Learning to Love How Everything Always Changes
Learning to Love How Everything Always Changes
Learning to Love Changing
In this bonus newsletter, I offer a free excerpt of my book ASTROLOGY IS REAL above the paywall — and an excerpt from my upcoming trilogy of novels below the paywall.
First, here’s an excerpt from ASTROLOGY IS REAL. These oracles are not like my regular weekly horoscopes. Rather, they are lyrical meditations on the natures of the signs. ASTROLOGY IS REAL has 15 additional sections like this one.
FORTUNES FOR YOU #7
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ARIES: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be an Aries." My readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. Aries says, "Just because I'm an Aries doesn't mean I will fall into an astrologer's assumptions about who an Aries is 'supposed to' be or how we're 'supposed to' act. And I'm being a thoroughly intense Aries by telling you so." —Elisa Jean
2. If you don’t vividly ask for and eagerly welcome the exciting gifts the Universe has in store for you, you may have to settle for trinkets and baubles. Never settle. —Monica Ballard
3. When people don't get it done fast enough for you, be ready and able to DO IT YOURSELF. And don't waste any time or energy being mad at the slowpokes.
4. Even when your courage has a touch of foolhardiness, even when your brazen quest for adventure makes you a bit reckless, you can be resourceful enough to avoid dicey consequences. Maybe more than any other sign of the zodiac, you periodically outfox karma.
5. You like challenges—especially those that you consciously choose and especially those that aren't imposed by others.
6. If someone tells you that you are too aggressive, invade their personal space and demand to know what the hell do they mean by that!!!
7. Smile when you have absolutely no reason to. Smile when your reasons for smiling are still in the future. Smile as you concoct outlandish, farfetched reasons to smile.
8. When you Aries are at your best, you are attracted to people who tell you exactly what they think, who aren't shy about being purely themselves, and who dare to be as vigorous as you.
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TAURUS: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Taurus." My readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. How to be a Taurus: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, you get to do it again! —Francesca Maria
2. What’s truly meant for you will wait for you until you are ready for it. —Yeshe Matthews
3. Who you will be has always loved who you are.
4. Taurus says, "As a Taurus, I have found that many places can be home. The forest can be home. The river can be home. The birch trees can be home. I bring pieces from those other homes and make them part of my home at home."
5. Make it your gift to be in communion with every level of reality. Conspire to heal fragmentation and schisms. Unite heaven and earth. Keep paradises and hells in touch with each other. Never let the past forget about the future, and vice versa. Turn dreams into waking-life experiences, and vice versa.
6. You can be led and inspired and guided—but never driven. —Lacey Wren
7. Tell your favorite people the god-awful truth when they need to hear it and no one else will do it. But do it kindly.
8. You know how to help people be in service to the deepest truths and strongest love. Don't be shy about wielding that skill.
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GEMINI: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Gemini." One of my readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. When you Geminis are at your best, you don't merely tolerate dualities. You enjoy and embrace them. You work with them eagerly and may even endow them with sparkly magic.
While many non-Geminis regard oppositions and paradoxes as at best inconvenient and at worst obstructive, you often find how the apparent polarities are woven together and complementary.
That's why so many of you are connoisseurs of love that's both tough and tender. You can be effective in seemingly contradictory situations that confuse and immobilize others.
2. My family is used to me exclaiming while driving "I need to keep my eyes on the road but LOOK AT THAT LOOK AT THAT!" as I gaze at whatever random hawk or cow or horse or waterfall or cloud I happen to spot. —Jenny Nalley Boyd
3. Network until you almost but not quite explode with excitement as you pinball among all the fun connections.
4. People may be inclined to come to you with their secrets because you are so good at seeing and sympathizing with more than one side of the story. But you should perhaps let them know you're not a rigorous secret-keeper.
5. Don't be everyone's messenger. But be the messenger for as many people as is amusing for you.
6. Your mind is sometimes a lush and beautiful maze that you get lost in. Is that a problem? Now and then it is, yes. But just as often, it's a blessing.
As you wander around amidst the finery, not sure of where you are or where you're going, you often make discoveries that awaken your dormant potentials. You luck into unforeseen insights you didn't realize you needed to know.
My advice: Next time you're in an amazing maze, don't be in a mad rush to escape. Allow the dizzying but dazzling expedition to offer you all its rich teachings.
