Rob Brezsny crop
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Avery, a character in Anne Michaels’ novel The Winter Vault, has a unique way of seeing. When he arrives in a place for the first time, he “makes room for it in his heart.” He “lets himself be altered” by it. At one point in the story he visits an old Nubian city in Egypt and is overwhelmed by its exotic beauty. Its brightly colored houses are like “shouts of joy,” like “gardens springing up in the sand after a rainfall.” After drinking in the sights, he marvels, “It will take all my life to learn what I have seen today.” Everything I just described is akin to experiences you could have in the coming weeks, Pisces. Can you make room in your heart for the dazzle?
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The battles you’ve been waging these last ten months have been worthy of you. They’ve tested your mettle and grown your courage. But I suspect that your relationship with these battles is due for a shift. In the future they may not serve you as well as they have up until now. At the very least, you will need to alter your strategy and tactics. It’s also possible that now is the time to leave them behind entirely—to graduate from them and search for a new cause that will activate the next phase of your evolution as an enlightened warrior. What do you think?
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony,” said Lou Reed. That might be an accurate assessment for most people much of the time, but I don’t think it will be true for you in the coming days. On the contrary: You will have a special capacity to make contact and establish connection. You’ve heard of dog whisperers and ghost whisperers? You will be like an all-purpose, jack-of-all-trades whisperer—able to commune and communicate with nervous creatures and alien life forms and pretty much everything else. If anyone can get a pony to understand Sanskrit, it will be you.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Does Kim Kardashian tweak and groom her baby daughter’s eyebrows? They look pretty amazing, after all—elegant, neat, perfectly shaped. What do you think, Gemini? HA! I was just messing with you. I was checking to see if you’re susceptible to getting distracted by meaningless fluff like celebrity kids’ grooming habits. The cosmic truth of the matter is that you should be laser-focused on the epic possibilities that your destiny is bringing to your attention. It’s time to reframe your life story. How? Here’s my suggestion: See yourself as being on a mythic quest to discover and fully express your soul’s code.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): The 19th-century American folk hero known as Wild Bill Hickok was born James Butler Hickok. At various times in his life he was a scout for the army, a lawman for violent frontier towns, a professional gambler, and a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Women found him charismatic, and he once killed an attacking bear with a knife. He had a brother Lorenzo who came to be known as Tame Bill Hickok. In contrast to Wild Bill, Tame Bill was quiet, gentle, and cautious. He lived an uneventful life as a wagon master, and children loved him. Right now, Cancerian, I’m meditating on how I’d like to see your inner Wild Bill come out to play for a while, even as your inner Tame Bill takes some time off.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “If I was a love poet,” writes Rudy Francisco, addressing a lover, “I’d write about how you have the audacity to be beautiful even on days when everything around you is ugly.” I suspect you have that kind of audacity right now, Leo. In fact, I bet the ugliness you encounter will actually incite you to amplify the gorgeous charisma you’re radiating. The sheer volume of lyrical soulfulness that pours out of you will have so much healing power that you may even make the ugly stuff less ugly. I’m betting that you will lift up everything you touch, nudging it in the direction of grace and elegance and charm.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” says hockey great Wayne Gretzky. In other words, you shouldn’t be timid about shooting the puck toward the goal. Don’t worry about whether you have enough skill or confidence or luck. Just take the damn shot. You’ll never score if you don’t shoot. Or so the theory goes. But an event in a recent pro hockey game showed there’s an exception to the rule. A New York player named Chris Kreider was guiding the puck with his stick as he skated toward the Minnesota team’s goalie. But when Kreider cocked and swung his stick, he missed the puck entirely. He whiffed. And yet the puck kept sliding slowly along all by itself. It somehow flummoxed the goalie, sneaking past him right into the net. Goal! New rule: You miss only 99.9 percent of the shots you don’t take. I believe you will soon benefit from this loophole, Virgo.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): If you are the type of person who wears gloves when you throw snowballs, Germans would call you Handschuhschneeballwerfer. They use the same word as slang to mean “coward.” I’m hoping that in the coming days you won’t display any behavior that would justify you being called Handschuhschneeballwerfer. You need to bring a raw, direct, straightforward attitude to everything you do. You shouldn’t rely on any buffers, surrogates, or intermediaries. Metaphorically speaking, make sure that nothing comes between your bare hands and the pure snow.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In his song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” Bruce Springsteen mentions a disappointing development. “That waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me,” he sings. “She said she won’t set herself on fire for me anymore.” I’m assuming nothing like that has happened to you recently, Scorpio. Just the opposite: I bet there are attractive creatures out there who would set themselves on fire for you. If for some reason this isn’t true, fix the problem! You have a cosmic mandate to be incomparably irresistible.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “Some people say home is where you come from,” says a character in Katie Kacvinsky’s novel Awaken. “But I think it’s a place you need to find, like it’s scattered and you pick pieces of it up along the way.” That’s an idea I invite you to act on in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. It will be an excellent time to discover more about where you belong and who you belong with. And the best way to do that is to be aggressive as you search far and wide for clues, even in seemingly unlikely places that maybe you would never guess contain scraps of home.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): What words bring the most points in the game of Scrabble? Expert Christopher Swenson says that among the top scorers are “piezoelectrical” and “ubiquitarianism”—assuming favorable placements on the board that bring double letter and triple word scores. The first word can potentially net 1,107 points, and the second 1,053. There are metaphorical clues here, Capricorn, for how you might achieve maximum success in the next phase of the game of life. You should be well-informed about the rules, including their unusual corollaries and loopholes. Be ready to call on expert help and specialized knowledge. Assume that your luck will be greatest if you are willing to plan nonstandard gambits and try bold tricks.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Sorry to report that you won’t win the lottery this week. It’s also unlikely that you will score an unrecognized Rembrandt painting for a few dollars at a thrift store or discover that you have inherited a chinchilla farm in Peru or stumble upon a stash of gold coins half-buried in the woods. On the other hand, you may get provocative clues about how you could increase your cash flow. To ensure you will notice those clues when they arrive, drop your expectations about where they might come from.