By Rob Brezsny
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Dear Rob: When my wife got
pregnant, she was warned that one side effect might be that her feet would grow
a bit. She's now a few months along, and while her feet remain a dainty size 7,
my own feet have expanded from size 12 to 13! I've heard husbands sometimes
have sensations that parallel their pregnant wives' symptoms, but this is
crazy, don't you think? -Vicarious Aries." Dear Vicarious: You Rams are in
a phase when your ability to share the feelings and experiences of others is at
a peak. I suggest you take advantage of this opening to supercharge your
empathy and get closer to your loved ones than you've ever dared.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The new CEO of soft drink giant
PepsiCo is Indra Nooyi, striking a modest but significant blow for female
equality in the business world. That's the good news. The bad news? Pepsi is a
terrible product that rots teeth, has no nutritional value, and contributes to
the obesity epidemic. Keep this in mind as you carry out your assignment in the
coming week, Taurus. Fight and claw and scheme and dream to raise up the power
of the feminine (yes, even if you're a man), but only if it's a version of the
feminine that raises up everyone and everything else, too.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): "It was like a masquerade
festival at eternal midnight," says a character named Flux in Antero
Alli's magical realist movie
The Drivetime
,
"with everyone throwing off mask after mask and never getting to the bottom."
That description has a resemblance to what your life has been like lately,
Gemini. Any day now, however, that will change. The last masks will finally
come off. All will stand revealed. You'll get to the bottom of the core
identities.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Get a hold of some of that
million-year-old salt from the Himalayas and use it to season your food. Maybe
you'd like to sample the Chinese delicacy know as thousand-year-old duck eggs.
Wash it all down with the beer from Greenland that's made of 2,000-year-old
water obtained from melted glaciers. By doing these things, you'd symbolically
imbibe ancient purity, pristine rawness, and the wildest spirits of nature.
That would be right in alignment with what the astrological omens say you need.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Sunny Sky's is an ice cream store in
North Carolina that sells a flavor called Cold Sweat, which is made with three
varieties of hot peppers and two kinds of hot sauce. It's sweet and creamy and
cool and spicy and prickly and fiery all at the same time—kind of like
what I foresee for you in the coming week, Leo. To get the most out of this
extravagantly paradoxical time, I suggest you take small bites. And please wait
a while following each new mouthful to see what the after-effect is before you
load up on more.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Writing in
The New York Times
, Joyce Wadler captured the essence of a genre that
has lost its once-heady repute. "Poetry, if we may take a moment to
explain to the young people," she said, "is an art form somewhat like
rap, only it does not sell, and since the death of Lord Byron [in 1824] there
has been a paucity of bling-bling." At the risk of nudging you toward a
cultural dead end, then, Virgo, I'll ask you to expose yourself to concentrated
doses of poetry this week. In my astrological opinion, you need to have your
brain scrambled and heart flushed in a lyrically healing way, which good poetry
can do. Here are some excellent sources: (1) James Broughton,
http://tinyurl.com/zabt9. (2) Mary Oliver, http://tinyurl.com/z325h. (3) Pablo
Neruda, http://tinyurl.com/l6684. (4) Rainer Maria Rilke,
http://tinyurl.com/gsy3t. (5) Daniel Ladinsky, http://tinyurl.com/f9w2j. (6)
Lots of poets, http://tinyurl.com/kyqzc.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): U.S. Patent number 5,996,568 is an
apparatus for safely shooting hot dogs into a crowd. Patent 4,834,212 is a
device into which someone can scream and howl without bothering anyone nearby,
allowing her to vent pent-up emotions. Patent 2,272,154 is a ladder that
spiders can use to climb out of a bath. Patent 4,247,283 is a gadget that
allows a trumpet to be used as a flamethrower while being played. These are
exactly the kinds of imaginative innovations I urge you to work on, Libra. Your
inventiveness is at an all-time high, as is everyone's need for your
inventiveness.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): It'll be a good time to feed your
demons apple pie and ice cream. Don't scrimp! Other actions that will put you
in fortuitous alignment with the cosmic rhythms: looking for interesting, uplifting,
inspiring trouble; unleashing explosive belly-laughs as you contemplate
everything that makes you angry; forcing yourself to think a kind thought about
someone who misunderstands you; bellowing curses in the direction of the
brightest star you can see, blaming it for all your problems; and hopping and
skipping down the sidewalk or hallway as you sing-song the names of everyone
you dislike.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The Burning Man festival is one
of the planet's most spectacularly idealistic parties. Now in its second
decade, the week-long event annually draws upwards of 40,000 celebrants to a
barren patch of Nevada desert to participate in a "gift economy,"
where no money changes hands and art is as abundant as advertisements are back
in the "real" world. The founder and director of this cultural
triumph is Larry Harvey. His success didn't come quickly. "I was a failed
janitor, failed gardener, failed bike messenger, failed taxi driver," he
testifies. "By any normal standard, I was an abject failure. Now I see
that this was actually a sustained course of study for everything I'm doing
now." With this as your cue, Sagittarius, make a supreme effort to
reinterpret all your so-called flops and missteps as crucial lessons that
helped you develop your unique mission.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): I was nine years old when I first
risked my ass to fight for the rights of others. It was a winter morning in
Ohio. Ten of us kids were waiting on a corner for the school bus to pick us up.
A fifth-grader named Jerry Demasko was doing his usual shtick: insulting and
belittling the girls. When he sneeringly informed little Debbie Runello that
she would always be ugly, I snapped. I tackled him, sat on him, and drove his
face into the freshly fallen snow. "Promise you'll stop being a mean
bastard every minute of your life!" I demanded. He resisted at first, but
when my inflamed strength kept him pinned, he broke. Your assignment,
Capricorn, is to recall the first time you felt an eruption of pure
compassionate rage in the face of injustice. Once you've done that, spend the
next ten days cultivating and expressing that beautiful emotion.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): At any single moment, approximately
0.7 percent of the people on our planet are drunk--at least in a normal week.
In the coming days, however, I believe that a sudden profusion of intoxicated
Aquarians will ensure that the global average rises to at least 1.5 percent. To
be totally accurate, not all of those Aquarians will be sloshed on alcohol or
zonked on drugs. Some will be flying high solely on the strength of their
exhilarating adventures in the unknown, while others will have transcended the
everyday trance through the power of their boundary-shattering meditations or
their breakthrough love-making. Don't you dare miss out on this dizzying
opportunity to lose your mind in the most constructive way possible.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): "When you follow your
bliss," wrote mythologist Joseph Campbell, "doors will open where you
would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door
for anyone else." That's always true, Pisces, but it's especially apropos
for you now. If you swear a blood oath to follow your bliss, vowing to do what
your secret self loves more than anything else, a portal will open that's as
big as a garage door and as sweet as a gateway to a secret garden.
In addition to this column, Rob Brezsny creates EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, in-depth weekly forecasts designed to inspire and uplift you. To buy access, go to freewillastrology.sparkns.com. And be sure to visit his Web site at www.freewillastrology.com.