Musician Sarah McLachlan told the crowd at one of her concerts: "I feel great about singing really depressing songs." In the U2 song "A Man and a Woman," Bono sings, "The only pain is to feel nothing at all." They are your role models in the coming week, Pisces. I hope they inspire you to feel grateful for your capacity to experience such intense emotions. You're lucky to be so sensitive! You're blessed to have so much vital force! So please celebrate your talent for feeling melancholy and overwhelmed. Congratulate yourself for being such a connoisseur of guilt, confusion, and anxiety. You're more alive than other people. You've got a soul as big and wild and deep as the Amazon River.

What greater adventure is there than exploring the enigmas of your unique destiny? For more hints, listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE for the week ahead. You can also listen to my three-part long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in 2008.

*

SACRED ADVERTISEMENT
Beauty and Truth Laboratory researcher Firenze Matisse traveled to Antarctica. On the first day, the guide took him and his group to a remote area and left them alone for an hour to commune with the pristine air and unearthly stillness. After a while, a penguin ambled up and launched into a ceremonial display of squawks and stretches. Firenze responded with recitals of his favorite memorized poems, imagining he was "engaged in a conversation with eternity." Halfway through his inspired performance of Thich Nhat Hanh's "Please Call Me by My True Names," the penguin sent a stream of green projectile vomit cascading against his chest, and shuffled away.

Though Firenze initially felt deflated by eternity's surprise, no harm was done. He soon came to see it as a first-class cosmic joke, and looked forward to exploiting its value as an amusing story with which to regale his friends back home.

Beauty and Truth Laboratory researcher Michael Logan was the first person to hear Firenze's tale upon his return from Antarctica. "You might want to consider this, Firenze," Michael mused after taking it all in. "Penguins nurture their offspring by chewing food—mixing it up with all God's enzymes—and then vomiting it into the mouths of the penguin babies. Perhaps you weren't the butt of a cosmic joke or some Linda Blair-esque bad review, but in fact the recipient of a very precious gift of love. Who knows?"
*
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 Powells.