s time for them to return the favor and infuse the moon with their energies.
You spend a lot of time taking on other people’s concerns, Cancer, and one of your best facets is that ability to nurture and rejuvenate the emotionally wounded. But oftentimes your urge to mother everyone comes at the expense of your own emotional health, to the extent that you don’t even feel like you can reveal your sense of fatigue to anyone because it might make you seem like an imperfect caregiver.
Leos don’t have that issue; they prioritize self above all other things. And for a few weeks, you are being very strongly encouraged to do just that. Take time for yourself; indulge in self-care; maybe beg off if a friend who never reciprocates your emotional labor comes scratching at your door. The gift Leo is giving you is one of self-assertion, Cancer; please accept it.
(Also, the Capricorns are always planning something too.)

Well, Leo, here we are: With so much planetary energy at your disposal, there may never be a brighter spotlight for you to seize. The whole zodiac is looking to you for direction and inspiration. To deliver it, you just have to untie what meager restraints you place on yourself and roar as loud as you possibly can.
But while you’re bestowing your gifts upon the rest of us, what gifts are you giving yourself? The North Node is pointing everybody in your direction, but where is it pointing you?
The answer lies with your deepest secret, the one you hardly ever admit to yourself: As proud an image as you like to project, you desperately need the praise of others in order to maintain it; without that, the doubt you lock away in the closet begins to seep under the door until it floods your whole sense of being. You are a monarch; you need the adoration of those below you in order to exercise your fullest power.
Except this month, you don’t. With the influence of Mars and Saturn, you are being encouraged to trade your usual indolence for discipline and drive. Even more importantly, you are being given the tools to deepen your sense of self-worth via aggressive action. Whatever dreams you’ve been secretly too afraid to pursue are within your grasp; and when you achieve them, the praise of others will seem as distant and unimportant as a dimming star.
The gift you give yourself this month is your own evolution, Leo — the time is yours.

This week, you continue to feel the influence of a mutable Grand Cross, with Venus in Gemini squaring Virgo placements, Saturn squaring them in Sagittarius and Neptune opposing them in Pisces. This continues an intense process of self-examination of yourself and where you stand in your relationships that began late last week. A Grand Cross can easily become a cage of self-doubt; and with your impressive critical skills, Virgo, that cage can be hard to escape.
Luckily, here comes Leo to bust you out; the New Moon will conjunct your ruling Mercury just before it transits into your sign, dragging that Leonine sense of self-worth into your dungeon and blowing a hole in the wall. But once you escape, you should take special care not to rebuild the walls that trapped you, and Leo is again ready to help with that.
A truly massive amount of positive energy at just the right time is Leo’s gift to you this week, Virgo, along with its sense of fun. Once you escape, do you best to loosen up and forget about the doubts that often plague you. Put your critical tools away and simply experience the moment for what it is. Otherwise you’ll just use them on yourself.

Here’s the thing about you, Libra: You think yourself generous, but you’re really not.
Mind you, you certainly are a kind, giving person willing to devote your whole life to helping those in need. You will make extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of others, asking nothing of those who can’t afford to give and turning away the offers of those who can. You donate the gift of yourself at every opportunity, and by doing so you improve the world immeasurably.
And that’s wonderful, but it’s not generosity. That comes from those who believe they have an overabundance to share, that they have reached such a station in life that they can give without the kind of sacrifice you make. There’s an inherent power dynamic to that — the strong giving what they can to the weak without surrendering their strength.
And you are *massively* uncomfortable with thinking of yourself in those terms; you, the arbiter of balance and fairness, cannot abide the notion of holding that kind of power over someone. So you base much of your personality in self-denigration, debasing what riches you hold to preserve your perceived lack of power. You martyr yourself to avoid being crowned.
But Libra?
You *do* hold those riches; you *do* have abundances to share; in some ways, you *are* better and more powerful than others. And that’s so unfair it could make you cry, but Jupiter is here in your sign to help you through this realization; and the five placements in Leo sextile your sign are here to help you climb up onto your throne.
This month, Leo gives you the gift of noblesse oblige. Accept your strength so you can help people in ways you never dreamed possible.

Even by your standards the past few months have been intense for you, haven’t they, Scorpio?
You’ve felt as if you’ve been denied the darkness you like to lurkin; your usual razor-edged survival skills have seemed blunted. You feel inexorably pulled towards areas that induce deep discomfort, alleys of existence that you avoid. A wolf that’s been leashed, the sheer lack of control you feel over this process enrages and terrifies you; straining against your bonds, you’ve likely sworn a terrible vengeance against your captor, whoever they may be.
Well, the good news is that the North Node in Leo is responsible; the bad news is that this is afight you can’t win; and the best news is that the North Node isn’t your captor at all — it’s an ally seeking to strengthen you in the pursuit of your ultimate desire.
And that’s complicated by the fact that you have *two* grand desires that conflict with each other — total control and complete transformation. To keep the wounds you were born with from being deepened, you seek domination over all around you; but to heal those wounds, you seek out explosive processes of death and rebirth. And to achieve the latter — the ultimate surrender of death — you have to relinquish the former.
That is what the North Node is teaching you to do, by pulling you out of your home territory and into the harsh light of the Sun. One of your great fears is that once you’re exposed to the light, it will shine right through you, your wounds exposed for the world to see; and while that’s true, you will also be able to inspect them with newfound clarity. Only then can you heal.
The clarity of the Sun is Leo’s gift to you this month, Scorpio. The transformation you seek is within grasp; you need only walk into the light.

