Venus is walking backwards

Yesterday afternoon, Saturday 3 October, at 3:15 Perth time, Venus stopped.

Not slowed down. Stopped.

Then she began moving backwards through the sky, and she will keep doing it until 14 November. Forty two days, exactly. Make of that what you will. (42)

I want to talk about what that actually means, because Venus retrograde gets written about badly, and a fair bit of what you read about it this month will be either doom or nonsense.

Most people hear Venus and think love.

Venus is wider than that.

Venus is what you value.

Love, yes. Money. Beauty. Comfort. The things you have decided are worth having, and the price you are quietly willing to pay for them.

Your taste is Venus.

Your standards are Venus.

What you will put up with is Venus.

So for the next six weeks the question on the table is not who loves you. It is what you have decided is worth it.

Now the part almost nobody bothers to say.

Venus is not really going backwards. Planets do not stop and reverse. They never have.

What happens is that the earth catches her up and overtakes her on the inside, the way a faster car on the freeway makes the one beside you look like it is sliding back past your window. The motion is real to your eye, and it is not happening.

Sit with that, because it is the whole teaching. Nothing in your life is going to reverse over the next six weeks.

You are going to be standing somewhere different, and from there you will see the same things from a different angle. Forty years in, I still think that is one of the more useful things the sky does for us.

Here is what makes this particular retrograde worth paying attention to.

Venus turned around at 8 degrees of Scorpio. She spends three weeks walking back through Scorpio, crosses out of it on 25 October, and finishes in Libra on 14 November.

So the six weeks has a shape to it, and the shape matters.

Scorpio is the deep end.

It is what sits underneath, what does not get said out loud, what you want and will not admit you want.

Libra is the room where two people actually meet. Fairness, balance, courtesy, how you treat each other where everyone can see.

So the first half of this asks you what you are not saying.

And the second half asks you what you are actually doing about it.

That is a good order. It is the order I would use myself.

The Sun is in Libra as I write this, so the whole month leans that way anyway.

You will also see plenty of advice this month telling you not to buy anything, not to cut your hair, and not to speak to anyone you used to love.

I would not run your life off that.

What I will say is that a Venus retrograde is a poor time to commit to something you have not properly thought about, and a very good time to properly think about something.

If the haircut is a whim, let it wait six weeks.

If it is six months of quietly wanting it, go and get the haircut.

In forty years of sitting with people, the thing that surfaces in a season like this one is rarely a person.

It is a compromise.

Some arrangement you made a long time ago about what you would accept, made for good reasons at the time, and never looked at since.

That is what comes up for air now.

I have said before that guidance starts as a whisper, and that if you keep ignoring it the whisper gets louder until it goes thermonuclear, and by then you knew a long time ago. Six weeks like this one is the whisper stage. It is the sky being gentle with you before anything has to get loud.

That is a kindness, if you take it.

I am not going to tell you what you will find. I do not know, and anyone who says they do is selling something.

What I will tell you is that you already know which compromise I am talking about.

You thought of it about four paragraphs ago.

You will be your own teacher. You will be your own guide. All I will do is help you to remember what you already know.

So do not go looking for it. Just stop arguing with it for six weeks and see what it says.

What is the one thing you value that you have never actually examined?

There is more teaching like this in The Library, and every daily post is in Daily Posts. If you would like guidance on your own path, see Readings.