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Horoscopes for week of February 10, 2011
"Before I loved you, nothing was my own," wrote Pablo Neruda to his lover in one of his sonnets. "It all belonged to someone else -- to no one." Have you ever experienced a sense of being dispossessed like that, Aries? A sense of there being nowhere and nothing in the world that you can call your own? And have you ever fantasized that your emptiness could be remedied by the intimate presence of a special companion? I wish for you to have that consoling experience in the coming week. In fact, I predict it. Happy Valentine Daze!
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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You need love almost as much as you need food and drink. Not just any old kind of love, though: It has to be high-minded and mysterious, and neither sentimental nor tormented. Hoping to steer you towards what you really need, I'm offering you the poetic words of Pablo Neruda. Say or write them to the person whose destiny needs to be woven more closely together with yours: "Our love is like a well in the wilderness where time watches over the wandering lightning. Our sleep is a secret tunnel that leads to the scent of apples carried on the wind. When I hold you, I hold everything that is--swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maple trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread that the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives."
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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You're very familiar with the inexhaustible longings that you harbor in your depths. Your primal hungers for love and connection are never far from your awareness. But the sad thing is that you often regard this as a problem -- as a vulnerability that disempowers you. This Valentine season I'm asking you to change all that. I'm urging you to see your enormous yearnings as strengths . . . to celebrate them as essential fuel for your vitality . . . to treat them as crucial ingredients in your lust for life. Take it from someone who has seen too many people crippled by their lack of passion: You're lucky to be so well-endowed with desire.
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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What advice might beautify and elevate your love life? The following insights should help. 1. "We are not the same person this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person." - W. Somerset Maugham. 2. "People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is unlike the original." - Iris Murdoch. 3. "Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new." - Ursula K. Le Guin. 4. "A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day." - Andre Maurois.
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Happy Valentine Daze, Gemini! Here's my prescription for making best use of the current cosmic currents: Be enchanting, but in an understated way. Be slyly charismatic and innocently flirtatious and serenely wild. Show how sexy it is to be sublimely relaxed. Make judicious use of small acts of friendly mischief. Be affectionately unpredictable, always in the service of showing how much you care.
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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I want to remind you, in case you've somehow forgotten, that you'll never be able to bask in the love you want to receive from another person until you master the art of loving yourself with great skill and imagination. I'll go so far as to say that it's pointless to search for a perfect partner if you're not already your own perfect partner. Here's what Buddha had to say about the subject: "You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, but that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anyone, deserve your love and affection."
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Your love story has elements of a farce mixed with a soap opera, fairy tale, and ghost story. For a normal human being, it might be too intense and convoluted to deal with; it requires so much willing suspension of disbelief and involves so much letting go of certainty that no one in their right mind would agree to its demands. Luckily, you're not a normal human being these days, and you're not particularly in your right mind. That's why I say unto you: Ride this snaky tale for all it's worth. Enjoy every plot twist and riddle as if you've been given an epic myth you can ponder and learn from for the next ten years. Happy Valentine Daze, Cancerian!
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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Borrowing the words of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I've prepared a love note for you to use as your own. Feel free to give it to the person whose destiny needs to be woven more closely together with yours. "I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out."
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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"I think, therefore I am," declared the philosopher Descartes. Couldn't he have equally said, "I feel, therefore I am" or "I sense, therefore I am"? During this Valentine season, I suggest that you put the emphasis on those other proofs of identity, not Descartes'. From what I can tell, intimacy is most likely to thrive if you liberate it from excessive thinking and lubricate it with generous amounts of trans-rational contact. For love's sake, empty your head of abstractions, opinions, and theories. Make lots of room for the aroma of freshly washed hair, the shimmer of peaceful excitement, the shuddering solace of moist skin, the zing of poignant empathy, the wisdom of wandering hands, and the telepathy of shared perceptions.
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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What further wisdom would energize your love life? here's some excellent advice, courtesy of psychologist James Hillman: "For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining." How will you act on this excellent counsel? Maybe you could take you and your closest ally to a sanctuary you've never dreamed you'd go to in a thousand years. Or do an exercise in which you ask each other questions you've never broached before. Or devise an experiment in which the two of you get to face an unfamiliar challenge together.
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Happy Valentine Daze, Virgo! What's the best way for you to celebrate the season of love? In accordance with the astrological omens, here's a good suggestion: Write haiku-like poems on scraps of red paper and leave them around for a special someone to find. You can borrow the following samples, adopted from the work of Raymond Roseliep. 1. "mist on my mouth -- air you touched." 2. "I tried to bring you that one cloud in this cup of water." 3. "black raspberries -- your name breaking in the soft burst." 4. "love song: I enter your mirror." To get more inspiration, check here.
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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The three further love offerings I have might be a challenge for you to receive in the same generous spirit with which I'm giving them. Nevertheless, I suspect you can truly benefit from their bracing advice. So here are my gifts, starting with an insight from author Zora Neale Hurston: "Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." Your second oracle comes from writer James Baldwin: "Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." My third offering is from novelist Iris Murdoch: "Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Happy Valentine Daze, Libra. It's my astrological opinion that you need more jokes, comedy, and humor in your romantic adventures. If you're too serious about seeking the pleasures of love, you can't get what you want. To inspire your efforts, I present the winning entry from last year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. It was judged the worst possible opening line for a novel, but it's perfect fodder for the project I've assigned you: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss -- a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil."