You think big, little Sag. With Jupiter as your ruler, you view life as a never-ending expansion of self, a constant broadening of horizons. That’s why you’re such an active presence in the world; you never stop seeking new experiences to fuel your explosive growth.
But there is no such thing as an unending explosion; everything that expands must eventually contract, if only for a little while. But to you this feels like stagnation, which you in turn equate with death. So you delay the inevitable retrenchment as long as possible until you start plunging yourself into adventures you’re too fatigued to handle. And that’s when contraction turns into catastrophic collapse.
That’s why you should listen very carefully when the stars are telling you to slow down in a certain area.
And Sag?
The stars are telling you to slow down when it comes to your relationships. Saturn continues to retrograde through your sign, this week opposing Venus while trining the New Moon, Mercury and the North Node. Saturn is the planet of long-term goals and responsibilities, avatar of the slow march of time; and with Venus in Gemini, yearning to play social butterfly, a lot of tension hangs in the air between them.
But ultimately, Leo is the arbiter of the moment, and Leo is giving you the gift of complacency — the idea that a small world you know intimately is preferable to a massive one waiting to be explored. You’re receiving a signal to pare back your personal entanglements and social engagements before they’re pared back for you. It would be wise to take this advice.

Hey, Capricorn, do you want to know a secret about yourself? From one Cap to another?
You’re an asshole sometimes.
Yes, I know, it’s not the greatest secret in the world (though you seldom admit it); the *real* secret is why.
You lead a tough life, Capricorn; your ruling Saturn throws weight after weight upon your chest in the hopes that you’ll learn to lift it; when you do, the only reward is a bigger weight. So you tell yourself that the only freedom you’ll achieve is that of the strongest, fastest and smartest — the one who can’t be beat.
And you push yourself to improbable ends in the pursuit of that impossible ideal. Your every weakness glares in your eyes, a defect that must be purged if you are to survive Saturn’s next onslaught. Worse, the flaws of those around you begin to nag, so you begin to correct them. You tell yourself it’s because you want to make your loved ones stronger and better able to survive, but that’s just to cover up your true concern — that their weakness is infectious.
That’s why you cut people out of your life with such casual ruthlessness: You’re quarantining them, which is doubly convenient for you because you’re insulated from the anguish you cause. You can convince yourself that they earned your utter lack of forgiveness; after all, you treat yourself just as poorly.
This month, you can change that: Venus hangs in Gemini, opposite your ruling Saturn, coaxing it to meet in the middle and consider the perspectives of those you’ve left behind. Meanwhile, the South Node forms a midpoint between Saturn and Uranus, urging you to consider new ways of relating to people. These are the energies you have to master in order to reach your North Node goal.
And what is that? This month, Leo’s gift to you is its sense of forgiveness, both towards others and itself. Being a Capricorn, of course, you have to earn it; and being a Capricorn, you can.

OK, so are you ready to learn how the core tenets of your existence are wrong and bad and need to be transcended?
…Well?…
…Alright, so maybe Leo season won’t be quite that intense for you, but intensity is the issue in and of itself because it’s something you reject as thoroughly as you can. To you, it’s an indicator that someone cares entirely too much about something, and *nothing* could be more gauche.
But sometimes, Aquarius, you have to be the dork who cares about things. The South Node is forming a perfect midpoint between your ruling Uranus and Saturn, merging the energies of the chill rebel smoking behind the school with the valedictorian nobody wants to eat lunch with, forcing you out of your comfort zone of measured cool. Meanwhile, the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury and North Node are pulling you into the land of gaudy jewelery and big hair — Leotown.
And that’s OK, really. Your life’s goal is to shake up the world with ideas it had never considered before, and you are a constant wellspring of revolutionary thought. But ideas alone aren’t enough to transform society on the scale at which you dream; they take action; action takes commitment; and commitment can’t survive with only the intellect to feed it — it requires raw, messy emotional devotion.
And that’s an area where Leos excel. They love and hate fully and magnificently, reaching into the bottom of their heart and holding it up for the whole world to admire. This sense of engagement is Leo’s gift to you this season, Aquarius, because the world will never allow you to save it if you can’t show it you care.

There’s something about you that nobody understands, Pisces — the fact that you can never be fully understood.
I don’t mean you strive to be misunderstood like Aquarians; or that you intentionally shroud yourself in opacity like Scorpios; or even merely that you’re too tremendously complex for most to grasp. I mean that, given the limitations of physical existence, you simply cannot be understood because you don’t entirely exist here; you have one foot in the material and one in the ethereal, dual citizenship in the spiritual and tangible realms.
That brings a challenge to your life that none of the other signs experience; while they toil on Earth in the hopes of transcending their existence in one way or another, you’ve already done that. And while they lose themselves in material distraction and occasionally need to be reminded of their spiritual goals, you need to be pulled out of the ether and grounded in the demands of this reality.
That’s one of the reasons you have such a hard time speaking up for yourself, Pisces; your language isn’t entirely ours. But in order for this life not to feel like a scratchy wool coat you’ve borrowed — to make it truly yours — that’s the language you have to learn. And this month is a wonderful opportunity to do that.
Neptune and Chiron continue to retrograde through your sign, prompting deep exploration of your dual existence and the anguish of being torn between two planes. Meanwhile, Saturn in Sagittarius squares the midpoint where those two energies merge, applying their lessons to the question of your long-term existence in this realm and suggesting that the best way for you to absorb them is to ground yourself in the wealth physical experience has to offer.
In addition, later in the week, Venus will square that same midpoint at the same time she opposes Saturn, suggesting that the revelations brought about by Neptune and Chiron should be applied to your closest relationships. Finally, the trining of Saturn by the New Moon, Mercury and the North Node implore you to step up and announce your long-term needs and goals to the world.
That last part may be the hardest for you, Pisces, but the massive amount of energy in Leo means it’s also the part you’re receiving the most help with. Leo’s gift to you is its sheer force of will; apply it to the world around you until it feels like a home.