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CANCERIAN: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Cancerian." My readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. Cancerian says, "In some ways, we are the most stubborn of signs. We are prone to telling others, 'You can't make me do it!' This may be counter-productive and overly and unnecessarily self-protective, yes. But it also assures that we have a reliable, unassailable core." —Kool Nancy
2. If you don't feel close to or trusting of the family members that life gave you, go find some others you like better. You Cancerians have the right to get the family that serves you best.
3. When you are the attentive, nurturing parent of your own inner child, you have made it all the way home to the ultimate home. Now go and play. —Suzane Langlois
4. Just by being you, alter and shape the entire mood of any environment you're in. Be the lodestar or mother lode or mother lode star.
5. Cancerian says, "I feel all my feels and I know all my feels are real but not necessarily based on truth. Tricky to do! I honor every deep flow within me without necessarily regarding it as objective evidence about the rest of the world."
6. Never leave the house except to go to the store to buy stuff for the house. Get a job where you can work at home. Have lots of children. Do their laundry for them until they are 36 years old. —Amanda Yallos
7. You rarely take the straightforward route anywhere. Like the crab, you're inclined to move sideways or even backward to get where you need to go.
There's nothing wrong with that! It might be an antidote for people you know who are superficial and simplistic in their directness.
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LEO: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Leo." My readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. Leo says, "My Leonine magnanimity invites everyone to do as I do: Glow like the sun, unleashing the full radiance of their hearts both outward and inward, flooding their surroundings with nourishing beauty as they flood themselves. My sovereignty inspires and welcomes the sovereignty of all." —Sharon McCarthy
2. Carpe the hell out of every fucking diem! —Dee Ashford
3. On a regular basis, show how high you can leap and yet always land on your feet.
4. Question your own power? OK, I guess. But only if it's not working in the service of love.
5. Assume there is no limit to how much generous vivacity you can summon and express.
6. Fondle and nuzzle as much as possible. Tell your lovers EXACTLY where it feels good.
7. Assume there is no limit to how much generous zest, brio, zip, spice, and zeal you can summon and express.
8. One of the experiments I hope you will enjoy in the coming years is to work on loving another person as wildly and deeply and smartly as you love yourself.
In urging you to do so, I don't mean to imply I have a problem with you loving yourself wildly and deeply and smartly. I endorse your efforts to always keep increasing the intensity and ingenuity with which you adore and care for yourself.
But here's a secret some Leos don't know: Learning to summon a monumental passion for other souls may enhance your love for yourself.
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VIRGO: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Virgo." One of my readers provided an idea, which is noted.
1. Service is sacred. Virgos know this better than all the other signs. —Kauakea Winston
2. It's best if you refrain from wrestling with problems that resist your solutions. You should be discerning about how you use your superior analytical abilities. Devote yourself solely to manageable dilemmas that are truly responsive to your intelligent probing.
3. I feel sorry for people who aren’t receptive to your input, but you can't force them to give up their ignorance. "Go where you're wanted" is your best policy, along with "Take power where it's offered."
4. You must enjoy, not apologize for, your precise little obsessions, like how cans and boxes and dishes are organized in the cupboard, and whether the bows in tied shoes are the same size and shape, and which way the toilet paper unscrolls, from the top or bottom.
5. Risk asking almost too many questions in your drive to know every subtle and nuanced aspect about everything.
6. As you get older, you become better and better able to help loved ones and allies heal and shrink their insecurities. Don't neglect to apply the same magic to yourself!
7. Sometimes you create beauty and truth through your savvy skill about what to purge, erase, and shed.
8. You are authorized to politely request that lovers take showers before and after sex—even during!
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LIBRA: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Libra." One of my readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. Droll Libran pastime: Infusing your decision-making with an amused appreciation for how challenging and fun it is to make decisions.
2. Being an evolved Libra is never knowing what you want once and for all. It's continually debating with yourself about what's the best goal to aim for next.
3. You need to emotionally feel, not just intellectually conceptualize, the balance, harmony, and justice you seek to create. That's the only way your balance, harmony, and justice can be genuine and robustly impactful.
4. Grow your roots as big as your branches. —Marilyn Carson
5. Always keep studying the fine points about how to fall in love with beautiful people, beautiful things, and beautiful speech.
6. Libra says, "Tell me someone else's relationship problems, and I have them worked out in three minutes. As for my own relationship problems? Might take a good long while longer."
