| |  Illustration by Frances Murphy | All of my favorite possessions were paid for with cash in the homes of strangers in Texas: My favorite sweater is a vintage Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt I found in the back of a closet in a four-bedroom house outside of McKinney, Texas. It was brand new, with the tags still intact, and had never been worn by the owner. My espresso machine is from a home in Irving. My typewriter, a portable Royal, comes from a home outside of Fort Worth; my mom paid $40 for it as soon as she saw the ribbon still worked. My favorite shirt is an atrocious men’s button-up that I found on a clothing rack in a stranger’s garage. It’s purple plaid with green and yellow mixed in. I had it taken in, and it’s the most comfortable thing I own. In the backyard of the same property, I found a kitschy plastic tray that freezes ice into the shape of Texas. It reminds me of home. Life accumulates a lot, and when someone dies, there are heaps of material goods left behind. You end up with dishes and tights and cheap pens and garden hoses and books and printers and crosses and sweaters. There are piles of DVDs and thumb drives and underwear and spices and shoes. There’s rarely enough family to take it all (or family who even need it all) — hence the estate sale. My mother and I routinely drive hours across Texas to stand in line with the other hopeful collectors and cheapskates who visit these sales. I’m usually the youngest shopper in attendance, if you don’t count those still required to hold an adult’s hand. While walking through older ranch homes or two-story McMansions, it’s a reminder that, regardless of economic station, building a life is an act of hoarding. Putting down roots, like buying a house, only leads to acquiring more things. My mom is always searching for patterns, sewing notions, and fabric, so we have a primary mission for our mother-daughter journeys. But I’m never looking for anything in particular. Office supplies, like notebooks and pens, have to be dirt cheap. Kitchen appliances have to come with all their parts. With clothes and fabrics, it’s all about possibilities: Can I alter this to fit my body? Do I own other clothes I can wear this with? I once bought about two yards of Vera Bradley–esque quilted fabric that looked kitschy in the bin; it’s now living a second life as one of my favorite vests. *** It can be a process to find something you really love, but the key is arriving early to get first pick of the inventory. That’s why my mom and I have spent so many early mornings chasing the Texas sunrise, listening to terrible chat radio, and sipping from large cups of coffee and tea. Here’s how it goes: If you arrive an hour before the doors open, there will be a small line. If you’re two hours early, though, you’re almost certainly guaranteed the first spot. People don’t really make conversation, and if it’s cold enough, everyone will wait in their cars. Eventually, the estate-sale employee unlocks the front door of the home and announces any guidelines or markdowns. Then we all file in. Newbies mill around the front room, eyes agog at the state of the home. Nothing is neatly stored away. Instead, the items are arranged across every available surface. Small objects like pens or toiletries are packaged in baggies and priced to sell. Earrings, pins, necklaces, and other jewelry are put into display cases by the cash register. But everything else can be found where you’d typically store it. Looking for a toolbox? Go to the garage. In the market for cooking supplies? Make a beeline for the kitchen. The cabinet doors are often removed so the shelving can be used as a display. Every counter will be covered with canned food, pots, pans, plates, coffee cups, silverware. The fridge and oven may even have price tags. It’s spooky to take stock of the many possessions I’ve acquired this way. My journal at the moment is from a home office where a Christmas photo of George W. and Laura Bush was on display (this is Texas, after all). My food processor, in which I make excellent frozen yogurt, is from a kitchen in Collin County. My cheese grater, hand blender, and most of my bakeware are from that kitchen, too. I have a coffee mug with chili peppers from another home, and I have six miniature tea sets from a curio cabinet somewhere in Dallas County. All of these things had another life once; they were bought with some other purpose in mind. I’m not sure I believe in ghosts in the Patrick Swayze sense, but I still think about the previous owners every time I use these items. What did they expect to make with this fabric? Did they have prayers or feelings they planned to fill this blank book with? Why didn’t they cut the tags off of that Cowboys sweatshirt? Why was the hand mixer never taken out of its original packaging? Did they buy these things thinking they would have more time to use them? Estate sales can be for the dead but also for people downsizing or moving to assisted living. No matter the reason for the sale, I walk out of each home reminded that our time to cook, to write, to live is limited. I’ll always think about the people whose things are bringing me joy and pray that they’re at peace, wherever that may be. *** To me, the most evocative thing you can buy at an estate sale is a cookbook. The handwritten notes and tabs signifying the owner’s favorite recipes offer a different kind of intimacy than an unworn sweatshirt or a typewriter. When I’m deep in the haze of depression, I like to read these notes and imagine what lives and dishes these books could lead to. I always start by opening the book where the spine is well worn and envision