Horoscopes | Week of June 7-13, 2004

ARIES (March 21-April 19): What's real is the life-affirming joy you take in simple experimentation, carried out without the falsity of expectation inherent in forming too-conclusive hypotheses in advance of action. Love the admitted partiality of certain interactions that produce wise insights running in lines that, were you to follow them to their logical extremes, appear to cross in near-perpendicularity. Luckily, there is no reason to follow these epiphanic briefs down that path of logic, where they might inadvertently get frozen into damaging dogma, if not allowed their freedom to dangle. Play around with that feeling of knowing in a given moment, but recognize the truest heart-value in abandoning the attempt to extrapolate the knowingness to fit other situations when, in fact, it doesn't fit. You need not have everything figured out in order to, for a split second, have discovered how everything figures out. Like any moment in time, nothing lasts.

 

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Embrace the diversity of what you possess, instead of needlessly fixating on one valued attribute or belonging you either (1) lack and imagine would rescue your floundering existence from unexceptionality, if only, or (2) own and overemphasize because you think it does a good job of masking other conceived-of-as-glaring lackings, whether in fact it does. Like a resourceful nomad, a collage artist or foraging nest-builder, you can't wait around for something better to come along, all the while depriving yourself because you resist the call for extemporaneous innovation that accompanies working more smartly with what's already in your grasp. You are lucky to have what you do, despite the natural human tendency to want more or different. Be less quick to discard and stricter on your creative soul to repurpose castoffs, whether objects or taken-for-granted skills. Not only did Rome take longer than a day to build, but some of its millennia-old structures are built upon foundations the equivalent of recycled cardboard, safety pins and mud.

 

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Venus's transit across the Sun in your sign, Gemini, makes you the most charmed recipient of its photographic charge of attunement to beauty and love, if you are willing to recognize its source as the sincerity in human inconsistency. That's right, Gemini, all that crappy unfair publicity you reap from the other signs, uncompassionate astrologers and yourselves for having two or more faces, when we all know, deep down, that every individual personality is comprised of jigsaw pieces that don't even seem as if they were designed to fit and yet, when forced together with childlike willful insistence, cohere into a picture of a castle in the sky or scores of jelly beans in a jar. Do not apologize to anyone for the way faultlines appear where one surface doesn't quite meet the next, nor should you be careless enough to fall into those cracks. You are beautiful for your chameleon qualities. You are smart for the keen way in which you combine multiple communicative strategies. You are loving for the way you seek the place in each of us where you connect with us, and draw it out. Keep seeking, keep drawing, keep connecting.

 

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Deeply appreciate your unique interrelation with those mysteries of the world which cannot—and thankfully need not—be spoken. Embrace the expansive silence that reverberates in wave patterns that morph and amplify so that, when I abruptly move my arm or cry or send godly requests into the ethers, you pick up the signals and know. Remember that not everyone is initiated into the secret society where you can read the undercurrents of life as easily as uninspired commuters read the Times on the train everyday. Rise to the spiritual responsibility that comes with these extra forms of knowledge. As you receive energetic transmissions from people, cultures and entities, instinctively understanding what they mean, do your best to return a message of love with equal projective intensity. Have total faith in the power of deep-soul intention when you wish the world its best, and save energy by omitting the need for phrasing prayers into language. [Insert non-verbal outward push of healing emotion here.]

 

LEO (July 23-August 22): Do you ever pretend there's a camera fixed on you as you navigate the nuances of your daily existence, starring in the movie version or reality-TV carefully-edited documentation of your own life? Okay, now envision that the usual tightly-focused-on-you camera shot abruptly broadens into wide angle, shrinking you in general screen stature and exposing a field of other individuals, each performing a separate routine, each with his/her own cameraperson shadowing his/her every move. There are countless films simultaneously being made. And beyond those, there is another bigger filmic enterprise underway, gathering footage for the 'making-of-the-movie' special (or 'how did we all end up here, doing what we're each individually doing, but together?'). The director directs us all. The chaos of our isolated monologic rumblings comes into choreographic unison when glimpsed from this vista. It all appears to make more sense than the close-ups let on. We attain greater appreciation for the fact we are not alone, that the ensemble has performed a greater artistic service than any individual actor.

 

VIRGO (August 23-September 22): If the past several months have taught you any one thing (and, incidentally, they better have taught you at least one thing), it is to embrace the possibility that what you will become known for (regardless of how narrowly or widely that circle of reputation extends) may involve multiple, unrelated, context-specific, seemingly-at-odds-analytically accomplishments that banish your desire for more boundary-intensive control away to nowheresville. Just because you may strive for total expertise in one or more categories of experience, it doesn't mean you'll end up most emotionally fulfilled as a specialist. Won't you (and the rest of us) wonder if you weren't capable of enjoying, if not excelling in, a host of other external activities that weave alternate parallel universes where you might choose to dwell for certain portions of these limited earth-dwelling days? Even if you could achieve perfection in a single calling, would that be all?

