Fireworks displays excite the eyes and lift the spirit. But the smoke and dust they produce can harm the lungs with residues of heavy metals. The toxic chemicals they release may pollute streams and lakes and even groundwater. So is there any alternative? Not yet. No one has come up with a more benign variety of fireworks. But if it happens soon, I bet it will be due to the efforts of an enterprising Aries researcher. Your tribe is entering a phase when you will have good ideas about how to make risky fun safer, how to ensure vigorous adventures are healthy, and how to maintain constructive relationships with exciting influences.

I invite you to keep a running list of all the ways life delights you and helps you and energizes you. Describe everyday miracles you take for granted . . . the uncanny powers you possess . . . the small joys that occur so routinely you forget how much they mean to you . . . the steady flow of benefits bestowed on you by people you know and don't know. What works for you? What makes you feel at home in the world? For inspiration in this noble effort, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Have you ever been loved? I bet you have been loved so much and so deeply that you have become blasé about the enormity of the grace it confers. So let me remind you: To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you're smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness.

Animals, too: You have been the recipient of their boundless affection. The spirits of allies who've left this world continue to send their tender regards, as well. Do you "believe" in angels and other divine beings? Whether or not you do, I can assure you that there are hordes of them beaming their uncanny consecrations your way. You are awash in torrents of love.

Free jazz is a type of music that emerged in the 1950s as a rebellion against jazz conventions. Its meter is fluid and its harmonies unfamiliar, sometimes atonal. Song structures may be experimental and unpredictable. A key element in free jazz is collective improvisation -- riffing done not just by a featured soloist, but by the entire group of musicians playing together. To prepare for your adventures in the coming days, Taurus -- which I suspect will have resemblances to free jazz -- you might want to listen to music by its pioneers, like Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Sun Ra. Whatever you do, don't fall prey to scapabobididdilywiddilydoobapaphobia, which is the fear of freestyle jazz.

All of creation loves you very much. Even now, people you know and people you don't know are collaborating to make sure you have all you need to make your next smart move. But are you willing to start loving life back with an equal intensity? The adoration it offers you has not exactly been unrequited, but there is room for you to be more demonstrative. For help in cultivating this approach, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Imagine you're with a team of explorers in Antarctica. You're climbing the 2,000-foot granite spire called Rakekniven that thrusts up out of the ice in Queen Maud Land. The temperature is 10 degrees below zero. There's not a plant or animal in sight. The blinding white emptiness of the wasteland beneath you fills you with desolate reverence, alienated awe, and soaring gratitude. You are far from everything that normally gives you comfort. Why do you feel so good?

Apple and Exxon are the most valuable companies in America. In third place, worth more than $350 billion, is Google. Back in 1999, when the future Internet giant was less than a year old, Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page tried to sell their baby for a mere million dollars. The potential buyer was Excite, an online service that was thriving at the time. But Excite's CEO turned down the offer, leaving Brin and Page to soldier onward by themselves. Lucky for them, right? Today they're rich and powerful. I foresee the possibility of a comparable development in your life, Gemini. An apparent "failure" may, in hindsight, turn out to be the seed of a future success.

What is the obvious secret you can't quite see? How could you turn your challenges into daily gifts for yourself? For clues to mysteries like these, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Breathe more like a wild boar and less like a parakeet. Act more like an unfathomable game with no time limit and less like a puzzle with just a few last pieces missing. Shimmer more like the aurora borealis in the early morning sky and less like a furnace heating a mansion. See more like a panther sees and less like your first teacher. Write more fat messages in the mist on the glass, and speak less about the skinny facts you know by heart. Eat more magic cookies and less brain candy.

"You can't have your cake and eat it, too" is an English-language proverb. It means that you will no longer have your cake if you eat it all up. The Albanian version of the adage is "You can't go for a swim without getting wet. " Hungarians say, "It's impossible to ride two horses with one butt." According to my analysis, Cancerian, you will soon disprove this folk wisdom. You will, in effect, be able to eat you cake and still have it. You will somehow stay dry as you take a dip. You will figure out a way to ride two horses with your one butt.

Grace emerges in the ebb and flow, not just the flow. The waning reveals a different blessing than the waxing. Where are you in the great cycle of your life? For inspiration in figuring it all out, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Try this meditation: Imagine that you are the wood and the fire that consumes the wood.

First, focus your awareness on the part of you that is the wood. You may tremble or gasp, feeling the jolt of your solidity disintegrating, your form changing. As you shift your attention to the part of you that is the fire, you may exult in the wild joy of power and liberation.

It may be tempting to favor the fire over the wood, to love the burning more than the being burned. But if you'd like to understand pronoia in its fullness, you've got to appreciate them equally. Can you imagine yourself being the fire and wood simultaneously? Is it possible for you to experience the deep pleasure of their collaboration?

