The wide-open freedom of Sagittarius season can feel like relief: It’s hard to live with Scorpio’s focused intensity full-time. Although Scorpio season can offer a much-needed opportunity for clarity and sharpness, for reckoning with the world’s darker truths, it’s difficult to find your attention constantly redirected toward sharpness and suspicion, difficult to live with a mind like a laser. Thankfully, this next month is about approaching the world with openness and enthusiasm instead of mistrust. It offers a chance to see the big picture and embrace it, without doubt and without overthinking.
The sun is in Sagittarius each year from about November 22 to December 22, and during its time there it encourages us to live with an expansive, optimistic curiosity. While Scorpio encourages us to deepen our knowledge of the world, to dig and dig until we reach the truth, Sagittarius encourages us to broaden it — to explore, to ask questions, to see and experience as much of the world as we can. Sagittarius is a fire sign, and it can, at its best, illuminate the world. At its core, Sagittarius is about the quest for knowledge, understanding, and purpose.
But for Sagittarius, this focus on knowledge and higher learning doesn’t typically translate to quiet, scholarly seriousness. After all, knowledge isn’t just information and ideas, but experiences, too. Sagittarius is the sign of travel, particularly across long distances — the sign most emblematic of the desire to see the world. Ruled by Jupiter, planet of generosity, abundance, and luck, Sagittarius sees the world as a place worth seeing, and the experiences it has to offer as experiences worth having. Sagittarius has fundamentally optimistic nature: a desire to experience everything the world has to offer requires a basic faith that those things are, in fact, worthwhile.
So while the sun is in Sagittarius, you might find yourself feeling particularly optimistic and adventurous, open to experiences and activities that are unfamiliar. You might be more eager than usual to travel somewhere far away, to see the world outside the confines of your everyday life, to explore the unknown with an open, curious heart. This is a season for buses and trains, for talking to strangers, for asking questions you might have previously hesitated to bring up. Conversely, if your life doesn’t easily accommodate variation, and if your limitations and obligations make your existing routines difficult to break, Sagittarius season can be a time of intense restlessness and desire for escape.
But if Sagittarius gives us the condition of restlessness, it also offers the strength to escape. And in Sagittarius season, escape can be a simple and straightforward thing — it doesn’t require cunning or trickery or deceit, just a direct, courageous bluntness. All we need to do is feel our desire — for purpose, for knowledge, for a life of abundance — and let that desire move us.
Sometimes, a Sagittarian move to escape can appear messy, like when Britney Spears, a Sagittarius, shaved her head in 2007 — an anarchic, rebellious assertion of independence in response to a total lack of independence in her hyper-surveilled pop-star life. (Sinéad O’Connor, also a Sagittarius, described shaving her head as a way to free herself from the violent oppression of male attention.) But Sagittarius’s desire for freedom can be more intentional too, like when Arundhati Roy — another Sagittarius who famously cut her hair — stopped publishing fiction for 20 years after winning the Booker Prize, choosing to follow her intellectual energy where it led her, and start writing nonfiction about politics and empire instead.
Sagittarius season will ask you to accept some amount of disorder, even if you tend to like things orderly and predictable. Think of this not as a curse, but an opportunity to make your world, your life, your mind grow bigger. In Sagittarius season, you don’t have to plan five steps ahead; you can trust that each step you take will create extraordinary, unimagined possibilities. You can treat the rules that bind you as though they aren’t even there. You can feel your mind and your heart expanding, reaching out toward the whole wide world.