Sun in Libra

The stars of Libra still carry their oldest name. The two brightest are Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneschamali, Arabic for the southern claw and the northern claw, because the Greeks saw them as the Scorpion’s pincers. The Romans turned the claws into a pair of scales, the only object among the zodiac’s creatures.

The Sun enters Libra at the September equinox, when day and night are the same length everywhere on Earth. The tradition calls this sign the Sun’s fall, the place opposite its exaltation: the Sun is the self standing alone, and Libra is the sign of the other person. Venus rules it, and gives back in company what the Sun lacks alone.

The fair answer

At work you find the fair answer and make it look easy, and you can disagree without making an enemy. Two people who were not speaking on Monday are speaking by Friday, and neither of them knows you arranged it. You notice at once when a picture hangs a little crooked, or a colleague has been left out of the conversation. Your manners are not a performance. They are how you keep a mixed group of people workable, and you do it so smoothly that nobody sees the work.

A self made in company

You find out who you are in conversation, and you think best with someone to answer: a colleague, a sister, an old friend across a long lunch. Alone for too long, you lose your outline. Beauty steadies you as well. You have an eye for proportion in clothes, rooms and sentences, and an ugly email bothers you for longer than it should.

Still weighing

You wait to hear what others want and forget to ask what you want. You smooth over the argument that needed to happen, and stay agreeable while you are quietly furious. You say “whatever you like” and mean it, and a week later you do not like it at all. A menu can take you ten minutes, and a large decision can take you a year.

The scales are also the instrument of justice. When someone is treated unfairly in front of you, the weighing stops, and you choose in a second, and choose well.