AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In 2000, I logged 34,000 miles during my travels across America to meet my readers. During a three-year stretch earlier in my life, I was a homeless gypsy, sponging off friends and staying in hostels from Vermont to South Carolina, from Italy to Greece. But in recent years I’ve gone on …
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Last May, workers cleaning up garbage on Britain’s highest mountain made a startling find. There at the top of Mt. Ben Nevis was a piano. How did it get there? Three years earlier, hikers in Indiana’s Yellowwood State Forest stumbled upon an equally inexplicable anomaly: a massive boulder lodged in the …
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You don’t need any special climbing skills to reach the top of Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro. It’s the highest walkable mountain in the world. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy conquest. You’ve got to be in good physical shape. To avoid altitude sickness, you must ascend gradually enough to acclimatize yourself to …
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “Why just ask the donkey in me to speak to the donkey in you when I have so many other beautiful animals and brilliant colored birds inside that are all longing to say something wonderful and exciting to your heart?” That’s the question Daniel Ladinsky asks in his translation of a …
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): At the Coachella music festival, I found myself next to a guy sporting a rainbow mohawk and wearing a red, white, and blue speedo, black socks, golf shoes, a striped necktie, angel wings, a red clown nose, and a battered hard hat with a sticker that read “Martinis and brown rice.” …
It’s time for you to fall in love, Aquarius–though not necessarily with a person. You could swoon with infatuation for a place where your heart feels free, for example. You could dive into new music that liberates you from your past, or give yourself with abandon to a fascinating task that brings out the best …
The often-inebriated Calamity Jane character on HBO’s TV show *Deadwood* uttered words that are important for you to take to heart. I’ll paraphrase her observation in order to streamline her drunken syntax: “Every day you have to figure out how to live all over again.” Of course this is always true, Aquarius, but it’s even …
This is a favorable time for you to conjure up an imaginary friend who also happens to be a muse. You can pretend that he or she is perfectly real, just invisible. Or you can fantasize that he or she is a mostly buried part of you that you rarely express, or maybe your ideal …
This week should be pretty CRUNCHALICIOUS, Aquarius. You know, crisp and delectable, chewy and pleasing to your inner four-year-old–like a breakfast cereal with three different sweet tastes packed into puff balls that softly explode in your mouth. The only potential problem is that you could keep wolfing down the treats without any regard for how …
Imagine asking fundamentalist nutcase Jerry Falwell to evaluate a book about evolution by a renowned science writer like Richard Dawkins. Imagine handing poet Allen Ginsberg’s masterwork *Howl* to a janitor in Bangladesh and paying him to write his opinions about it. The effect would be similar to an event that actually occurred recently. *The New …