7. Your ability to see all sides of every story is a gift, though sometimes it may feel like a drawback.
8. The Libran approach to fighting for what's right doesn’t mean getting into loud arguments or trying to manipulate people into seeing things your way. It's your birthright to rely on gentler, smoother styles of persuasion.
Have you developed your innate potential? Have you become skilled at using clear, elegant language to state your truths?
Do you serve the best outcome rather than your ego? Are you willing to understand why others feel the way they do even if you don’t agree with their conclusions?
I hope you liberally call on these superpowers. We all need you to express your potency as a role model of integrity and moral rigor.
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SCORPIO: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Scorpio." My readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. Here are two top Scorpio pastimes: 1. exploring and deploying your intense, fertile creativity; 2. spiraling gleefully down into a deep dark void in pursuit of deep dark treasures.
Sometimes those two hobbies dovetail quite well. You can satisfy both pursuits simultaneously: being creative as you fetch treasure from the void.
A favorite variation is when the void you glide into turns out to be a lush wonderland because of your unpredictable creativity.
2. Scorpio says, "I must regularly empty my metaphorical trash so I always have enough room to gleefully breathe the sweet air and exult in the beauty of the earth."
3. A Scorpio lover named Elisa Jean says, "We Scorpio allies admire how Scorpios can be so solicitous and welcoming: the best party hosts. They know how to foster social situations that bring out the best in everyone and provide convivial entertainment.
"Yet Scorpios also know everyone's secrets. They are connoisseurs of all the skeletons in the closets.
"And so they have the potential to spawn discordant commotions and wreak havoc on people's reputations. But they rarely do. Instead, they keep the secrets. They far more often use their covert knowledge to weave deep connections."
4. It's hard to find truly terrible pizza. Likewise, even bad sex is usually a decent diversion.
But many of you Scorpios would rather skip the bad sex so you have more time and energy for the good stuff.
Luckily, you have a built-in Bad Sex Detector that mostly informs you if you're in danger of hooking up with a Bad Sex Practitioner. Lucky you!
5. Scorpio's friends say, "Eeeee! You scare me! I like it." —Robie Flannagan
6. You’re wise to periodically summon intense streams of self-forgiveness for past events that would otherwise haunt you.
7. You've got to keep poison out of your passion. Got to make sure your zeal heals and never steals others' energy. You can do it!
8. You can and should be a virtuoso of simmering, ruminating, marinating, steeping, churning, smoldering, fermenting, and effervescing.
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SAGITTARIUS: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Sagittarius."
• Always keep your interesting options open. Let your mediocre options shrivel and expire.
• Tell everyone that the Emperor is naked, and tell the Emperor, too.
• Face stressful situations with supple humor. Regard this practice as an art form or tricky game that you can have actual fun getting skilled at.
• Fight for others' rights, even when it doesn't affect you. Make a difference in the lives of those who can't make a difference for themselves, even if they don't thank you.
• Wear purple whenever you need to boost your spiritual resilience.
• Spend as much time gallivanting outdoors as is humanly possible. Learn the languages of rivers, hills, trees, animals, and clouds.
• Refuse to be possessed by others, either demonically or angelically.
• Be honest to the point of frankness but not to the point of rudeness.
• Be forever thirsty for knowledge and experiences that feed your joie de vivre.
• Get plenty of deep sleep with adventurous dreams.
• Blurt out your opinion, then chuckle and yawn.
• Make affectionate fun of yourself with kindness and wit.
• Dance and sing at unexpected moments.
• Use a plethora of exclamation points and fancy, swanky, rococo words!!!!!!
• Laugh and smile so much that your cheeks hurt.
• Make no apologies and have no regrets about doing what you love.
• Find friends who like to argue and not take it personally.
• Make sure your interests and passions never reach a limit. Refuse to let the things you already love influence you to close your mind about new things you could love.
• Hang out at toy stores and try out the toys.
• Don't ever merely run. Gallop. Scamper. Zoom. Dart. Ramble. Lope. Prance. Bound. Bustle.
• Cultivate a relationship with at least one animal friend.
• Name yourself. Don't allow anyone else to name you. Giving yourself an additional nickname at least once every two years is healthy and wise.
• Use your imagination to make routine events seem fascinating and wonderful. Develop a specialty in finding dazzlements.
• Launch your own private revolutions.
