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Horoscopes by Rob Brezsny


Week of January 31st, 2013

♈ ARIES

(March 21-April 19)
Wageni ni baraka is a Swahili proverb that means "guests are a blessing." That's not always true, of course. Sometimes guests can be a boring inconvenience or a messy burden. But for you in the coming weeks, Aries, I'm guessing the proverb will be 98 percent correct. The souls who come calling are likely to bestow unusually fine benefits. They may provide useful clues or missing links you've been searching for. They might inspire you to see things about yourself that you really need to know, and they might even give you shiny new playthings. Open your mind and heart to the unexpected blessings.


If you missed any of the long-term, big-picture horoscopes I wrote for you at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, I've bundled them all in one place. Go here to read them. You can also listen to my three-part long-range, in-depth EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for 2013, or an audio forecast for the coming week.

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There was an indignant uproar after revelations in 2006 that James Frey's best-selling "memoir" A Million Little Pieces contains fabrications. He hadn't actually lived all of the experiences he depicted therein.

Hearing about it prompted me to ruminate on whether there's any such thing as a completely accurate account of any person's life. My conclusion: no.

In every autobiography and biography ever written, the author imaginatively strings together selectively chosen details to conjure up artificially coherent narratives rather than depicting the crazy-quilt ambiguity that actually characterizes everyone's journey.

If you and nine writers set out to tell your life story, you'd produce 10 wildly different tales, each rife with subjective interpretation, misplaced emphasis, unintentional distortions, and exorbitant extrapolations from insufficient data.

Celebrate the malleability of reality. Regale listeners with stories about the time you worked as a pirate in the Indian Ocean, or rode the rails through Kansas as a hobo, or gave a down-on-his-luck CIA agent sage advice in an elevator. When you call to get pizza delivered and the clerk who takes your order asks your name, say you're Brad Pitt or Paris Hilton. When someone you're meeting is annoyed because you're late, say you couldn't help it because you were smoking crack in the bus station bathroom with your mom's guru and lost track of time. If asked how much education you have, say you have three PhDs, one each in astrobiology, Russian literature, and whale songs.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.