 

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): Commit, and recommit, to putting in the ample philosophizing time needed to determine what is most important to you in this life. As I said last week, you might want to open your mind to alternatives, to assist you in more fully exploring and weighing the wealth of ethical options available with which to take a stand. But you—and only you—are ultimately responsible for concluding what qualifies as a 'right' and a 'wrong' in your world, and hopefully carrying out your life in accordance with the principles you value. And since you're the one writing the rules for you to follow, you may take as much freedom as you'd like in making honest room for exceptions, amendments and loopholes, so long as you are able to explain the moral logic to yourself. If others want to challenge you on the premise of your code, engage or disengage as desired. Just as long as you know how the guidelines work, so that you can live without reinventing the wheel every moment a decision is demanded.

 

SCORPIO (October 23-November 21): Can an emotional interchange be both total and partial? This question eludes an easy answer, like some abstract mathematical truism that claims 1+1 equals both 2 and 1 and sometimes even 3. 1+1=2 is the most obvious example of individuals remaining individual, despite a union. 1+1=1 is the romantic approach, that the coming-together of two separate entities creates a single fused entity, a unit without boundary and distinction. 1+1=3 speaks to spirit with a notion of trinity, that the two individuals both remain individuals and also spawn a third individual, the relationship, distinct from the life of either individual when alone, with its own personality and behaviors and emotional tone. In language, you are undoubtedly most familiar with 1+1=2, the one we all assume to be true. In experience, you might be more accustomed to 1+1=1 because Scorpios crave connections that matter, the intensity, the passion, the whole shebang. That's why 1+1=3 is the most tenuous and nerve-wracking option—and thus the one with the most transformative promise—because it seems to demand so much more, both totality and partiality, with a potential for multiplicative expansion the more you allow your personal 1 among this 3 to remain 1 and search for additional intimate allegiances with other 1s to produce more 2s and attain those occasional awe-inspiring 3s.

 

SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): Hello, is there anybody out there? For some reason, I had this lightning-flash glimpse of my recent horoscopic words falling on deaf Sagittarian ears. Am I not sparkling enough? Am I barking up trees that you would tell me are wrong? Or have I merely blended into the crowd of people who all seem to want something from you, want to tell you something about yourself or want to help you pass the time in distraction from the things you need to be telling yourself? I can't help but see a proliferation of stimulating relationship stuff, with all this Venus transit business happening in your seventh house, where one meets another in collaborative togetherness. Discover that there may be additional ways of being different with your partner, additional partners with whom to be different ways, or different ways with which to become a partner if not already. If you cannot hear my voice or the voices of others because one certain someone (you? your love? your substitute for love?) is speaking so loudly as to drown us out, then it's a clear clue to lower that sound and flip around the channels to see what else is on.

 

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19): If you plan to derive any loving inspiration from the remarkable astrological tenor of these times, it must come from rediscovering the joy of staying dutiful. Your sense of highest duty—whether to social justice, a particular partner or authority figure, or your God—will always manifest, if taken with seriousness, in a sense of duty to your own immediate functional well-being, for you can neither serve your master nor your peers if you do not maintain as excellent fitness as possible and respect the necessity of daily tasks. To strain past your comfort, to try a new way of conducting your business or to run that extra mile, this equates to stretching your piety to rewarding lengths. You need not achieve or excel in order to work yourself a little harder. The work, in fact, need not be expended toward any goal other than self-development. For whatever it's worth, remember how you love testing your own limits—and do so in health-supportive challenges to show you love us all by loving yourself first and most.

 

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18): What a treat to be able to direct my patient Aquarian readership toward love in its twittering irrationality, to impel you to sample from its salad-bar of goodies without filling up at the first vat of yum you meet and forgetting to save room for dessert. You understand too well that love, though purported to be a core universal concept we share collective knowledge of, means as many different things to different people at different times as there are poems and paintings and assorted aesthetic musings crafted to attempt to describe its thoroughly indescribable essence(s). Just as one artist needn't be fixed into genre or a single masterwork in order to prove accomplishment, you must leave yourself free to pollinate and be pollinated by the truths in trivia, the divine in the commonplace, the love in the glance or the chat about politics or Proust or polishing the silverware. Love a lot of little bits, loving enough to barely find the time.

 

PISCES (February 19-March 20): Use your intellect to contain any typically Piscean existential yearnings for an essential return to wombed undifferentiation. Outsmart cosmic homesickness by reattaching it to your lived history, to actual experiences of home having briefly lived up to your expectations before being dashed by reality, enough so that you still hold out promise for restoring what could have been. See, your soul cravings are not as mysterious or unfounded as your fantasies might lead you to believe. There have been isolated moments when you felt safe and nurtured by a house, a landmark, a landscape, a country, a state of being. Notice that those dots don't always connect into a recognizable picture. But those dots do exist. You are not wishing upon an impossibility, but upon nostalgia for a sense of real life having been lived and knowledge that it could be again. Move memories from featureless moods to detailed accounts of past circumstantial realities, and you can learn a lot more about why you've felt as you did and how best to keep the feelings vital and fresh.