Backbone > Planet Waves
Horoscopes 3-03
by Eric Francis

Aries (March 20-April 19)
This is not going to be your average spring. The feeling is that of Promethian fire, of minds lighting up one another, of hearts reverberating with the music of freedom. I know the world is on the brink of chaos, but what we are witnessing is nothing more or less than the sum total of all we have denied all these years, and nothing less than the opportunity to go beyond it. As we release those cloaks and buttresses of refusal to know and feel the truth of who we are, we are born into a new world. For a moment, let no practical consideration deter your passion and your craving for vision, knowledge and freedom. Consider that very craving to be your most pressing practical concern. If life were really a game, you would be on top of it. But it’s no such thing. Not now. Not today.

Taurus (April 19-May 20)
When you reach a certain point in life where you feel your mastery and power, you may sometimes notice a loss of another gift, that of your ability to emote deeply. But now you have no need to cling to, or stand on, an old security base in a moment when your soul is calling upon you to express your greatest strengths, to let go into the world that exists beyond your fear. It may seem, as these days unfold, that you will surely fail at something you very much desire and need to succeed at, and worse, fail when you are so close to your goal. At the same time you are being drawn toward something or someone, toward an ideal and toward a feeling that is much larger than yourself. Yes, you will surrender, and no, it does not need to make any sense. Hold your dreams lightly.

Gemini (May 20-June 21)
You haven’t yet realized the extent to which your sense of frustration is totally an illusion. You have long suspected it as such, yet that doesn’t necessarily help when you’re feeling like your heart is a brick or nothing makes any sense. It may feel like flirting with madness to let go into the fertile void, but I assure you that far more insanity is born of clinging to a false sense of safety or an ideology that has no bearing in biological, artistic or emotional reality. On one level, the overwhelming feeling of your solar chart is that of a full-on meeting with the chaos of who you are becoming, as if you are flying into space without a ship. But if you are reading these words, you have an ego matrix. It’s just getting a little looser, and energy is flashing through the spaces, and you are responding to the higher calling to which I have been alluding for months.

Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Perception makes the world we think we see, though it’s very strange to think that the perception of oneself is an internally-driven experience that is projected outward and through which we filter the entire world. When that self-perception changes, everything changes. For many years you have worked to be free from something, to give up something, to release yourself from a commitment, agreement, or expectation. I speak not of a magazine subscription, but of an entanglement on the level of your relationship with existence. No doubt part of this involved a sexual awakening, which is just a raising of awareness and a casting off of fetters. But there is another level, which is dropping or bursting through an inheritance legacy. You are about to get your first confirmation that there’s nothing to live up to. Watch how the world changes when you remember.

Leo (July 22-August 23)
If life is supposed to be so good, why don’t you know whether to run, walk, laugh, cry, draw your sword or undress right now? You may wonder how the treatment you receive from others, or the environment in which you find yourself, is related to what you are experiencing within yourself. You may marvel at its inconsistency. You may look at the world and wonder what is true, what is real, and what is worthy of your precious attention. I’ll tell you: all of it. Try denying nothing. Nothing you see, nothing you feel, nor the desire to suppress one version of reality or the other because there is an apparent contradiction. Look straight at life. Do not be afraid to challenge the agreements people hold you to, and most of all, do not doubt your capacity for change. Freedom is the freedom to change, or it is nothing at all. Nothing at all, sweet child.

Virgo (August 23-September 22)
You have been waiting to get a good look at yourself. It reminds me of those times when, experimenting with, let’s call them alternative realities, you finally wound up in the bathroom and, when you were expecting it the least, you met... The Mirror. Ah, but you do want to meet The Mirror now, don’t you? You need to; you have been holding back too long. You need the grounding and the dose of humility and the feeling of melting into surrender that must come with selflove and self-compassion. You know there is no need to perpetuate one particular inner struggle and the only way to release it is to open yourself to total vulnerability, honesty and accepting yourself for who you are and why you are, and most of all, what you need. The face you see in the glass may first appear as an enemy, or it may appear as a friend, or it may appear as a weary soul. Please don’t hold back your love and forgiveness. Glance into this person’s eyes and remember.

