Gemini: You know who’s
excited about quarantine!? Well, excited is probably the wrong word but BOREDOM
RESEARCHERS! https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-natural-experiment/
Join
their experiments. See what’s going on with your old friend Boredom. Doodle
around the edges of it. Build a shrine of pushpins and binder clips. Burn
looseleaf as sage. Sit until you turn into cloudscapes, until your breath and
your voice stop feeling like weapons. It’s a peace you deserve.
Cancer: Last Thursday
night while Shamanic Journeying via Zoom, (Like one does.) the stars were
dragged Blair Witch style into a dark wood shining only with fluorescent
blue leaves. Plants are sometimes the only kind of touching, aren’t they? The
only hint of life? The big leaves were both warm and cool to the touch,
shifting colors because they were a dream. Curl up in those dark dream leaves
until some helping creature arrives to lead you to a bright meadow.
Leo: As the person who built an Aurora Borealis/
the door from Russian Doll out of tissue paper and LED lights, you can
accomplish most things. Step one: Learn all the names of the flowers before you
graduate to fungus, grasses, butterflies, and birds. String up the prettiest
names like lights, make your gardens like lights, make the petals like lights
too, why not? Delphinium, pulmonaria, kalanchoe, whatever names feel best, say
them like prayers.
Virgo: “The sky over the
city has too much light, baby. You can see the stars a little but you gotta
work for them.” N.K. Jemesin, The City We Became. What pulses in the
city of you, now without the thrum and crush of your commute? Now that you’re
not being honked at so often when you hesitate for a nanosecond at green
lights. Now that you’re commercial-free, where are the new gaps? See if you can
hear it, or better yet, hold out your hands to the sky and wait to be touched.
Libra: A long walk in the
woods, if you can. Not on the weekend, that would be nuts. It’s okay if the
walk’s in your mind, or on watercolor paper. If you can’t ride your bike along
the rivers and creeks or dance in a crowd under a big bridge any time soon,
what then? Can you listen to those gentle studying songs until you sleep new
lessons? Can you, very carefully, twist ropes into wings? The stars are sending
new ways for you to sit in the sun and every puzzle you can hold in your two
warm hands for hope.
Scorpio: Like
everyone (Well, not everyone.) you are a business rebuilding, a Festival Girl
whose travels have paused. Be even more than usual the stars’ favorite
palindrome: drawn inward. Your imagination will grow forests and populate seas.
Make your Tolkein-maps of undiscovered realms. Your mantra for now is here
be dragons. It’s okay if you don’t yet see the treasure underneath.
Sagittarius:
You’re a library. And the head librarian of that library. Ask the Front Desk
(also you) where the Mystical Experience section is. Turn left at the card
catalog of Conversations Your Barbies had, head past the Disco Songs Your Mom Used
to Sing. The Special Collection is showing the archives from the Museum of Bad
Advice, but don’t sign in there just yet—you just washed your hands. Check out
as many items as you’d like, the City of You has changed its overdue policy.
Capricorn: If
there’s one thing that (dear but un-re-watchable) Friends got right
about the Nineties, its how much every day turned on the axis of coffee. Tired
from doing not-very-much until sunrise or from a young, walloping
misunderstanding of the proportions of a gin and tonic, we would migrate to our
(way more rewatchable!) friends in basements, on porches, in
just-barely-bookstores. We can’t do most of that right now, but: A porch, a cup
of good coffee, a Sunday you feel ambivalent about, a dear friend, and peace.
Aquarius: As
much as the stars are OBSESSED with Marie Kondo, there really is no one right
way to clean a basement. If you want to go scorched-earth and pitch it all out,
go ahead, the stars won’t tell anyone. If you want to lovingly turn over every
document, write a sonnet to every shred of ephemera, every errant leaflet, go
ahead, why not? It’s your basement, and even if it isn’t, too bad, you’re the
one doing the work. Go down the steps and start.
Pisces: Every classroom
you’ve even been in, teaching or learning, home or away, LOVES you. Each one
keeps like love letters the maps you’ve drawn of them, the spreadsheets, the
procedures, the hand-written signs. Buildings know how to love
all-encompassingly and so do teachers, so do students. The windows are open to
the summer breeze. The sun is giddily shattering concentration and helping the
houseplants to feed themselves. The pencils are all sharpened, the dry-erase
markers are fresh and multicolored. These things remember, and so do you.
Aries: Get caught in the
rain without worrying that your phone will catch a raindrop. There will be no
need to sleep overnight in rice. You have a blowdryer and towels if you need
them. Loosen your mask before it starts to feel like drowning. If, once you’re
inside again reading with your coffee, the sun comes out, you don’t even have
to get up and look outside for the rainbow. The rainbow will come to you.
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