Free Will Astrology

Oct 10, 2001 at 12:00 am
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Warning: image overhaul underway; persona in flux. Old boundaries partially washed away; new lines not yet drawn. Familiar friends insecure in light of shifting meanings; fresh allies attracted by whiff of sexy risks. Recommendation: Hunt down even pithier questions; shun smooth solutions and premature answers. Harvest delightful revelations resulting from a willingness to be affectionately intimate with uncertainty. Enjoy the seductive power that comes from being mysterious.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): If I were speaking to you in my role as a militant play activist, I might dare you to begin weaning yourself from your job. I'd tempt you to increasingly devote yourself to creating a rhythm in which leisure and fun occupy as much of your time as wage-slavery. Even more audaciously, I'd ask you to imagine in vivid detail how to make money from doing what you love. But in my role as your conscientious astrologer, I can't dangle that advice in front of you. You may not have the luxury of living in poverty for years, as I did while I followed my bliss until it paid off. So instead, Taurus, please accept the following counsel: Use all your ingenuity to make your job a bouncier, zippier, fizzier experience.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): A recent poll asked, "If you were a dog and were given the chance to lick the face of any celebrity you wanted, who would it be?" Amazingly, four of the top five choices were Geminis: Angelina Jolie, Mark Wahlberg, Anna Kournikova and Naomi Campbell. What this tells me, first of all, is that people will take seriously almost any idiocy concocted by the pollsters. But more intriguingly, it confirms a suspicion I'd already developed from my analysis of your astrological omens. You Geminis are wildly tasty these days. In fact, you're as juicy and delectable as you ever get. May I suggest that you host a feast?

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke urged an aspiring bard to change the way he imagined the Supreme Being. "Why don't you think of God as the one who is coming," Rilke said, "who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into coming ages, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?" Given your current astrological mood, Cancerian, this is an evocative subject for your meditations. Not only are you on the verge of reinventing your relationship with this divine intelligence; you're also poised to discover rousing secrets about your unique part in the creation of the new world that's on its way.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): For years, psychotherapist Jennifer Paine Welwood has been my teacher as I've transformed myself into the person I've always wanted to be. With her help, I've freed myself from my past and escaped the grip of my personal demons. As a result, I've been able to dive into the really fun part of my life's work, which is to be in service to the greatest good of everyone I encounter. I'm not alone in benefiting from Jennifer; many others claim her as guide. And I believe it's no coincidence that she is a direct descendant of Revolutionary War hero Thomas Paine, a staunch champion of civil liberties. Like him, she's an ingenious emancipator, a cultivator of conditions under which the soul can flourish. In describing her influence, Leo, I hope to inspire you to intensify your own quest for liberation. The cosmic moment is ripe.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Time to take the training wheels off, my overqualified friend. Time to quit pulling your punches and sugarcoating the truth and saving yourself for something better. Get your ass farther out there on the line, my dear, or else stop complaining about how no one takes you seriously enough. Your moment of reckoning is not at hand; but the dress rehearsal for that moment is. Act as if this small fork in the road is a dead ringer for the huge fork in the road that awaits you in early 2002.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): To mark the beginning of a new chapter in your own personal book of love, Libra, we will spend the next two weeks reviewing some useful guidelines to keep in mind. This horoscope deals with what love is not; next time we'll cover what love is. Love is never a perfect match of totally compatible saints, so don't let sterile fantasies seduce you away from flawed but fecund realities. Love is not a low-maintenance machine, so work hard on cultivating its unpredictable organic wonders. Love is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney, so don't let your romantic story be infected by the entertainment industry's twisted, simplistic, sentimental myths about intimate relationships.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Your destiny in the coming days may have a certain resemblance to the medieval Feast of Fools, in which poor people had license to insult privileged folks, the priests brayed like donkeys during Mass and the village idiot wore a crown and dispensed wisdom. Your fate also reminds me of the annual DooDah Parade in Pasadena, Calif., where otherwise normal people shoot marshmallows out of catapults, perform synchronized dances with briefcases and elect a Queen of Dead Roses. In other words, Scorpio, it'll be a perfect time for you to be the character you'd be if you had no expectations to live up to and nothing to lose.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): "If everything seems under control," racer Mario Andretti once said, "you're not going fast enough." I second that emotion. It applies to the entire human race, which is swirling through evolutionary tipping points at a breakneck speed. But it's doubly apropos for you, Sagittarius, because you're careening through the most headlong phase of your personal astrological cycle. For your edification and amusement, I will add a corollary to Andretti's wisdom: "If you're not confused, you're not thinking or feeling deeply enough."

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Here are my entertainment suggestions for the next two weeks. 1) Listen to music that revives the beautiful aspirations you've allowed to atrophy. 2) Gaze lovingly upon the sky or ocean as you fantasize about the dream you'd like to be in the midst of fulfilling two years from now. 3) Keep a notebook and pen by your bed at night in order to transcribe the gemlike dreams that will help you mutate a fearful fantasy into a courageous intention. 4) Drink in movies and books that inspire you to feel excited about being alive at a historical turning point that abounds with so much danger and opportunity.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In answer to queries from several readers: While I believe that most drugs should be legalized, I don't take any of them myself. None. Zero. My long-term practice of meditation and dream work and psychotherapy has, however, turned me into a radical, calm-eyed menace to devolution. Take that into consideration as you contemplate my advice for this week, Aquarius, which is: Blow your own mind, baby. Run wild through the frontiers of consciousness, searching for tricks that will ensure you'll be visited by a more regular flow of exuberant fantasies in your daily life. Expand your imagination as you conjure up uncanny schemes to save the world by doing what you do best.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Time is speeding up, and a result, so is the law of karmic repercussions. Everything you do sends out more ripples than it used to. For instance, each minute you spend fantasizing about winning the lottery depletes an entire day's worth of the energy you might have otherwise had available to launch a kick-ass plan for better money management. Likewise, you can no longer afford to indulge in woe-is-me envy for treasures owned by other people. Maybe you could get away with it in the past, but doing so now will sap your fierce determination to actually claim that prize for yourself. The moral of the story, Pisces: Unleash your latent reserves of pragmatic, hard-driving willpower. Imagine a moral code rooted in beauty, love, pleasure and liberation instead of order, control, repression and fear. Send your dreams to