A few weeks ago I was on a road trip. I stopped for a brief visit with an old friend who has hella Scorpio in their chart. While we were catching up, shoes off and sharing a dinner of road snacks and rotisserie, I happened to get a large splinter in my toe. My first instinct was to ignore it. I even told my friend “it’s fine” when it clearly wasn’t. They, in finest Scorpio fashion, insisted it wasn’t fine and went to get their wound care kit. I had to laugh because I was living out the metaphor I use with my clients all the time: Scorpio energy insists that we remove the splinter, even if it means more pain at first. I had been in default road-trip mode — endure and keep moving. I was struck by how hard it felt in that moment to admit I needed care for such a small thing. But I did.

I think many of us have been in “endure and keep moving” mode for a long time now. Nothing is fine and most of us have to keep working and buying groceries and making doctor’s appointments anyway, between the grief and the protests and the numbness. Our social fabric feels especially tenuous. Many people tell me their relationships with friends and family are fracturing along political lines. This distrust permeates other relationships. Even when care is available to us, it can be hard to trust it and hard to accept it.

This collective splinter is lodged deep. We are all in some kind of pain. We may lash out online in pain. Pain may prompt us to withdraw and stop interacting. We may end up feeling we need to defend our pain against someone else’s pain. We may feel our ancestral pain as present pain. And pain just becomes exponential when it’s ignored or dismissed. Even if our personal pain seems like a small thing, we are witnessing vast pain. How do we access care around something so big?

Astrologically, Scorpio is the sign that can witness this kind of pain. Scorpio care is unflinching and can cut deep, as it aims to address the core problems. The ones we haven’t been looking at. This may be Sagittarius season (we’ll get there), but Venus in Scorpio this month is bringing a flashlight and a scalpel to all the painful splinters in our relationships. And odds are good that healing can happen — Venus teams up with all the slow-moving planets from Jupiter to Pluto this month, most in harmonious connections. This means we have many opportunities to take a look at what’s going on and find ways to work things out. Courage and care are two words this month asks you to tattoo on your forearms where you can see them every time you’re about to reach for someone or push them away: Are you reacting from a place of fear or courage? From a place of care or dismissal? How can you set the boundaries you need to protect yourself and also reach with care towards people you want to be in community with, even if it feels potentially fraught?

Because after all we are in Sagittarius season — this is a time of gathering and festivity, of lighting candles against the cold, dark nights. Sagittarius knows there is something aspirational that connects us to each other. Scorpio may show us where we’ve hurt or been hurt but Sagittarius shows us how to keep our hearts alive when we’re afraid they’ll break. Scorpio may show us the brutal reality, Sagittarius shows us what we can do differently in the future. Sagittarius keeps a necessary impulse toward faith in each other alive. And Sagittarius season is a time of coming back into spaces of joy together, even if we are also holding grief. As Bertolt Brecht wrote: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes there will also be singing. / About the dark times.” We need Sagittarius to lead us back into the dance of life, of grief and joy, of connection and disconnection, of believing in and trying to shape a better future. May this be a month where you can receive the care that’s available for you.

I’m available for readings so please get in touch. I’ve also got a few cool things I wanted to tell you about: I’m offering Astrograms again—custom artwork drawn from your birth chart — and I’m pretty excited about this. You can get custom designs for you, for you and your best friend, for your whole polycule. And stay tuned in January for my massive Year-Ahead Forecast for each sign on my Patreon! You can also follow me follow me on Instagram for more regular astro content. Meanwhile I’m wishing you warmth and joy and just as much connection as you want this Sagittarius season.

Aries

Accept care: For the part of you that feels like everything is falling apart and you have to keep holding it together, and why aren’t your friends taking these risks with you? For the energy it takes for you to show up to the challenges you face on the daily. For the ways you’ve been changed by the big changes in your life. For the part of you that’s resigned to disappointment. For the part of you that is stubbornly resisting your own need for care, and the part of you that is learning how to reach out for it before the need is urgent.