I know this might come as a shock, Leo, but . . . are you ready? . . . you are God! Or at least godlike. An influx of crazy yet useful magic from the Divine Wow is boosting your personal power way beyond normal levels. There's so much primal mojo flowing through you that it will be hard if not impossible for you to make mistakes. Don't fret, though. Your stint as the Wild Sublime Golden Master of Reality probably won't last for more than two weeks, three tops. I'm sure that won't be long enough for you to turn into a raving megalomaniac with 10,000 cult followers.

Whether it's your time to ferment in the shadows or sing in the sun, fresh power to transform yourself is on the way. Life always delivers the creative energy you need to change into the new thing you must become. For more help in understanding it all, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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One of life's bounties is its changeableness, which ensures that boredom will never last very long. You may underestimate the intensity of your longing for continual transformation, but the universe doesn't. That's why it provides you with the boundless entertainment of your ever-shifting story. That's why it is always revising the challenges it sends your way, providing your curious soul with a rich variety of unpredictable teachings.

Neuroscientists have turned up evidence that suggests you love this aspect of the universe's behavior. They say that you are literally addicted to learning. At the moment when you grasp a lesson you've been grappling with, your brain experiences a rush of a natural opium-like chemical, boosting your pleasure levels. You crave this experience. You thrive on it.

In your imagination, take a trip many years into the future. See yourself as you are now, sitting next to the wise elder you will be then. The two of you are lounging on a beach and gazing at a lake. It's twilight. A warm breeze feels good. You turn to your older self and say, "Do you have any regrets? Is there anything you wish you had done but did not do?" Your older self tells you what that thing is. (Hear it now.) And you reply, "Tomorrow I will begin working to change all that."

You can learn to be lucky. It's not a mystical force you're born with, but a habit you can develop. How? For starters, be open to new experiences, trust your gut wisdom, expect good fortune, see the bright side of challenging events, and master the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities. For more help, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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 phrase "new roses" can serve as an antidote to neurosis -- as a kind of magical spell. You might invoke it when you're in danger of getting undermined by either your own neurosis or someone else's.

If you notice, for instance, that your subconscious mind is spiraling down into a sour fantasy stirred up by one of your habitual fears, you could mutter a cheerful round of "new roses, new roses, new roses."

If your allies slip into the same compulsive behavior that they tend to get stuck in whenever stress overflows, you could chant "new roses, new roses, new roses" in a tuneful, affectionate tone.

Over a hundred years ago, the cattle industry pressured the U.S. government to kill off wolves in Yellowstone National Park. By 1926 the wolves had all but vanished. In the following decades, elk herds grew unnaturally big, no longer hunted by their natural predator. The elk decimated the berry bushes of Yellowstone, eating the wild fruit with such voracity that grizzly bears and many other species went hungry. In 1995, environmentalists and conservationists got clearance to re-introduce wolves to the area. Now the berry bushes are flourishing again. Grizzlies are thriving, as are other mammals that had been deprived. I regard this vignette as an allegory for your life in the coming months, Libra. It's time to do the equivalent of replenishing the wolf population. Correct the imbalance.

Somewhere there's a treasure that has no value to anyone but you, and a secret that's meaningless to everyone except you, and a frontier that harbors a revelation only you would know how to exploit. Why not go in search of those things? For inspiration, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don't fully understand, you're still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you've been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that's just right for your body's needs, as it was before you fell asleep.

You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect. The interesting gift of these vivid hues is made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear reactions in order to convert its own body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.

I have no problem with you listening closely to the voices in your head. Although there might be some weird counsel flowing from some of them, it's also possible that one of those voices might have sparkling insights to offer. As for the voices that are delivering messages from your lower regions, in the vicinity of your reproductive organs: I'm not opposed to you hearing them out, either. But I hope you will be most attentive and receptive to the voices in your heart. While they are not infallible, they are likely to contain a higher percentage of useful truth than those other two sources.

When they say "Be yourself," which self do they mean? Certainly not the self that wants to win every game and use up every resource and stand alone at the end of time on a mountain of pretty garbage. So which self is it? For guidance, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Dear Beauty and Truth Lab: I was wondering if you had any information about Beyonders, people who were born under no star and who are therefore not ruled by the stars. - Wannabe Beyonder

Dear Wannabe: It's impossible to be born under no star. However, we all go through periods when we're relatively free from the authority of the stars we were born under and therefore immune from cosmic compulsion. During these times, we're less susceptible to the whims of fate and the demands of the past and the inertia of karma. Our willpower has more breathing room, and we're more likely to fulfill Einstein's dictum, "Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Kangaroo rats live in the desert. They're at home there, having evolved over millennia to thrive in the arid conditions. So well-adapted are they that they can go a very long time without drinking water. While it's admirable to have achieved such a high level of accommodation to their environment, I don't recommend that you do something comparable. In fact, its probably better if you don't adjust to some of the harsher aspects of your environment. Now might be a good time to acknowledge this fact and start planning an alternate solution.

