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Mozart once challenged his friend Haydn to play a harpsichord piece he’d written. Haydn tried, but stopped partway through when the musical score called for him to play a note in the middle of the keyboard even though his right hand was fully occupied at the high end and his left hand at the low […]

Sagittarian writer Samuel Clemens was best known under his pen name, Mark Twain. But he tried many others, including Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Trismegistus, and Sergeant Fathom. Since you’re in a phase when experiments with your persona would be productive, I suggest you dream up a few aliases of your own. I […]

When I sent out my email newsletter last week, I got the usual number of automatic replies from people who were on vacation or out of the office. But one from Lisa P. caught my attention. “Can’t reply to your email right now,” it read. “I will be meditating until June 1.” My first reaction […]

You’re not living in Iraq or Sudan or the Congo, and you don’t have to walk five miles a day with a jug on your head to fetch the water you need, and you’re not so bereft of food that you have to resort to eating worms and tree bark. So how bad could your […]

All of us have gaps in our education. You and I and everyone else alive have dank pockets of ignorance that diminish our humanity and musty pits of naivete that prevent us from seeing truths that are obvious to others. We all lack certain skills that hold us back from being more fulfilled in our […]

You don’t have to answer to anybody this week, Taurus. You don’t have to defend yourself, explain yourself, or compromise yourself. I mean, you can do those things if you want to be super extra nice, but there won’t be any hell to pay if you don’t. It’s one of those rare times when you […]

All 26 of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories about Tarzan are set in Africa, but he never once visited that continent. And Bram Stoker didn’t feel the need to travel to the Transylvanian region of Romania in order to write about it in his novel Dracula. But I don’t recommend this approach to you in the […]

Why would you choose this bright, sunny moment to descend into the dark places and explore the fermenting mysteries? What renegade impulse would move you to turn away from the predictable pleasures and easy solutions, and instead go off in quest of more complex joys and wilder answers? Here’s what I have to say about […]

Sufi holy man Ibn ‘Ata Allah was speaking about prayer when he said the following: “If you make intense supplication and the timing of the answer is delayed, do not despair of it. His reply to you is guaranteed; but in the way He chooses, not the way you choose, and at the moment He […]

The mind loves order, the heart loves chaos, and the gut loves action, says my astrological colleague Antero Alli. The ideal situation is to honor each of these needs, keeping them in a dynamic balance. But now and then, it’s healthy to emphasize one over the other two. According to my astrological analysis, you’re entering […]