The days are still getting shorter, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and you can be damn well sure that freedom-loving Sag is already one step ahead of that hot, confining mess.

In a lot of ways, it’s an act of mercy that Sagittarius follows Scorpio in the cosmic order. Just when you thought life couldn’t feel any heavier, Sagittarius busts down your door and throws open the windows on your outlook, reminding you that there’s a big wide world of possibilities beyond your own shadow. We need Scorpio to help us confront the stuff we’d rather ignore, but after a month of probing and reckoning with whatever we found under the hood, we’ve all earned the right to prioritize fun and adventure for a little while.

Here’s another way to look at it: Scorpio digs deep to uncover what’s hidden; Sagittarius takes this knowledge and propels it into the sky in the form of innumerable little arrows. Figuring out what to do with them when they land isn’t terribly important at the moment (that’s Capricorn’s job). For now, what matters is that we can accept what we learned from Scorpio — enough to laugh about it, and enough to start imagining the possibilities contained in this knowledge.

We imagine Sagittarius as a rowdy centaur with a bow of arrows, gallivanting all over the world in pursuit of good times and higher knowledge. Sagittarius certainly doesn’t want to be tied down, and its love of foreign cultures — any ideas and philosophies that expand its world even further — means we’re dealing with an archetype who has hoes in different area codes.

Unlike its opposite sign, Gemini, Sagittarius is concerned with more than information, trivia, and data for curiosity’s sake. Sagittarius deals in knowledge and beliefs, and it’s especially good at contextualizing Scorpio’s mysteries within a larger framework of higher principles — the “big picture,” as some would call it. If you think about it, we can’t really form a system of moral codes or principles without an understanding of humanity’s darkest impulses, so it makes sense that Sagittarius could only come after Scorpio. It’s about confronting the shadow, and then figuring out how to live with it in an ethical manner.

On a metaphysical level, Sagittarius refers to the ongoing expansion of consciousness that’s part and parcel with being alive. We’re all moving targets with an appetite for discovery. Fortunately, the archer’s arrows have a tendency to meet us where we are.

Often associated with travel and higher education, Sagittarius is also known for its blunt honesty, happy-go-lucky optimism, and, at times, obliviousness and dogmatism. Beliefs and principles are tantamount to the archer, and when these are wrapped up in his identity, they become, in a sense, “the only true way.” How ironic that Thanksgiving falls during this time — a day that, according to our modern, whitewashed understanding of history, is about promoting gratitude and optimism, yet often comes with a hefty side dish of political squabbles.

What’s important to note is that the ultimate goal of Sagittarius is always to arrive to a set of values that resonate with its learnings from around the world — that accommodate the big picture of the global community. In other words, Sag wouldn’t be so damn soap-boxy if it didn’t believe in what it was preaching.

And lest you be fooled by the archer’s youthful sense of levity, remember that he’s been through some shit. Sagittarius lacks the innocence of Aries, which looks at the world as a blank slate on which to imprint its mark. Sag has seen the darkness — he just made a conscious decision to sing a little louder, laugh a little longer, and embrace the world a little more freely. How else would we ever find it in ourselves to move forward?

This post was originally published on 11/21/2016 on thedailyhunch.com.