the meals I’ll make when I’m finally feeling better. My estate-sale white whale was Julia Child’s behemoth Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child’s book is the cookbook, and I needed to have a vintage one, one that held all the scents of the meals its previous owner had made. Sale after sale, I came away disappointed. I had convinced myself that if I bought a copy at Barnes and Noble it wouldn’t be the same. I figured I would just never own it. But one day, in a crowded living room, while waiting to buy a few dress patterns and notebooks, I caught a glimpse of something: a large book with the distinctive fleur de lis pattern on a navy background. It had to be Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “Hold on! I’ll be right back,” I whisper-yelled to my mom as I tried to quickly and inconspicuously cross a large living room full of people. I couldn’t risk someone else noticing my holy grail. By the time I made it to the bookcase on the other side of that living room, I could see Julia’s name. There it was. Someone’s grandmother or mother or aunt was looking out for me. It was just $7. The paperback set was almost untouched. No notes or dog-eared pages or tabs sticking out. This book would be mine to mark up and make memories in for some future owner. Even though the previous owner left the book untouched, I’ve still felt her spirit pass into my kitchen, like she’s offered me an unsung heirloom. Because every time you take something from the dead, you take a little piece of them with you. Caitlin Cruz is a reporter and writer in Brooklyn and Dallas County. | | | | |  Gif by Claire Merchlinsky | In March of 1974, John Lennon stumbled into Los Angeles’s iconic club the Troubadour. He was belligerent after drinking Brandy Alexanders all night. He kicked a valet and got in a fistfight, before getting tossed out. A month later, he appeared at a concert with a sanitary napkin affixed to his head. He would later affectionately call this period his “lost weekend” — the eighteen months during which he and Yoko Ono lived apart. He shacked up with another woman, May Pang, and was largely unmoored, boozy-breathed, violent, and lonely. I knew about the lost weekend through romantic celebrity man lore, but only once I experienced a lost weekend of my own did it occur to me to wonder what Yoko had done in John’s absence. During the last half-hour of a thirteen-hour road trip, my husband nervously announced he “wasn’t sure about family life,” which was his way of saying that he wasn’t sure about me. He didn’t want to end things, he said, but he didn’t know what he wanted. I told him that I had sympathy for him, but that he should get the hell out of our apartment. We had been married for five years, together for ten, and were in our early 30s. I had felt his restlessness slithering through our relationship since we had moved to California a year earlier. I had just written a book that questioned the very idea of marriage, so at some level I had it coming. I worried that my book had set a chain of events in motion that I could no longer control, that I, like John, had destroyed my spouse with my art. My husband started drinking a lot and staying out late with friends. He had recently left his job for a month to travel with asylum seekers through Mexico, riding on the tops of trains. I couldn’t tell if he was falling apart or more fully becoming himself — or both, simultaneously. When I thought about the lost weekend, I had always imagined that John had left Yoko, but it turns out it was Yoko who had told John to leave and she who had suggested the relationship with Pang. “It was like being sent to the desert,” John said of that time. “I was on a raft alone in the middle of the universe.” Before the lost weekend, John and Yoko had been together for five years and had hardly spent a minute apart. John was even known to follow her to the bathroom. But they were one of the most hated couples in America. The year before they split in 1973, the LP Some Time in New York City had bombed. Critics said his career was over. To make matters worse, he was the midst of a deportation battle with the INS. Yoko was blamed for the Beatles’ demise and endured a series of sexist and racist media assaults, including an Esquire article titled “John Rennon’s Excrusive Gloupie.” She was locked in a legal battle for custody of her daughter. The night that George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon, John got drunk and fucked another woman while Yoko sat in the other room and could hear the whole thing. His drinking had gotten out of control. Well, if he can do this, forget it! Yoko thought. “I needed a rest. I needed space,” she later said. Sometimes a girl needs to piss alone. But it was also a preventative measure. “I started to notice that he became a little restless,” she said. Telling someone to leave feels better than being left, a sharp break preferable to creeping decay. “She wanted him to revisit life without her and see how he liked it,” Yoko Ono’s biographers Nell Beram and Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky wrote. I wanted my husband to exorcise his uncertainty, to see what life was like without me — and mostly I hoped that life would suck. “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, their tails wagging behind them,” my mother-in-law counseled. This comment comforted me — men were just distractible puppies! But, of course, it’s a gender trope that saddles women with the responsibility for long-term planning without the power to determine the outcome. The men just get to be. John didn’t have to decide anything — he just drunkenly rode Yoko’s