For the Week of September 15 VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): It’s impossible to be perfect. It’s neither healthy nor productive to obsess on perfectionism. You know these things. You understand you can’t afford to get bogged down in overthinking and overreaching and overpolishing. And when you are at your best…

Week of September 8 VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “To love oneself is hard work,” declares Virgo author Hanif Abdurraqib. He adds, “But I think it becomes harder when you realize that you’re actually required to love multiple versions of yourself that show up without warning throughout a day, throughout a…

Week of September 1 VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?” Virgo-born Mary Oliver asks that question to start one of her poems. She spends the rest of the poem speculating on possible answers. At the end, she concludes she mostly longs to be an “empty, waiting…

Week of August 25 ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the coming weeks, I urge you to flee from stale and rigid certainty. Rebel against dogmatic attitudes and arrogant opinions. Be skeptical of unequivocal answers to nuanced questions. Instead, dear Aries, give your amused reverence to all that’s mysterious and enigmatic…

Week of August 18 ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky wrote, “All my life, I’ve been going around waiting for something — as if I were waiting in a railway station. And I’ve always felt as if the living I’ve done so far hasn’t actually been real life…

For the Week of August 11 ARIES (March 21-April 19): Tips to get the most out of the coming weeks: 1. Exercise your willpower at random moments just to keep it limber. 2. Be adept at fulfilling your own hype. 3. Argue for fun. Be playful and frisky as you…

For the Week of August 4 ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries poet Ada Limón advises us to notice and love “the music of the world.” She says that praising and giving attention to the good things “are as important and necessary as witnessing and naming and holding the grief and…

Week of July 28 ARIES (March 21-April 19): Fiction-writer John Banville tells us, “There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.” I suspect that’s sometimes true for many of us. But it won’t apply to you Aries anytime soon…

Week of July 21 ARIES (March 21-April 19): You are entering the Season of Love’s Renewal. To celebrate, I offer you a poem by eighth-century Tamil poet Andal. Whatever gender you may be, I invite you to visualize yourself as the “Snakewaist woman” she addresses. Here’s Andal, bringing a fiery…