August 2023: Horoscopes for Moderns

What if we drop our story and live life from a place of open-ended curiosity? This is what's asked of us during August's highly-charged new Moon on the 16th.

TWO WRITERS PRESENT two points of view on the theme of living life without a narrative.

David Shields writes: “There isn’t any story. It’s not the story. It’s just this breathtaking world that’s the point. The story is not important; what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel stuff. That’s what puts you there.”

And just back home from an early evening walk, Bernard Cooper places Shields’ suggestion into the natural world:

“Why just yesterday I was lamenting all these things when I saw a stream of blackbirds soaring over the city. Endless they were, like winged pieces of letters, like a moving sign in Times Square, heraldic and quick and colossal. Except that a message never appeared. Their transmigration riddled the sky.”

The new Moon in Leo (our hunger for life) on the 16th is highly charged. A push-pull set of aspects bookends the middle of the month.

The new Moon squares Uranus in Taurus (the compulsive desire for freedom) while Mars in Virgo trines Uranus (nothing can stop me now!) and shifts our engine into high gear. And so it would seem all systems are set to go—GO—GO!

But then our standard impulse toward self-expression is confronted by a muddle when Mars opposes Neptune (winning through pausing) on the 22nd.

What to make of this month’s go-stop paradox?