wave. With John gone, Yoko could focus on her work. She produced a solo album, including the tracks “Feeling the Space,” “Growing Pain,” “She Hits Back,” and “Woman Power.” In “If Only,” Yoko’s voice is both strong and quivering: “I cut my finger when you left the room / The wound has healed since then / But the wound keeps bleeding for reasons unknown to me.” But also: “She left her man / She left her children because she knows she only has one life to live.” With my husband gone, my apartment became both a refuge and a mausoleum. I didn’t have to look at his beard hairs in our sink anymore, but I found myself missing them. I didn’t have to worry that there were too many whiskey and beer bottles in the recycling, but I knew they were amassing elsewhere. I didn’t have to wonder when he was coming home, because he wasn’t. The chapter in Yoko’s authorized biography about the lost weekend is called “Real Life.” Shorn of comprehensible linear narratives about my direction, I suddenly found myself thinking, Oh, this is real life. Like a nearsighted person, my vision was compressed to the extreme foreground. “Do you have a plan?” friends asked. I did not. All I could see was the next day’s breakfast, my commute to work, dinner, then sleep. Some part of me savored this liminal space. It rained hard in the weeks after my husband left, and the Berkeley Hills looked greener than the year before. Pain had piqued my awareness of the world. A friend’s husband descended into a manic state. He poured glitter over his body and left her and their children. He exploded their lives. “I am so fully myself,” she said, with a sort of heartbroken but self-admiring wonder. *** The lost weekend ended for John and Yoko when he performed “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” with Elton John at Madison Square Garden. Though John didn’t know it, Yoko was in the audience. The crowd went wild, but she saw something else. “It hit me that he was a very lonely person up onstage there,” she said. “And he needed me. It was like my soul suddenly saw his soul. So I went backstage.” They hadn’t seen each other in a year and were dumbstruck by the sight. They began dating again, and about a year later, Sean was born. “I feel higher than the Empire State Building,” John would later say. “We were finally unselfish enough to want to have a child.” He became a self-professed “house husband,” baking bread and caring for Sean while Yoko handled his business in smoky rooms full of men in suits. John’s relief at their reunion was palpable. In a 1980 Playboy interview, he said, “She's taught me everything I fucking know. She was there when I was nowhere, when I was the nowhere man.” Yoko was the self-sufficient one, he said. “She doesn't need me." Time is the simplest metric of marital success. The other measures — joy, love, and fulfillment — are too unwieldy. But by retroactively compressing eighteen months into a “weekend,” John was doing what mortals cannot. He believed this was just a blip in a long marriage. But of course, five years after their reunion, on the same day he took those pictures clinging nude to Yoko, he was shot dead in front of the Dakota while Yoko watched. Calling it a lost weekend was also an attempt to restore order to their love story, to minimize their separation to a hazy digression, something that happened beyond the frame. But as every long-partnered person knows, there is no linear narrative; everything happens beyond the frame. Yoko would later claim that she always knew John would come back, but that’s something you can say only in retrospect. The problem with lost weekends is that they look a lot like breakups. I’m still trying to figure out which mine is. My husband is renting a room in West Oakland. I’m staying in our apartment. When he came over for coffee the other day, he looked bedraggled. His beard had crossed over some line from hipster to hermit. As we made the coffee together, it occurred to me that it was good to have him there to hand me things, to hear the sound of his voice. But I was relieved when he left. There is, almost certainly, more pain in our future. Under such circumstances, there’s only one option: as Yoko wrote, “Angry young woman, there’s no way back, so just keep walking.” Laura Smith’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, and Mother Jones. She worked on her memoir, The Art of Vanishing (Viking; On Sale 2/6/18), while on a fellowship at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and lives in Oakland, California. | | | | |  Illustration by Ashleigh Corrin | Over the past year, as I watched streams of women declare first-time candidacy, I felt inspired and hopeful, as well as apprehensive. On the one hand, I thought, It’s about time. And our time certainly is right now — we know that, at every level of elective office, there are more women running than ever before. People are fired up and civically engaged in unprecedented ways, and women deserve to lead. On the other hand, as someone who’s had firsthand experience working on the ground for various political campaigns, including historic races for female candidates, I worried about the practical implications of some of the messages coming from newer organizations. While recruiting folks to run for the first time, some seemed to suggest: “Drop everything, and just do it!” I wondered if this was realistic, how we set up first-time candidates for success, and how we ensure they are meaningfully engaged with the communities they would serve. I wanted to know how candidates can best be prepared to endure the campaign trail, to address the significant impact that running for office can