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Horoscopes by Rob Brezsny
♍ VIRGO
(August 23-September 22)
This week my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES offer you a teaser look at some of the major themes you will be working and playing with in 2014. Start dreaming and scheming about who you're going to be in the new year!
(Beginning December 31, I will devote three consecutive weeks of EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES to an in-depth discussion of your long-range outlook for the coming months. Tune in!)
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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT. The oracle below is excerpted from my book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.
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"The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them," wrote novelist Margaret Atwood. "There ought to be as many for love."
Here are a few that the ancient Greeks devised, according to Lindsay Swope in her review of Richard Idemon's book Through the Looking Glass.
Epithemia is the basic need to touch and be touched. Our closest approximation is "horniness," though epithemia is not so much a sexual feeling as a sensual one.
Philia is friendship. It includes the need to admire and respect your friends as a reflection of yourself—like in high school, where you want to hang out with the cool kids because that means you're cool too.
Eros isn't sexual in the way we usually think, but is more about the emotional gratification that comes from merging souls.
Agape is a mature, utterly free expression of love that has no possessiveness. It means wanting the best for another person even if it doesn't advance your self-interest.
Your assignment is to coin three additional new words for love, which means you'll have to discover or create three alternate states of love that have previously been unnamed. To do that, you'll have to put aside your habitual expectations and standard definitions of what constitutes love so that you can explore an array of nuances, including varieties you never imagined existed.