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CAPRICORN: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Capricorn." One of my readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. Loosen your firm grasp and steely resolve just enough so you can allow the world to enjoy you. The peak you ascended—so carefully, so painfully—gave you wisdom and compassion. Allow everyone a chance to treasure you for who you have become. —Solar Lab
2. The mandate for Capricorn, wrote occultist Aleister Cowley, is "the complete appreciation of all existing things . . . rejoicing in the rugged and barren no less than in the smooth and fertile."
3. Here's another mandate for Capricorns, courtesy of Aleister Crowley: "Refine your rapture."
And how might you refine your rapture?
• Get more and more skilled at finding out what gives you pleasure and bringing it into your life.
• Take inventory of your bliss-inducing strategies and experiment with pushing them further.
• Ask your deep psyche to reveal as-yet undiscovered secrets about what might give you sublime pleasure.
• Seek new ways to experience euphoria and enchantment, with an emphasis on what also makes you smarter and healthier.
4. You almost always know more than you think you realize about teasing out practical solutions that benefit the most people.
5. Your serious intensity and earnest focus are strong points. But you should also be aware that not every decision you make is momentous and packed with a thousand implications.
6. Wait until you're 60 years old to dance like a lunatic and play with dolls and study occult magick.
7. When your skills and potencies are fully engaged and serving constructive purposes, you are adeptly expressing your soul's code.
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AQUARIUS: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be an Aquarius." One of my readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. Few people really understand you. So you may need to be your own best friend, the affectionate ally who deeply understands you. But that shouldn't be a problem, since you have many personalities who would love to be each other's best friends.
2. To improve and purify yourself, help others! And do it with flair. As French artist Marcel Duchamp advised, "Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination."
3. Even the finest, most highly evolved Aquarians seem to have never received instructions on how to be an Aquarius. They have been winging it since they were in their cribs. They assume that if they ever received such instructions, the first rule might be, "Ignore these instructions."
4. People love you because you are freaky and eccentric and yet also sincere and kind. You are unconventional, non-conformist, unique, unusual, odd—and also trustworthy, tolerant, non-judgmental, and compassionate.
5. Work 29 hours a day and love it. Play the other 29 hours a day and love it.
6. You know you're an Aquarius when people laugh at something you said, and you have no idea what it was. You entertain people without trying.
7. You may have watched and memorized all 139 episodes of 3rd Rock from the Sun, a TV sitcom about four extraterrestrials living on Earth and posing as a human family.
8. Many Aquarians have learned their ideas are ahead of the game. In fact, they realize, the game may not even exist yet. Hence, they learn patience, diligence, and enough resilience to stand alone while waiting for the world to catch up with them. —Marie Poland
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PISCES: Below are hunches and guesses about the topic "How to Be a Pisces." My readers provided some ideas, which are noted.
1. People who don't know much about astrology may say that Pisceans are wishy-washy. That's a lie.
The truth is, Pisceans are not habitually lukewarm about chaotic jumbles of possibilities. They are deeply in love with the world and all its interwoven mysteries. Their tender fervor is often turned up high.
Awash in reverent adoration, they see and feel how all the apparent fragments knit together into a luminous bundle of amazement.
2. You truly mean these words, originally spoken by Oscar Wilde: "I find the earth as beautiful as the sky and the body as beautiful as the soul."
3. If possible, have at least one ally who does some of the dreary day-to-day living for you, enabling you to escape to imaginary havens and fantastic sanctuaries.
4. Forgive everyone even when they are not sorry. —Lorne Murphy
5. Author Robertson Davies declared, "One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence." It sounds poetic, but I don't think it applies to most of you Pisceans.
Here's what I've concluded: The more you learn your mystery, the more innocent you become.
Please note I'm using the word "innocence" in the sense defined by author Clarissa Pinkola Estés. She wrote: "Ignorance is not knowing anything and being attracted to the good. Innocence is knowing everything and still being attracted to the good."
6. Pisceans are above it all . . . and beneath it all . . . while never fully being in it at all. —Elizabeth Kirkpatrick
7. You have the honor and privilege of understanding and arguing on behalf of all people in all times and places.
8. You may theorize that you're the only one who has figured out the mysterious riddles of life. You may describe yourself as being lonely in paradise. But the fact is, there are others who know the secret rules you know. Many fellow Pisceans, for example. Go find them.
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BELOW THE PAYWALL is chapter 55 from my upcoming trilogy of novels, collectively called Love Stories for the Earth: Holy Rivers, Lucky Storms, and The Other Real World. Below are links to previous installments: Here’s a link to the first 41 chapters. A link to Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapters 51 and 52 Chapter 53 and 54