have on personal finances and family obligations, and how these challenges particularly impact women. I also found myself more and more interested to explore the paths of the women who’ve come before us, the seasoned veterans who have paved the way for so many more women to just run. One such leader is California state senator Holly Mitchell. Before running for office, Senator Mitchell had a career in the public sector: she was a legislative aide and later spent seven years as the CEO of a nonprofit, Crystal Stairs, which focuses on improving the lives of families through quality early-childhood care and education. When you talk about going deep and thoughtfully interacting with communities and issues, Senator Mitchell sets herself apart as both expert and advocate. As a state senator, she has been described by colleagues as “a moral compass and social conscience of the entire Senate.” But she’s also known to be a budget wonk who understands not just balancing dollars and cents but, more important, the significant impact that funding cuts can have on nonprofits like Crystal Stairs. In fact, it was the experience of receiving budget cuts while her organization relied on state money that Senator Mitchell credits with influencing her run for office. What follows is a conversation with Senator Mitchell about her path to the state legislature, lessons learned along the way, and how we should be thinking about expanding opportunities in politics for black women in particular. Meena Harris: I want to know about your path to public service and how you were inspired to run for office. Did you always want to serve, or was it an interest that developed over time? Holly Mitchell: I studied political science as an undergrad. I was in leadership in the Black Student Union on my high school and college campuses and naturally fell into those roles. My parents were both public servants. I worked on a couple of campaigns when I was really young. My parents had a friend who ran for Congress, and my mother took me along when she went to the campaign headquarters. I would be in the corner stuffing envelopes — that’s what you did in those days. Fast-forward, I go through the Coral Foundation Fellowship and get an opportunity to work for State Senator Diane Watson in her district office. She was phenomenal in that she allowed me to identify the policy issues that I was interested in, which really has followed me throughout my career. I later went to work in the nonprofit sector, working on behalf of underrepresented communities. One day, I was sitting in a budget subcommittee hearing as the CEO of Crystal Stairs. I had brought several busloads of women to Sacramento to talk about how critical subsidized child care was for them and their families, because the committee was considering major cuts to the program. In that moment, I realized that committee alone could have a direct impact on millions of families and children — and not one of the committee members was from my county. I understood that someone just like me, with my experience and skill set, was the kind of person that needed to run for office. MH: You’ve spoken about being a good “translator,” in terms of navigating back and forth between policy-making and your community. How has that played out in practice? HM: I actually figured that out about myself when I was on staff. Senator Watson was a member of the same budget subcommittee that I chaired as state senator before I became the full budget-committee chair. During Senator Watson’s time, there were three guys who managed the whole budget process. They walked around the capitol like superheroes — crowds would part when they got off the elevator. Senator Watson said, “I want you to staff me in Sub Three, so you go to these briefings.” I’d go and sit, and I wouldn’t ask a question, because those three guys were there. As I listened more and more, I thought, They may know about numbers on a piece of paper, but for me, the state budget is not just a document that has to add up. Sitting in those meetings and being quiet and afraid of those guys, I realized that the skill I had that they didn’t was knowing how those numbers impacted real lives. As they casually talked about “We could reduce this program by X percent,” I could see the faces of actual Californians who would be affected by that. That’s where I found my own power and my own voice. That’s what gave me the courage in those meetings to actually raise my hand and say, “If you do that, Ms. Jones on 49th and Central won’t have enough food to get her through the end of the month.” MH: Let’s talk about the lack of political representation for black women. What can and should we be doing to remedy this? HM: We have to think broadly and more creatively about where we recruit women from. When I threw my hat in the ring, people knew me and would universally say, “She’s smart, and she runs a top-shop operation over there at Crystal Stairs. But wow, she’s running for office, huh?” I just wasn’t on that short list of former staff that fit the very narrow model of who they thought could run. Shirley Weber is also a good example. She was a professor of Africana studies at San Diego State. She'd been on the school board but hadn't expressed any interest in running. It took a woman, Toni Atkins, to go talk to her and convince her why she needed to run for public office. We also have to be frank, because I don’t want to set women up for failure. They have to understand there’s no pension; they have to understand the reality of living in two places. I’m very open. I’m a mentor to a freshman assemblywoman who is a divorcée with two kids. We sat down and spent hours