Taurus

Accept care: For the part of you that wants everyone else to be reasonable and understand what seems obvious to you. For the ways you’ve felt unmet by the people you thought were ride-or-die. For the ways you’ve also failed them. For the deep longing you have to just be able to enjoy your life. For everything you’ve had to give up in order to live according to your values. For the small, nagging voice inside you that feels you should have given up more. For the part of you that is grieving a world that no longer exists (or never did).

Gemini

Accept care: For the ways you work yourself until you’re too tired to care for your body — mentally, physically, or both — often because it is your literal job. For how your social world can feel too small and too large (or at least, demanding) at the same time. For all the many small things in your daily life that numb you to joy and delight, that feel too mundane to complain about. For the poems you aren’t writing and the songs you haven’t finished. For the ways you blame yourself for this, as though you somehow aren’t affected by your world.

Cancer

Accept care: For the part of you that is afraid to and needs to speak out. For the ways you are moving out of your comfort zone and into engagement with things that might have terrified you in the past. For the part of you that worries about centering yourself or taking up too much space. For the part of you that truly needs to center yourself sometimes and is looking for appropriate places to do so. For how big the feelings are. For how few spaces seem able to hold them.

Leo

Accept care: For the part of you that feels very young and unprotected. For the ways you perform competence and cool when you’d rather stay home and stay in bed. For however your family failed you, dramatically or incidentally, when you were learning how to regulate your nervous system — aka feel safe in this world. For the ways that love and belonging can feel circumstantial, like you need to keep performing a self that deserves love. For that part of you that fears what will happen if you stop performing.

Virgo

Accept care: For the conversations you keep having in your head where you say the perfect thing and then someone else finally understands and changes their position. For the pressure you put on yourself to be able to name and notice and debate and persuade. For all the things you’re tracking that seem to be getting lost, flattened, distorted beyond recognition. For your powerful need to be helping and equally powerful doubt that what you’re doing really helps. For the part of you that won’t let yourself rest.

Libra

Accept care: For the part of you that wants both justice and peace. For how much you’re holding that you don’t often speak about. For the part of you that just wants to feel secure in your own life, and the part of you that judges that first part. For the part of you that holds multiple opposing perspectives and doesn’t know what to do about that. For the nagging fear you have that you should be doing more, as though it’s solely up to you to fix all things.

Scorpio

Accept care: For the part of you that needs love to come with honesty and has chosen to walk away from dishonest relationships. For the loneliness that comes from that choice. For the ways others have read you as intimidatingly independent when really you’re looking for trustworthy intimacy. For how long it’s taken you to know yourself as well as you do now, and for how hard it is to forgive yourself for things you did before you knew yourself quite so well.

Sagittarius

Accept care: For the part of you that wants to tune out everything and just go hike the Pacific Crest trail or take an impulsive trip to a country where you don’t know anyone and wander around for a solid month. For all that you can’t hold in your waking mind and need to squirrel away into your dreams. For how important it feels to keep believing in a better future and how impossible it feels to believe in a better future. For what you couldn’t protect. For what you had to leave.

Capricorn

Accept care: For the ways your friends and comrades are disappointing you, even if they’re doing the most not to. For your vision of how things ought to work and the reality of how they’re mostly not working. For the part of you that wants to retreat to cynicism and stop trying to organize or collaborate or come to the protests or public meetings. For the part of you that can’t stop trying. For the ways you can see farther than many around you, and how that’s no guarantee they’ll understand when you try to show them.

Aquarius

Accept care: For all the ways you need to keep hustling and grinding. For the parts of you that wish you could be living an entirely different life, and for the parts of you that take some pleasure in how hard you can work or how much you can accomplish, and then feel uneasy about that pleasure. For whatever peace you’ve made with your own limitations and the part of you that wishes you could push past them. For the part of you that is learning to forgive past you for the mistakes they made so that present and future you don’t have to.

Pisces

Accept care: For the part of you that would rather time travel, smoke weed, or watch a movie than show up to the world as it is right now, thank you very much. For the yearning for a more beautiful existence that once felt much nearer than it does now. For the private world you need to create to come back to center, and how that centering feels harder now than it once did. For the ease with which you reach for escape without it actually feeling restorative. For the ways your intuition or imagination or compassion seem to be struggling like a car running out of gas and you have no idea where the next gas station is. For the part of you that feels alone with all this when you are anything but.

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