astrology

Madame Clairevoyant: Horoscopes for the Week of August 30

Actress Shabana Azmi, a Virgo. Photo-Illustration: by Preeti Kinha; Photos: Getty

Early Monday morning, communication planet Mercury enters socially minded Libra, offering you all the tools you need to maintain harmonious relationships with the people in your life. The need to defend your own ideas gives way to a desire to understand others’; judgment becomes compassion. Seen from other angles, this might look like indecision, or an unwillingness to defend your beliefs. But Mercury in Libra brings the understanding that care and friendship and generosity of spirit are just as valuable, just as necessary, as being right all the time.

Weekly Horoscope Aries

Aries Weekly Horoscope

A certain amount of recklessness has served you well in life. It allows you to avoid getting stuck, to charge ahead when others might hesitate, tangled up in doubt. Still, sometimes a little hesitation is a valuable thing. This week, you may find yourself contemplating more and moving less, and that isn’t a problem. Use this time to take stock of where you’ve been and where you’re going. When your mind tells your reckless spirit to wait, heed its call. You can save yourself so much heartache right now by thinking, weighing the options, slowing down.

Weekly Horoscope Taurus

Taurus Weekly Horoscope

There will always be people who want more than you’re able to give, and situations where it feels like you’re required to do and be everything, all at once, without a single mistake. It isn’t fair, and it’s up to you to recognize these as the unreasonable demands that they are. This week, you can refuse to contort yourself trying to achieve the impossible, decline to behave like a machine with no feelings, no boundaries, no limitations. You can commit to the defiant act of living in balance, of honoring your human needs. It doesn’t make you selfish.

Weekly Horoscope Gemini

Gemini Weekly Horoscope

You often find real power in your refusal to be held back, constrained, dictated and limited in how to live. Refusal, in general, is a wonderful, life-giving thing. This week, though, it’s also important to grant yourself the space to say yes too. When you find a project or place or idea that brings you joy, move toward it. When you find a person who lights you up, open the door to them. It doesn’t mean you’re locking yourself into a lifelong commitment, it only means that you’ve found something good, and you can stick with it as long as it keeps carrying you forward.

Weekly Horoscope Cancer

Cancer Weekly Horoscope

If you’ve felt lost lately — like you’re grasping for a sense of purpose and direction that keeps eluding you — it isn’t your fault. Everyone goes through fallow periods; humans live in seasons, just like plants and animals and everything else under the sun. The trouble is when you mistake these natural cycles for something else, imagining that what you’re experiencing isn’t a moment in an ongoing story, but a reflection of some deep, essential truth about you. This week, try not to take all your self-doubt to heart. Even if you haven’t been feeling your bravest, your courage hasn’t vanished forever: It’s all still within you.

Weekly Horoscope Leo

Leo Weekly Horoscope

When the truth is too painful to accept, there’s comfort to be found in fantasy. Reality is so often ugly, troublesome, unwieldy. This week, though, it’s your task not to believe in any lies, not even the ones that seem most appealing. (In any case, you’re too smart and clear-headed right now to actually take comfort in false reassurances.) Instead, you can find real and vital beauty and possibility. You can find reason to believe in the people around you, and it won’t just be wishful thinking.

Weekly Horoscope Virgo

Virgo Weekly Horoscope

It could be easy, this week, to let yourself be guided by your worst, deepest cynicism. It’s certainly an understandable impulse. But if you let your jaded side take over completely, it’ll be hard to navigate your way back to joy, to the knowledge that this planet and its people are beautiful and worth protecting. The truth is that the world is filled with others who are trying every bit as much as you are, who care as much as you do, who are ready to fight alongside you, if only you’ll ask. Right now, pessimism won’t protect you, but connection and solidarity can, and can change everything.

Weekly Horoscope Libra

Libra Weekly Horoscope

You might feel that your usual tools for combating loneliness no longer work as well as they used to. Your old community might be shifting or fracturing, and your friendships taking on new shapes. The world is in constant motion, and so it can seem like you’re constantly working to get your bearings and catch your balance, only for everything to transform once more. Right now, you might not find support in the same places you used to, but you can find it all the same. If you fear that all of this change will leave you in isolation, this week will prove you wrong.

Weekly Horoscope Scorpio

Scorpio Weekly Horoscope

Most of the time, your habit of questioning easy answers is a gift, one that makes you astute and interesting and almost impossible to deceive. Occasionally, though, the easy answer is in fact the right one. And when you ignore what’s on the surface in order to dive deep, you can end up missing the valuable information in plain sight. While some people aren’t straightforward about their desires and intentions, others are. While some hide their feelings, others share them honestly. This week, hold on to your skepticism, just remember that sometimes you can take people at their word.

Weekly Horoscope Sagittarius

Sagittarius Weekly Horoscope

Fear can make anyone’s heart temporarily contract; anxiety can expand until it blocks out the sunlight, and makes it hard to remember that anything better ever existed or might be again. Lately, you’ve been feeling this kind of world-shrinking fear too (how could you not?). But this week, it becomes possible to turn toward your friends and neighbors and community, to come back to your natural generosity. By responding to the world around you with openness, the best parts of you can reemerge. Other people can bring you back to your best self.

Weekly Horoscope Capricorn

Capricorn Weekly Horoscope

Ultimately, it’s worthwhile to hold yourself and others to high standards. But this week, it’s important to think about whether these standards are fair, too: not just in ideal conditions, but in the complicated world that actually exists. Nobody can thrive in all situations, or remain unaffected by what’s happening all around them. Sheer determination can get you far, but it’s never enough on its own. You’re part of a community, and there is support awaiting you — more than you even realize — when you need it.

Weekly Horoscope Aquarius

Aquarius Weekly Horoscope

It can be challenging to balance your human need for closeness with your desire to be left alone. It can be hard to know where to find love, when so many other people’s idea of what love is leaves you cold. So often, the intimacy you crave isn’t all softness and tender words, but the bright, sparkling clarity of a moment of recognition: the sense that you are known, that someone has seen your hidden brilliance or secret pain for exactly what it is. This week, you won’t have to muddle through alone: The world will offer the understanding you seek.

Weekly Horoscope Pisces

Pisces Weekly Horoscope

People talk to you, sometimes, as though the whole universe is straightforward and simple, as though every person, every story, every feeling, can be analyzed and deemed either good or bad, useful or pointless. But this approach leaves out so much. The world is rebellious in its complexity, full of people — including you — who resist easy categorization. This week, you can rebuff all attempts at understanding that only leave you feeling dull, unimaginative, diminished. You are alive and in motion, and you can reject every narrative that attempts to flatten you into something less.

Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of August 23. The weekly horoscopes for the week of September 6 will be online next Sunday.

Get Claire Comstock-Gay’s book, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, out now.

Madame Clairevoyant: Horoscopes for the Week of August 30