Take inventory of the extent that "No" dominates your life. Notice how often you say or think: 1. "That's not right." 2. "I don't like that." 3. "I don't agree with that." 4. "They don't like me." 5. "I'm not very good." 6. "That should be different from what it is." For help in retraining yourself to say "Yes!" at least 51% of the time, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Of the many things that have gone right for you during your time on Earth, the most crucial was your birth. As you crossed over the threshold, trading the warm dark sanctuary for the bright noisy enigma, you didn't die! It was a difficult act of high magic that involved many people who worked very hard in your behalf. The skills they provided in helping you navigate your rite of passage were in turn made possible by previous generations of threshold-tenders who bequeathed their expertise.

Months before that initiation, a more secret miracle bloomed: Your life began as a single cell, spawned by the explosive fusion of two highly specialized bundles of chromosomes. How could that tiny package of raw material have possibly grown a brain and liver and heart and stomach over a period of a few months? What inscrutable genius guided and oversaw the emergence of your fully formed infant body, that virtuoso creation, from the slimmest of clues?

"Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled," said writer William Blake. I think you will challenge this theory in the coming weeks, Capricorn. Your passions will definitely not be weak. They may even verge on being volcanic. And yet I bet you will manage them fairly well. By that I mean you will express them with grace and power rather than allowing them to overwhelm you and cause a messy ruckus. You won't need to tamp them down and bottle them up because you will find a way to be both uninhibited and disciplined as you give them their chance to play.

How's your fight for freedom going? Are you making progress in liberating yourself from your unconscious obsessions, bad habits, and conditioned responses? For assistance and inspiration, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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You can drink a glass of water. You can spread butter on a slice of toast. You can wash your hair and prune your plants and draw infinity signs on a piece of paper. Your hands work wonderfully well! Their intricate force and sustained grace are amply supported by your heart, which circulates your blood all the way out to replenish the energy of the muscles and nerves in your fingers and palms and wrists. After your blood has delivered its blessings, it finds its way back to your heart to be refreshed. This masterful mystery repeats itself over and over again without you ever having to think about it.

Would you please go spend some quality time having non-goal-oriented fun? Can I convince you to lounge around in fantasyland as you empty your beautiful head of all compulsions to prove yourself and meet people's expectations? Will you listen to me if I suggest that you take off the mask that's stuck to your face and make funny faces in the mirror? You need a nice long nap, gorgeous. Two or three nice long naps. Bake some damn cookies, even if you've never done so. Soak your feet in epsom salts as you binge-watch a TV show that stimulates a thousand emotions. Lie in the grass and stare lovingly at the sky for as long as it takes to recharge your spiritual batteries.

Assume that your drive to experience pleasure isn't a barrier to your spiritual growth, but is in fact essential to it. Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy can make you a more ethical and compassionate person. Imagine that feeling good has something important to teach you every day. For inspiration in practicing this approach, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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Your imagination may be the best gift you've been given. It's the source of your creative power. If there's a particular experience or object you want to bring into your life, the first thing you've got to do is visualize it. The practical actions you take to manifest your dreams always refer back to the pictures in your mind's eye. And so every goal you fulfill, every quest you carry out, begins as an inner vision. Your imagination is the engine of your destiny. It's the catalyst with which you design your future. Do you know where it comes from? Do you have any idea how powerful it is?

Dear Pisceans: Your evil twins have asked me to speak to you on their behalf. They say they want to apologize for the misunderstandings that may have arisen from their innocent desire to show you what you had been missing. Their intent was not at all hostile or subversive. They simply wanted to fill in some gaps in your education. OK? Next your evil twins want to humbly request that you no longer refer to them as "Evil Twin," but instead pick a more affectionate name, like, say "Sweet Mess" or "Tough Lover." If you promise to treat them with more geniality, they will guarantee not to be so tricky and enigmatic.

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." So begins Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield. I'd like to inspire you to write a story of your own that begins like that. For help, tune into your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE.

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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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May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years.

May you wake up to salsa music one summer morning and start dancing while you're still half-­asleep.

May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses.

May you mix stripes with plaids, floral patterns with checks, and yellowish-green with brownish-purple.

May you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds and one extrasolar planet.

May you put a bumper sticker on your car or bike that says, "My god can kick your god's ass!"

If you bury your face in your tear-stained pillow and beg God to please send you your soul mate, may you not slur your words in such a way that they sound like "cell mate."

May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans.

May you actually kiss the earth now and then.

May you find many good excuses to say, as physicist Niels Bohr once did, "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."