Libra (September 22-October 23)
When members of the Grateful Dead were introduced to Salvador Dali, they asked him what drugs he did. “Drugs?” he replied, insisting he had no interest. “I am a drug.” This sums up pretty well the effect you will be having on the people around you as the month progresses, and you begin to exude a certain energy that is associated with an inner plunge into your misty world of child perception. The borders between what is real and what is not are rather soft in a child’s mind, as they have been in yours for a long time. But the effect of what you both move through and experience internally in the coming weeks grants you a subtle gift for turning the world of reality into the world of paint and plasticine, with all the attending freedom. This is an unusual, caring and creative moment where the mental/emotional planes mix with the physical like a watercolor in the rain. The most important thing to remember is that life is art, and art is a choice.

Scorpio (October 23-November 22)
In the strange biorhythm of your life, you are in a new cycle, below the ‘middle’ line and reaching upwards. The old cycle resolved with such an unlikely swirl of comings-together that you probably wondered what it was that you were so worried about after all. With each of these cycles, which run in two-year pulses, you gain confidence. You become a different person, and that’s merely because you know yourself better. I think there’s probably still a lot you’re not ready to say. But you can practice, and you can dare, and in truth, readiness is sometimes over-rated, usually confused with willingness. What stands between them is the willingness to take a gamble. In this month and the months to come, however, the gambles are going to be taking you. I trust you will enjoy the results.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 22)
It really sucks when all our ideas about right and wrong are the remnants of a dictatorship that was left behind by our parents, but we have no clue whatsoever. The clues, though, are guilt, frustration, no-win situations, inhibitions that get us stuck in the face of our dearest desires, general dissatisfaction with life… but you are making progress. You have a lot to thank yourself for. One particular decision stands out as liberating beyond what words can describe, and the courage it’s taken has been immense—but it is your courage. Take it as evidence that you have consecrated a level of self-awareness that can never be taken from you. To consecrate is to make holy, to witness the inner god-power of something, in this instance, your sense of self. You are learning that the soul is not the wimpy, wispy thing they allude to in church. Soul is the living fire of spirit, in human form. Soul is the awareness of the totality of being that welcomes each new part back into union. Soul is what you are remembering.

Capricorn (December 22-January 20)
Ideas are everything. Ideas change. Everything changes. When everything stops changing, we can therefore look to our ideas. When the world moves fast and wild, observe the screen of your thoughts. When your imagination soars, keep your eyes open. This is the forbidden territory—both the movement, and the sense of observation, the Self present that is at the center of the scene—the mind of the senses, the consciousness of creatures. Forbidden, as we are all raised with dead spots in our hearts, the places where we were attacked or neglected. Life is either a process of running around these voids, or going into them and staying present until they wake up, and it can take a while. In the end, or rather, in the beginning, there is simply the choice to live. Not to live well, or live in the present, or live right, or live any special way, but simply to live.

Aquarius (January 20-February 19)
The dividing line is between being in your life and possessing it. But you also know that it is quite impossible to do that—that existence is not a thing one can own. Yet it can be valued and expressed with value. I assure you that what distinguishes the distinguished among us is precisely the capacity to appreciate who they are in the context of actually existing—of not taking that fact for granted. You are starting to address one rather ancient problem, which is the need to sense your existence and movement through space from the perspective of plunging into the sensation of it all. The sensation is calling on you to take an unusual risk, as if, having done so much becoming, you must test out the reality of that with an action, a radical decision, an investment in yourself, or the expression of a need. Just feel how you feel when you offer life the ability to respond to your actual reality. A discovery awaits you.

Pisces (February 19-March 20)
The uncertainty factor is the most important thing in your life right now. Indeed, it sees to be the only thing in your life right now. But what changes in a way that few could have predicted is not “your life.” What changes is you. Transitions from one reality to the other are potentially scary, and often both sides of the venture are equally convincing. It is also very difficult to let go of an old version of reality without having a new one to just walk into, and you don’t quite have it yet. But remember, you are not being asked to abandon anything. You just need to notice the world around you. Sometimes when we wake up in the morning, we are conscious before our eyes are open. We don’t necessarily know where we are. We are not sleeping, but have not seen the sight of the new day. What you will notice when you open your eyes is, in reality, that you’ve been awake for quite a while.

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