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Free will astrology

Week of January 7

ARIES (March 21-April 19): According to my reading of the astrological omens, it'll be a hair-on-fire kind of week for you - and yet also a heart-in-repose kind of week. In other words, you have the potential to be fierce and relaxed, vigorously ambitious and sublimely poised. In fact, this might be one of those rare times when you can be both a justice-dispensing warrior and an enlightenment-seeking magician. Want to turn water into wine when the pressure's on? Find the pearl of great price in the heat of the battle? Feats like these are quite possible.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Can you pull off a mid-course correction while hurtling through the air across a chasm during a leap of faith? If anyone is capable of such a feat, you are. However, I'd prefer it if that wasn't necessary. I'd rather see you prepare a little better, like by procuring the help you'd need to create a safety net or sturdy bridge that will stretch across the chasm. Or by getting one of those jet packs to strap across your back and allow you to fly. Or by taking as much guesswork as possible out of the details about how you're going to get from the edge of one cliff to the edge on the other side.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): This is one of those rare times when you can get abundant access to insider secrets, unauthorized information, taboo knowledge, and forbidden wisdom. Proceed carefully. As much as I'm an advocate of you getting to the whole truth and nothing but the truth, it's also my duty to remind you that it could be disruptive to find out all of the truth in one big swoop. You should ask yourself if you're fully prepared to change what needs to be changed once the previously hidden stuff emerges. If you're not, it might be better to wait until you are.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Which metropolitan areas in America have the most brainpower? Not the best sports teams or the richest businessmen or the most powerful politicians, but the smartest people? "The Daily Beast" did a study and declared that the top two were the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina and the San Francisco Bay Area. Now it so happens that those are the two places where I've spent much of my adult life. It doesn't mean I'm brilliant, but it does suggest I have an instinct for knowing where the brilliant people congregate. And I'm quite sure that they have been a very good influence on me. My recommendation to you in 2010, Cancerian, is to cultivate this knack. Gravitate toward genius. Surround yourself with deep thinkers and innovative dreamers. Hang out in the vicinity of brainstorms.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): "The more you complain," says an old adage, "the longer God lets you live." If that's true, I hope you will be adding many years to your lifespan in the coming week. Would you like to live to the age of 100? There are many rich and colorful opportunities for you to lodge protests right now. You have cosmic permission to rouse a ruckus in the name of improving the way everything works. But try to concentrate on constructive criticism that really helps transform what's stuck. The Divine Wow is more likely to give credit for that approach than for mere narcissistic grousing.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): A reader calling herself Rebellioness collaborated with me to come up with five revolutionized approaches to the art of rebellion. I present them here for your use, as they identify the kinds of behavior that will be most nurturing for you to cultivate in the coming weeks. 1. Experimenting with uppity, mischievous optimism. 2. Invoking insurrectionary levels of wildly interesting generosity. 3. Indulging in an insolent refusal to be chronically fearful. 4. Pursuing a cheeky ambition to be as wide-awake as a dissident young messiah. 5. Bringing reckless levels of creative intelligence to all expressions of love.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I want to tell you about Harj, a character in Douglas Coupland's novel Generation A. He's an enterprising young Sri Lankan man who sells "celebrity room tones" over the Internet. Each hour-long recording purports to convey the sound of the silence that pervades the homes of luminaries like Mick Jagger and Cameron Diaz when they're not there. I think that you Libras are now primed to learn from Harj's example. Like him, you have the power to capitalize on nothingness and absence and emptiness.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): A guy I know broke up with his girlfriend recently. He used a time-honored strategy: making it sound as if he wasn't worthy of her. "It's like you're a grandmaster at a chess tournament," he told her, "while I just got my first checkerboard and am still figuring out how to play checkers." He was implying that she was much more skillful than he was in the art of relationships. I have a feeling that there's a situation like this in your world, Scorpio - an alliance in which the two parties are at different levels of maturity. I'm not necessarily saying you should sever the connection. But you should at least acknowledge the gap and decide what to do about it.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In a million years, I would never authorize you to unleash your naked greed and give it unconditional license to careen through the world gobbling and acquiring and appropriating. However, due to an odd blip in the astrological configurations, I am at liberty to give you permission to unleash your discerning, elegant greed and grant it a temporary dispensation to sample more than usual of anything that captivates your ravenous imagination.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): "You are what you love, not what loves you," says the character Charlie Kaufman in the film, Adaptation. (Kaufman is played by Nicolas Cage, who has three planets in Capricorn.) I urge you to work hard to make that perspective your own, Capricorn. Ideally, it will become a permanent addition to your philosophy of life. But please at least try to install it as your primary words to live by for the next three weeks. To do so will smooth out a distortion in your energy field, making it easier for people to love you.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I suspect you have to go down into the underworld for a while. But you have a choice about how it will play out. You shouldn't wait for some random goblin to come along and pull you down into the miserable abyss. Instead, be proactive. Shop around for a more useful abyss - a womb-like pit with half-decent accommodations and a good learning environment - and go there under your own power. That way you won't have to slog your way through musty fogs and creepy pests and slimy muck. You'll keep your suffering to a minimum and attract adventures that are more intriguing than demoralizing.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): When my acupuncturist pushes a needle into my chest, my feet sometimes twitch involuntarily. A jab in my earlobe can cause my hand to leap off the table; when she pokes the bridge of my nose, my liver may throb. The lesson for me is that parts of the body are linked in ways that aren't obvious. I invite you to expand this principle as you use it to evaluate the interconnections between different areas of your life. How do your attitudes about love affect your ability to attract money? (And vice versa.) Are there any ways in which your capacity for happiness is affected by your political views? How do your judgments about other people impact your physical health? More than even you farseeing Pisceans imagine, everything's linked to everything.

 

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