For three weeks there was a door that opened the other way. Mars pushing at Saturn, neither of them at home, the pressure climbing every day and never arriving. It arrived on the first day of this month, and it passed. This week is what comes after a long effort, and what comes after a long effort is almost never rest. It is light.

The wayfarer who was climbing the road with a bundle of staves held in front of his face has arrived. He has set the load down. And the first thing that happens to anyone who sets down a load he carried for months is not relief, it is the view. He sees the road he made, he sees where he arrived, and he sees the bundle lying on the ground with one stave fewer than it had when he lifted it. It was lost somewhere along the way and he never noticed. Nobody is going to tell him which one it was.

The Sun crosses the whole week in Virgo, the season of what gets done and put in order, and in the small hours of Friday the Moon meets it at the very same degree and disappears completely inside its light. That is what sets the tone of the seven days: there is no second light in the sky. The Moon, the one that shows things slowly and from the side, leaves the stage, and what is left is the light that shows everything head on and all at once. It is what usually happens in the middle of the day, when there is no shadow anywhere to look into and things are exactly the size they are.

On Thursday three things happen within a few hours, and it is the day that turns the week. In the morning Venus leaves Libra, which is her own house, where she spent the whole month at ease, and enters a place where nothing gets settled on the surface. Late in the afternoon Mercury leaves Virgo, which is also his own house and the place where he thinks best, and crosses into Libra, where everything you think has to be weighed against what somebody else thinks. Both leave home on the same day, a few hours apart, and neither comes back this week.

And at that same hour, late on Thursday afternoon, Uranus stops. It has been at the same degree and the same minute of the sky since Monday without moving, and on Thursday it turns and starts going backwards. It is worth saying plainly what this is: something that had been advancing for months stops advancing, stands still in plain view of everyone, and then starts back down the road it came by. It does not announce itself loudly. It is a decision coming undone, a direction reversing, a thing taken as settled left suddenly half done.

Mercury, meanwhile, is coming out of the Sun’s glare. Two weeks ago it went into the exact centre of that glare and brought back a clarity that arrived quietly and already finished. Now it comes out again and can be seen once more, low, just after sunset. What happened in silence begins this week to have to be said out loud, and to be said in a place where being right on your own is no longer enough.

On Saturday afternoon, with less than an hour between one and the other, the sky does both at once. Mercury comes into good angle with the deepest and slowest planet of them all, and at the same time stands exactly opposite the one that dissolves outlines. Put plainly: on the same day there is one thing seen with a sharpness nobody can argue with, and another, right beside it, that will not be seen at all however much light you put on it. Both are true. The temptation of the day is to use the sharpness of the one to pretend the other is settled too.

There is also help that this time actually arrives. The Sun and Mars come closer to an easy angle every day, and it is the exact opposite of what happened in August: instead of force hitting a wall, it is force that finds a way through. It is not spectacular. It is only the difference between pushing and being pushed. If you have something that has been stuck for weeks, this is the week to put a hand on it again.

On the world stage the same drawing appears. There are things that come into plain sight with nobody able to deny them, and what gets discovered is not that they were hidden, it is that they were in plain view and nobody had looked. There is a decision announced long ago as irreversible that halts and begins to move backwards, with the same people now explaining the opposite of what they were explaining. There are those who carried a weight for months and only now, with the weight on the ground, notice what it cost them. There is a clarity that arrives so clean that there is no arguing with it any more, and even so nothing changes, because seeing and doing are different things and the distance between them is always longer than it looks. None of this compels anyone to anything, because the stars incline, they do not compel. The question of the week is this: of everything this week showed me in full light, how much did I already know before it was shown to me, and how long had I been pretending I had not noticed?