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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As I meditated on what advice might purify and supercharge your love life, I got to thinking about a statement attributed to French poet Paul Valery. "Love is being stupid together," he said. There's an element of truth to this notion, but it's too corny and degenerate for my tastes. I prefer to focus on a more interesting and complete truth, which is this: Real love is being smart together. If you weave your destiny together with another's, he or she should catalyze your sleeping potentials, sharpen your perceptions, and boost your IQ. Your relationship should be a crucible in which you deepen your understanding of the way the world works. If you can't share your love with such a person, don't share your love with anyone.
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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This Valentine season, you have considerable potential to bring more lyricism into your close relationships. To stimulate you in that noble effort, I'm borrowing from the poetry of Andre Breton. See if you can adopt this style of expressing yourself (or steal the actual words) as you reach out to a person you'd like to be closer to: "Your neck is pearled barley. Your hair is a wood fire. Your mouth is a bouquet of stars. Your eyelashes are a child's first stroke of writing. Your eyebrows are the edge of a swallow's nest. Your shoulders are dolphins' heads under the ice. Your fingers? The ace of hearts. Your armpits? Beechnut and midsummer night. Your arms are the sea foam and flood gate foam. Your feet are bunches of keys."
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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During my quest for advice that might be helpful to your love life, I gathered some further words of wisdom. 1. "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." -Friedrich Nietzsche. 2. "Love is not about losing freedom; it's about sharing freedom with a partner who's as talented a liberationist as you." - my friend Sarah. 3. "I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty." - Pablo Neruda.
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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"Love that stammers, that stutters, is apt to be the love that loves best," wrote poet Gabriela Mistral. That's an important theme to keep in mind during the season of amour. Your job as a lover is not to be inflated with the perfect knowledge of how to proceed, not to stride forcefully into each romantic nuance with your confidence exploding . . . but rather to stumble along humbly, waging experiment after experiment, striving to kindle the spark, unleash the deluge, conjure the whirlwind, burrow into the dirty, sacred depths -- or whatever the idiosyncratic truth of the moment calls for. Happy Valentine Daze, Sagittarius!
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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To further our meditation on romance, let's consider psychologist Carl Jung's words: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul." Do you fit that description? Have you ever employed tortured logic to explain to yourself why you're not following your heart's promptings? In the past year, did you take a detour that has led you further and further away from your true home? Are you engaging in evasive measures in order to keep yourself from seeing the open secret about love that's right in front of you? I'm just asking, not accusing. Only you know the correct answers.
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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Happy Valentine Daze, Capricorn! Borrowing words from poet Amy Lowell, I've created the nucleus of a love note for you to use as your own. Feel free to give these words (and others you write yourself) to a person whose destiny needs to be woven more intimately together with yours. "Your shadow is moonlight on a plate of silver; your footsteps, the seeding-place of lilies; the mystery of your voice, a chime of bells across the windless river air. The movement of your hands is the long golden running of light from a rising sun. Young horses are not more limber than your thoughts. Your laughs are bees buzzing around a pear tree. I dare to reach to you. I dare to touch the rim of your brightness."
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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"Love at first sight may be a matter of instinctively recognizing someone who will allow you to continue in comfortingly familiar -- and often destructive -- patterns learned in childhood." So said Salon.com's Lisa Zeidner in her review of Maggie Scarf's book Intimate Partners. Make that idea your watchword. Let it be the beacon that guides you away from the sentimental illusions about romance that you may still be drawn to. After all, there are few things that undermine authentic love more than infantile wishes and naive fantasies.
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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When some Westerners hear the term "tantra," they think it's a New Age codeword for lavish sex. But in its original form, tantra is a philosophy that advocates spiritual union with all of creation, not just erotic union with an attractive partner. Tantric practitioners might engage in metaphorical "love-making" with lizards, birch trees, clouds, toasters, rivers, and quirky friends, among other wonders. I recommend that you experiment with this perspective, Aquarius. I bet you'll find that cultivating lusty compassion for the entire world will enhance your personal intimacy with the people you care about. Happy Valentine Daze!
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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What advice would be useful for your love life? Not this observation by The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening: "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." Do not, under any circumstances, make those your words to live by. Instead, consider the following counsel from Norman Mailer: "Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to."
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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In many of the weddings I've been to as a guest, the love birds have sealed their vows with a chaste kiss -- a formal gesture that wasn't imbued with much spontaneous passion. But in a recent marriage ceremony I attended, the new husband and wife showed little inhibition at the climax. They French-kissed in a prolonged embrace that also included ample groping. In the coming week, I urge you to put yourself as much as possible in situations where you can express that kind of free-wheeling spirit. Happy Valentine Daze, Pisces!
The horoscopes you read here may be all you need from me. But if you'd like a bigger dose of my thoughts about your destiny, try my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES. Each is a 4 to 5 minute meditation about where you are right now. (For a limited time only, I've also still got longer forecasts that report on the big picture of your life for 2011.)
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Clarissa Pinkola Estes said this in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves. "The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form," she wrote, "is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead." She obviously doesn't mean you should seek negativity on purpose. Rather, you should freely acknowledge that even the most sublime intimacy has a dark side. As long as you welcome love's difficulties, it will remain vital.
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The preceding oracle is brought to you by my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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© 1995-2013 -- Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved
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