Some weeks are for deciding and some weeks are for carrying. This one is the second kind. The last one ended with a scale settling and a judgment already formed, and this one begins exactly where that left off: with nothing left to weigh, only what was decided, and somebody has to carry it all the way.

The effort of these days has one simple problem, which is a lack of leverage. Mars crosses Cancer, a sign with no taste at all for force, and goes on pushing at Saturn, who sits in Aries with nothing of his own there and barely moves. One presses, the other will not give, and neither of them is at home. It is the exact feeling of pushing a door that opens the other way. The pressure climbs every day from Monday to Sunday and only peaks in the week that follows, which means these seven days are all uphill from start to finish.

And there is a figure who runs through the whole week, on foot, bent over, climbing a road with a bundle of staves on his shoulder. Three weeks ago that bundle was on the back of someone walking. Last week it sat on the pan of a scale, waiting for sentence. Now it has been lifted again, and this time nobody gave the order. He takes every stave at once, because making two trips looks to him like wasted time, and because setting half of it down sounds to him like giving up on half. The load is so high that it hides his face. Whoever watches him pass does not see his face, and he does not see the end of the road.

Relief exists, and it has not arrived. Jupiter and Saturn have been walking towards each other for weeks, and by Sunday night there is less than half a degree left between them, next to nothing. The meeting happens on the following Monday, one day after this week closes. That is what sets the tone of the seven days: the help exists, it is in sight, it is nearly here, and it does not arrive in time. Anyone who wants to check with their own eyes should look east before the sky lightens. Jupiter is out of the Sun’s glare and back again, low, a little earlier and a little higher every morning.

Thursday holds the quietest and most important thing of the week. Mercury, which last week had vanished inside the Sun’s glare, reaches the exact centre of it. In old astrology this is not a death. It is a welcome: the planet enters the king’s chamber and comes back out with what it went in for. And it does so inside Virgo, which it entered on Tuesday, its own house and the place in the sky where Mercury thinks best. Put into everyday terms: the clarity of this week comes silent. It does not announce itself, it does not argue with anyone, and it cannot be watched happening. It shows up already finished, probably while you are busy with something else entirely.

On Friday the Moon is full, and a full Moon is above all too much light. It lights up at once everything the week has been carrying, and what you carry always looks bigger once you see the whole of it. It fills in Pisces, on the far side of the Sun, which is in Virgo: on one side what can be counted and put in order, on the other what fits into no account at all and still weighs. And that same Friday there is a jolt. The Sun and Mercury both come to a hard angle with Uranus within hours of each other, and Uranus is always the thing that comes loose. News at the wrong hour, a part that slips out of place, a rope that slackens. It can be relief and it can be double the work, and the difference between the two lies in how well it was tied.

Venus, meanwhile, is past the hard part. She stays in Libra, her own house, leaving behind the standoff with Saturn that marked last week. What was weighed has been weighed. The temptation now is to reopen it every day to see whether this time it comes out differently, and that is where a decision stops being a decision and becomes just one more thing on your back.

Above all of it, the Sun crosses the entire week in Virgo, which is the season of what one does. Work, detail, tidying, repairs, lists. Virgo is good at counting, and that is exactly where it goes wrong this week, because the thing being carried is the one thing that cannot be set down to be counted.

On the world’s stage the same design appears. There are loads that fall on people who did not choose them and stay there because there is nobody else to hold them. There are commitments taken on across years that all come due in the same month, and the problem is no longer any one of them, it is that they are all at once. There are those who keep adding staves to the bundle with great conviction and have never once carried the bundle. There is help announced with a great deal of noise for a date that falls after the deadline of the people who need it. And there is, on a day of full light, something badly tied that comes loose and does not get tied again, a document, a recording, a sentence said in the belief that nobody was listening. None of this compels anyone to anything, because the stars do not compel, they incline. The week’s question remains: of everything I am carrying, how much did I truly choose to carry, how much was put up there without anyone asking me, and how much could I have set down long ago and did not, only because setting it down felt like giving up?