For the week of April 2, 2020

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “If all the world’s a stage, where the hell is the teleprompter,” asks aphorist Sami Feiring. In my astrological opinion, you are the least likely of all the signs to identify with that perspective. While everyone else might wish they could be better prepared for the nonstop improvisational tests of everyday life, most of you tend to prefer what I call the “naked spontaneity” approach. If you were indeed given the chance to use a teleprompter, you’d probably ignore it. Everything I just said is especially and intensely true for you right now.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): When Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsun was 25 years old, a doctor told him that the tuberculosis he had contracted would kill him within three months. But in fact, Hamsun lived 67 more years, ’til the age of 92. I suspect there’s an equally erroneous prophecy or unwarranted expectation impacting your life right now. A certain process or phenomenon that seems to be nearing an end may in fact reinvent or resurrect itself, going on to last for quite some time. I suggest you clear away any misapprehensions you or others might have about it.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I invite you to remember what you were thinking and feeling around your birthday in 2019. Were there specific goals you hoped to accomplish between then and your birthday in 2020? Were there bad old habits you aimed to dissolve and good new habits you proposed to instigate? Was there a lingering wound you aspired to heal or a debilitating memory you longed to conquer? The coming weeks will be an excellent time to take inventory of your progress in projects like those. And if you find that you have achieved less than you had hoped, I trust you will dedicate yourself to playing catch-up in the weeks between now and your birthday. You may be amazed at how much ground you can cover.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I can’t swim. Why? There was a good reason when I was a kid: I’m allergic to chlorine, and my mom wouldn’t let me take swimming lessons at the local chlorine-treated pool. Since then, the failure to learn is inexcusable, and I’m embarrassed about it. Is there an equivalent phenomenon in your life? The coming weeks might be an excellent time to meditate on how to correct the problem. Now excuse me while I head out to my solo self-administered swim lesson at Bass Lake, buoyed by the instructions I got from a YouTube video.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Is William Shakespeare the greatest author who ever lived? French philosopher Voltaire didn’t think so, calling him “an amiable barbarian.” Russian superstar author Leo Tolstoy claimed The Bard had “a complete absence of aesthetic feeling.” England’s first Poet Laureate John Dryden called Shakespeare’s language “scarcely intelligible.” T. E. Lawrence, a.k.a Lawrence of Arabia, declared The Bard had a second-rate mind. Lord Byron said, “Shakespeare’s name stands too absurdly high and will go down.” His contemporary, the poet and playwright Ben Johnson, asserted that he “never had six lines together without a fault.” I offer these cheeky views to encourage you to enjoy your own idol-toppling and authority-questioning activities in the coming weeks. You have license to be an irrepressible iconoclast.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo-born Jack Ma is China’s richest person and one of the world’s most powerful businessmen. He co-founded Alibaba, the Chinese version of Amazon. He likes his employees to work hard, but also thinks they should cultivate a healthy balance between work and life. In his opinion, they should have sex six times a week, or 312 times a year. Some observers have suggested that’s too much—especially if you labor 12 hours a day, six days a week, as Ma prefers—but it may not be excessive for you. The coming months could be a very erotic time. But please practice safe sex in every way imaginable.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): How hard are you willing to work on your most important relationships? How might your life change for the better if you gave them your most potent resourcefulness and panache? The next eight weeks will be a favorable time for you to attend to these matters. During this fertile time, you will have unprecedented power to reinvigorate togetherness with imaginative innovations. I propose you undertake the following task: Treat your intimate alliances as creative art projects that warrant your supreme ingenuity.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “I make mistakes,” confessed author Jean Kerr. “I’ll be the second to admit it.” She was making a joke, contrasting her tepid sense of responsibility with the humbler and more common version of the idiom, which is, “I make mistakes; I’ll be the first to admit it.” In the coming weeks, I’ll be fine if you merely match her mild level of apology—just as long as you do indeed acknowledge some culpability in what has gone amiss or awry or off-kilter. One way or another, you need to be involved in atonement and correction—for your own sake.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): If you have been thinking of adopting a child or getting pregnant with a new child, the coming weeks will be a favorable time to enter a new phase of rumination about that possibility. If you’ve been dreaming off and on about a big project that could activate your dormant creative powers and captivate your imagination for a long time to come, now would be a perfect moment to get more practical about it. If you have fantasized about finding a new role that would allow you to express even more of your beauty and intelligence, you have arrived at a fertile phase to move to the next stage of that fantasy.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): I suggest you make room in your life for a time of sacred rejuvenation. Here are activities you might try: Recall your favorite events of the past. Reconnect with your roots. Research your genetic heritage. Send prayers to your ancestors, and ask them to converse with you in your dreams. Have fun feeling what it must have been like when you were in your mother’s womb. Get a phone consultation with a past life regression therapist who can help you recover scenes from your previous incarnations. Feel reverence and gratitude for traditions that are still meaningful to you. Reaffirm your core values—the principles that serve as your lodestar. And here’s the number one task I recommend: Find a place of refuge in your imagination and memories; use your power of visualization to create an inner sanctuary.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Are we just being poetic and fanciful when we say that wonder is a survival skill? Not according to the editors who assembled the collection of essays gathered in a book called Wonder and Other Survival Skills. They propose that a capacity to feel awe and reverence can help us to be vital and vigorous; that an appreciation for marvelous things makes us smart and resilient; that it’s in our selfish interests to develop a humble longing for sublime beauty and an attraction to sacred experiences. The coming weeks will be a favorable time for you to dive deep into these healing pleasures.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): For decades, the city of Sacramento suffered from severe floods when the Sacramento and American rivers overflowed their banks. Residents authorized a series of measures to prevent these disasters, culminating in the construction of a 59,000-acre floodplain that solved the problem. According to my analysis, the coming weeks will be an excellent time for you to plan an equally systematic transformation. It could address a big ongoing problem like Sacramento’s floods, or it could be a strategy for reorganizing and recreating your life so as to gloriously serve your long-term dreams.