Last week was light straight overhead. Everything showed up head on and at its real size, and there was no shadow to run to. This is the Sun’s last week in Virgo, the season of what gets done and put in order, and the light begins to come down. It does not go out. It comes from the side again, lower and warmer, the way it does late in the afternoon. And late in the afternoon nobody asks any more what they saw. They ask what they are going to do with it.

The wayfarer who set the bundle of staves down at the entrance to the town has not picked it up again. He has made a fire with it. The staves burn inside a ring of stones in front of the gateway, the flames rise high and do not cross the stones, and he sits on the ground to one side with his hands turned toward the heat. The figure who had been standing far down the road since stepping out of the light has arrived too. She is a woman, and she sits on a low wall on the other side of the fire, one open hand turned toward the heat and in the other a single upright stave. The stave has put out leaves. Nobody asks her where she brought it from.

On Monday the help that arrived last week reaches its highest point. The Sun and Mars come to an exact easy angle, and from then on that bond slowly loosens. Mars is in Cancer, a place of water where his fire struggles to catch, and that is why this force is not wildfire. It is hearth fire: it warms the house because it stays inside the stones, and it would burn everything if it left them. If you want to use Monday to move something that has been stuck, move it with open hands and not with a fist.

On Tuesday Mercury comes fully out of the Sun’s glare, and what was being thought in a low voice comes into view for anyone who looks. On the same day Venus, who is in a place where nothing gets settled on the surface, presses head on against the deepest and slowest planet of them all. It is desire running into what will not be controlled: an attraction that asks for everything, a jealousy that turns up uninvited, a loyalty put to the test. And Venus slows down day after day, like someone braking before coming to a full stop, which only happens at the start of next month. Whatever is felt these days is for looking at calmly, not for signing.

Friday is the day that decides the week. Mercury, in the sign of the scales, stands exactly opposite Saturn, and Saturn is in Aries, a place where he has little strength, and he is walking backwards. The pair of scales that has carried the stone in one pan for weeks now hangs by the roadside with a feather in the other, and both pans hang level. Put plainly: on Friday there is something that has to be said face to face to a demand, a deadline, an authority that lays down conditions loudly because it no longer has anything to hold on to. A hard voice with no ground under its feet tends to speak louder, not truer. The answer that holds is not the one that raises its tone. It is the one that stays seated, with all its warmth, and does not get up.

That same night the Moon reaches half its light, in a fire sign. One half lit, the other half still waiting. It is the point in every month when what began at the New Moon stops being an intention and has to be defended, or let go. What was planted in the small hours of last Friday arrives here halfway along the road, and it asks for a small, firm decision, not a declaration.

What this week asks for is an authority that does not need to raise its voice. It is not coldness and it is not the patience of a saint. It is the warmth of someone sitting by their own fire who knows exactly how much wood to put on it. It has a shadow, and the shadow is the same fire in another shape: wanting to be the centre of the room, measuring other people by the light they give us, mistaking firmness for possession. From outside the two look the same. Only whoever sits close to the fire knows which one it is.

On the world stage the same drawing appears. There are negotiating tables where one side lays down conditions louder and louder, and the louder it speaks the less ground it seems to have. There are truces that hold more out of exhaustion than agreement, the fire kept inside the stones by hands that do not know each other. There are new alliances tightening under pressure, made by those who no longer trust the old shelter. There are narrow passages of sea where a small flame raises the price of everything that crosses the world. There are economic punishments that no longer stop at a single target and reach whoever happens to be nearby. And underneath all of it, on a Wednesday like any other and without anyone noticing, the two slowest planets in the sky fall into step with each other, and very old things shift place without a sound. None of this compels anyone to anything, because the stars incline, they do not compel. The question of the week is this: where do I have a fire that warms the house as long as it stays inside the stones, and how long have I been piling on more wood just so it can be seen from far away?