"Inspiration is highly overrated," says photo realist artist Chuck Close. "If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen." I share his assessment of the creative process. The books and music and columns I've produced owe their existence largely to my hard work, which generates a burst of inspiration every now and then but mostly gets things done without much flash. Keep that in mind, Taurus. Though you may not be inundated with a series of epiphanies in the coming days, you have the potential to spawn a lot of useful and original stuff. Your fertility quotient is high.

No one knows you better than you do. But maybe you'll be inspired to dig up even more self-knowledge if you tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for the week ahead.

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While you and I are together here:
Your favorite phrase is flux gusto
The colors of your soul are sable, vermilion, ivory, and jade
Your magic talisman is a thousand-year-old Joshua tree whose flowers blossom just one night each year and can only be pollinated by the yucca moth
Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you’d like the world around you to change
Your soil of destiny is peat moss
Your mythic symbol is a treasure chest dislodged from its hiding place in the earth by a flood
Your lucky number is 13 to the 13th power
Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics
A clutch of frog eggs from an unpolluted river is your auspicious hair-care product
The anonymous celebrity with whom you have most in common is the jesterwho followed Buddha around and kept him loose
The question that perks you up when your routine becomes too rote is this: What possesses the bar-tailed godwit to migrate annually from Alaska to New Zealand by hitching rides on gale-force winds?

The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.