astrology

Madame Clairevoyant: Horoscopes for the Week of July 13

Courtney Love, a Cancer. Photo-Illustration: by Preeti Kinha; Photos: Getty Images

Early Sunday morning, communication planet Mercury — which had been retrograde since mid-June — stationed direct in Cancer. It will still be in its retrograde shadow for the next two weeks. This is a time to wind down after the confusion and distractedness of Mercury retrograde, a time to process its lessons, a time to reset your thinking and to catch your balance again.

Weekly Horoscope Aries

Aries Weekly Horoscope

This week, you’ll likely find yourself pushing back against alienation, against isolation, against ideologies of lonely individualism in everything you do. This doesn’t mean that you have to be physically together with the people you love. Rather, it’s about celebrating, and not rejecting, the ways that you need other people. It’s about embracing, not resisting, the idea that your survival is bound up with the survival of friends and rivals and strangers. It’s a week to live with the beautiful understanding that you can’t — and don’t have to — go it alone.

Weekly Horoscope Taurus

Taurus Weekly Horoscope

It’s easy to imagine that you’re already basically complete, that you’ve reached your final form and are as wise and as good as you’ll ever be. It’s easy to imagine that the skills and the knowledge you have now are all you’ll ever have, so you’ll just have to make of them what you can. It can be valuable to be resourceful like this, but this week, remember that there’s another option, too: the option to keep growing, to learn things you don’t already know. It isn’t too late to learn the skills you wish you had. It isn’t too late to grow.

Weekly Horoscope Gemini

Gemini Weekly Horoscope

This week, instead of looking out to the farthest horizons, and instead of dreaming of some grand unified theory of everything, focus on putting things right in your own house, your own life, your own small corner of the world. You don’t have to do everything this week. Instead, try to focus your energies on the people and places you already belong to — the ones you’re accountable to, and that are accountable to you in return. Your frustrations will feel so much smaller this way, and the rewards so much greater.

Weekly Horoscope Cancer

Cancer Weekly Horoscope

You might have yourself convinced that it’s irresponsible to move until you’ve considered every possible outcome, irresponsible to express an opinion until you’ve read every book in the library, irresponsible to believe in any future except for one that’s been thoroughly vetted. You might have yourself convinced that it’s unethical to do anything at all until your mind is clear. And while it’s true that you have an obligation to be thoughtful and to act with care, this is a week to remind yourself that you don’t have to be perfect before you can try, before you can live.

Weekly Horoscope Leo

Leo Weekly Horoscope

The trouble with holding people — including yourself — to such high standards is that you have to constantly witness your standards not being met. It’s so painful to watch other people acting in ways that are harmful, in ways that are intentionally or accidentally cruel. It’s more painful still to know that you’ve acted in these ways, too. This week, give yourself permission to stop punishing yourself for every mistake you’ve ever made. This week, try to create space in your life for imperfection, space for mistakes, space to keep learning as you move closer and closer to the world you really want.

Weekly Horoscope Virgo

Virgo Weekly Horoscope

Every once in a while, you can start to feel like change is really coming; every once in a while, you can catch a glimpse of delicate, shimmering possibilities opening up in this moment. The problem is that these feelings of sweetness always shift back into feelings of fear, of loneliness and grief. Despair feels awful, but your job right now isn’t to permanently expel it from your heart, nor is it to grab hold of your hope and make it last forever. Your feelings may be shifting and wavelike, but your courage is steady, and you can ride them out.

Weekly Horoscope Libra

Libra Weekly Horoscope

Moments of crisis can often be moments of clarity. In the face of danger, in the face of true urgency, everything unimportant finally falls away. The trouble is that this clarity is fleeting; its sparkling, bright magic fades quickly under the stresses of everyday life. But that doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing. This week, think about what you can take away from such moments of crisis, what you can carry with you. Maybe it’s a fresh sense of your own power, maybe it’s a transformed view of what really matters to you, or maybe it’s a renewed feeling that another world might truly be possible.

Weekly Horoscope Scorpio

Scorpio Weekly Horoscope

This is a week to remind yourself that softness is not at all the same as ineffectiveness; vulnerability is not at all the same as brittle fragility. And in fact, the harder you try to stave off your softness, the closer you’ll come to ineffectiveness; the harder you resist your vulnerability, the more fragile you’ll grow. This is a week for cultivating your softness and your power side by side. They’ll feed and reinforce each other; they’ll make each other stronger and brighter.

Weekly Horoscope Sagittarius

Sagittarius Weekly Horoscope

This week, you might feel called to consider changing the role you play in the world. You might feel called to step up into a new role that’s been thrust upon you, or to step back from a position that no longer quite fits, that no longer aligns with the person you’re trying to be. This kind of change might not feel like growth, at first — rather, you might feel like you’re reverting to a state of inexperience, like you’re becoming a novice again. But that’s okay: Inexperience can be a clarifying, beautiful, generative state to be in.

Weekly Horoscope Capricorn

Capricorn Weekly Horoscope

This week, you might feel yourself still reeling from a recent change or reset, a recent disruption of everything you thought you knew. You might feel yourself still scrambling to make sense of these changes, whether they’ve taken place in the outside world or inside your own heart. You might feel pressure to start moving forward again, to take all your new knowledge and run with it, but remember that you don’t have to hurry. If you aren’t yet ready to move ahead at full speed, then let yourself wait, and think, and heal a little longer.

Weekly Horoscope Aquarius

Aquarius Weekly Horoscope

It’s easy to hold yourself accountable to unreachable ideals, to imagine your life as a long journey toward a state of perfection. This week, though, try to challenge your own strict conceptions of linear progress; try to remember how much brilliance and beauty is out there waiting to surprise you, waiting to change your mind. This isn’t a week for openness, not stasis, for curiosity, not certainty. Right now there is no clear, unambiguous path forward, no grand answer to be unlocked, only the unending sweetness of curiosity, the unexpected gifts of movement.

Weekly Horoscope Pisces

Pisces Weekly Horoscope

You have a strong innate sense for the world’s complexities, a clear understanding that everything we do is informed by long, layered, tangled-up histories. But this week, your job isn’t to trace everything back to its root, or to try and predict history’s bending path. Instead, try to shift your thinking away from complexity and toward simplicity. Your plans don’t have to be deep and wise and infinitely complicated. Right now, you can simply push forward with all the power that’s been given to you. In doing so, you’ll discover all the power you can build.

Read the weekly horoscopes for the week of July 6. The weekly horoscopes for the week of July 20 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 July 13