September 2026
I have a funny story to share with you. I wrote an essay for this month’s Jemez Mountain Horoscope column, the one you are reading right now. I always like to have another pair of eyes on it before submitting it for publication. The usual check for grammar and punctuation, but also to make sure it actually makes sense to someone else before I publish it.
This month, I was driving back from town with my wife. I asked her if I could read the latest horoscope essay aloud to her and see what she thought. About halfway through my reading, she cut me off.
“You can’t publish this!”
“What! Why not?” I argued defensively.
“You know why,” she said, glancing over at me and temporarily taking her eyes off the road.
I felt dejected and grumbled a little bit, but after thinking about it for a while, I knew she was right.
“I’m just looking out for you,” she said later on.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, knowing that the real reason I didn’t want her to be “right” was that it meant having to drum up a whole new essay. Twice the work!
The ironic thing about all of this is that this month’s horoscope column is about the planet Venus and its current journey through the sign of Scorpio, a place where Venus is traditionally debilitated. In ancient astrology, Venus is thought to be in exile in Scorpio because she is in the sign opposite her domicile of Taurus. This condition is often described as a stranger in a strange land. A planet in this condition may express some of its more difficult significations.
So this month, as Venus moves through the sign of her exile, including a significant retrograde back over territory she has already covered, we can expect exactly what I encountered earlier this week as Venus first entered Scorpio: arguments with loved ones, strained relationship dynamics, and reversals or revisions of creative or artistic projects—all significations of Venus feeling the strain of her current journey as a stranger through the strange lands of Scorpio.
So the funny thing is that I was trying to write about Venus in Scorpio while being fully engaged in a classic archetypal Venus in Scorpio moment and not even realizing it until I sat down to rewrite the horoscopes. And that’s astrology at its finest—to realize that the dynamics you were writing about happened to be staring you straight in the face the whole time, and you didn’t even realize it.
The honest truth is that Venus in Scorpio may not always be the easiest terrain to navigate, but it is well worth taking your time with it. And when you can, try and find the humor in being human. After all, some say the soul is built on relationships.
