ARIES (March 21-April 19): There’s something resembling a big red snake slithering around in your mind lately. Not literally, of course. I’m talking about a big red imaginary snake. But it’s still potent. Whether it ends up having a disorienting or benevolent influence on your life depends on your relationship with it. Respect it but let it know you’re the boss. Give it guidelines and a clear mandate so it serves your noble ambitions, not your chaotic desires. If you do that, your big red snake will heal and uplift you.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In my astrological opinion, almost nothing can keep you from getting the love you need in the coming days. The only potential problem: You might have a mistaken or incomplete understanding about the love you need, which could interfere with you recognizing and welcoming the real thing. Here’s my prescription: Keep an open mind about the true nature of the love you actually need most, and stay alert for the perhaps unexpected ways it might make itself available.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind,” asserts novelist Chuck Palahniuk. Your assignment, Gemini, is to work your ass off to fall out of love with your pain. As if you were talking to a child, explain to your subconscious mind that the suffering it is used to has outlived its usefulness. In fact, I recommend you conduct a ritual severing. Tie one side of a ribbon to a symbol of your pain and the other around your waist. Then cut the ribbon in half and bury the symbol in the dirt.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again,” said painter Joan Miró. “You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life,” he added. The coming days will likely bring you none of the former kind of experiences and several of the latter, Cancerian. It’s a numinous time in your long-term cycle — when you’re likely to encounter beauty that enchants you and mysteries that titillate your sense of wonder for a long time. How do you like your epiphanies? Hot and wild? Cool and soaring? Comical and lyrical? All the above?
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): There’s a new genre of erotic literature: dinosaur porn. E-books like “In the Velociraptor’s Nest” and “Ravished by the Triceratops” recount steamy encounters between people and prehistoric reptiles. While now is a good time to add explore pleasure’s frontier, I think you should remain rooted in the real world, even in your fantasy life. Plus, it’s safer. You don’t want to explore the frontiers of pleasure with cold-blooded beasts. Either travel alone or else round up a warm-blooded compassion specialist with some skills in the arts of intimacy.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The saxifrage is a small plant with white flowers. It flourishes in subarctic regions and cooler parts of the Northern Hemisphere. “Saxifrage” comes from the Latin saxifraga, meaning “stone-breaker.” Indeed, the plant often appears in the clefts of boulders. In “A Sort of a Song,” poet William Carlos Williams celebrates its strength: “Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.” I nominate this little dynamo as your metaphorical power object this week, Virgo. May it inspire you to crack through barriers with subtle force.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): You’re not being swept along in a flood of meaningless distractions and irrelevant information, right? I’m hoping you have a sixth sense about which few stimuli are useful and meaningful to you, and which thousands of stimuli are not. But if not, now would be a good time to take strenuous action. The universe will conspire to help you become extra stable and secure if you resolve to eliminate as much nonsense from your life as you can.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): To be healthy, you must give and receive sweetness regularly. But you can’t flourish on sweetness alone. For balance, you need the other tastes, including saltiness, sourness, bitterness and savoriness. From what I understand, you are headed into a phase when you’ll thrive on more bitterness and savoriness than usual. To get an idea of this, meditate on what the emotional equivalents might be for bitter tastes like coffee, beer and olives, and for savory tastes like mushrooms, cheese, spinach and green tea.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): When you procrastinate, you avoid an important task. You goof off, doing something fun or just puttering around. What if you could avoid an important task by doing other tasks somewhat less important but still quite valuable? For example, you could postpone your search for the key to everything by throwing yourself into a project that will give you the key to one small part of everything.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In his utopian novel “Looking Backward,” Edward Bellamy wrote: “It is under what may be called unnatural, in the sense of extraordinary, circumstances that people behave most naturally, for the reason that such circumstances banish artificiality.” Relief and release await you, Capricorn: an end to pretending, a dissolution of deception. Amid extraordinary circumstances, you will act with brave authenticity. Take full advantage.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “I have your back.” Is there anyone who feels that way about you? If not, now would be an excellent time to work on getting such an ally. Cosmic conditions are ripe for bringing greater levels of assistance and collaboration into your life. If you already have confederates of that caliber, you can deepen your symbiotic connection even further.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): More than 100 countries celebrate a holiday called Independence Day, memorializing when they broke free of another nation to form a separate state. I encourage you to create your own personal version of this festival. It could commemorate a past breakthrough moment when you escaped an oppressive situation, or achieved a higher level of autonomy. A fresh opportunity of this kind is available to you. Any day now might be a good time to declare a new Independence Day.
— Rob Brezsny