over coffee once she was elected, because she wanted to know, how are you doing this, how do you split your time? We have to have honest conversations about how we operationalize public life as women. MH: What do you say to newer activists who at times might feel defeated? What advice do you have for people to continue to be engaged, especially in their local communities? HM: I have always said when people ask, “Why do you want to run for office? Politics is dirty.” I say, “As women, as communities of color, as working-class folks, we don’t have the luxury not to be.” Every aspect of our lives is impacted, influenced, controlled by, touched by some political decision on some level of government. Everything, from the age at which we drive, to the mandate that we have insurance, to my ability as a black woman to be in certain public places with other people — those were decisions ultimately made by some elected body at some point in time. We learned in Flint, for instance, that political decisions determine the safety and purity of the water in your own home. None of us have the luxury to not engage. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to run for office, but everyone has a responsibility, an obligation. Can you imagine if everybody just did something? How different our democracy would look? Meena Harris is the founder of the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign. | | | | |  Illustration by Alexis Jang | I have a gift for you. I’d like to explain the secret origin of the universe. OK, that’s a bit ambitious. And technically, that’s only a part of the gift. And technically, it’s not a secret. It is well documented in the Tao Te Ching, the fundamental text on Taoism, written in China sometime in the sixth century B.C. Taoist cosmogony explains that the universe was born out of infinite nothingness when one spark lit — when one phenomenal impulse for life, beauty, love, truth, and harmony exploded. But the vacuum of going from nothing to something pulled everything into two opposing forces — Yin and Yang. Yang is the Sun shining down on the horizon — it is everything hot, loud, fast, bright, hard, and forceful. Conversely, Yin is the shady side of the hill — it is everything that is dark, cold, slow, soft, damp, and receptive. Yang is daylight, Yin is night. Yang is activity, Yin is rest. Yang is productivity, Yin is restoration. And for the universe (and ourselves) to be healthy, balanced, and peaceful, we should be half one and half the other. I know what you’re thinking: This sounds great, but where is my gift? I’m getting there. We are now in winter, the nighttime of the year. Winter is the season of utmost Yin. It is the Earth’s time of utmost rest, utmost darkness, and utmost conservation. Nature requires it. It is from this fertile silence that spring is born; it takes this period of consolidation to regenerate the burst of Yang that will crack the seedling and push it up through the soil to reach the sunlight at winter’s end. The balance of the cosmos hinges on this period of rest and recovery. And that’s what I want for you. In the dozen years I have been an acupuncturist and practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, I have never felt the call for Yin as profoundly as I do now. Last year was brutal. For too many reasons. I don’t have a friend who didn’t feel armored, indignant, exasperated, or defeated at some point in 2017. And in almost every patient, I sensed a pained fragility, like their bones were made of straw, like they were afraid to take a deep breath in — or worse, let it out — like one or two nights of sleep could not correct their troubles. Some of us began 2017 by literally marching through the cold. The hypervigilance we’ve maintained, the fight we’ve fought, has taken a toll and is now begging for its balance. If we are to maintain this fight, we must use the Yin of winter as the cosmos intended — as a true, deep hibernation, to conserve and to heal. I want you to be strong in spring. I need you to come back hot and fighting, like all of nature does once the snow melts. Keep following me here. Modern consciousness has cast a cruel spell on us. Industry and capitalism disproportionately favor Yang and do not want us to feel we have permission to rest. The abrasive neon light of the modern world does not recognize Yin. We don’t get validation, money, or Instagram likes for our privacy and solemnity. We are told that Yin — softness, darkness, slowness, inactivity — and its necessity are exclusively for “those people”: the weak, the lazy, the sick, the unsuccessful, the unpopular. While our culture may pay minor lip service to some Yin (e.g., Kate Hudson sublimely yet intensely stretching on a bucolic Topanga bluff in Fabletics commercials, which is Yang dressed in Yin’s clothing), we live in a time that celebrates busyness, multitasking, and stress as evidence of a job well done. Even modern spiritual movements in the West speak almost exclusively of enlightenment (Yang) and awakening (Yang), barely touching on the importance of obscurity (Yin) and sleep (Yin). But I promise you, this is simply the advertising of a deranged world that has forgotten Yin and Yang and the very impulse for life and beauty and peace that created it. The instinct to slow down and to recover does not mean you are inert or feeble. It doesn't mean you are worse at life than everyone else. It is simply a call for balance that the world ignores but you must answer. If you’re skipping to the end, begin reading here. My gift to you is this reminder: Yin is yours and you deserve it. Take your winter. The balance of your entire life is dependent on it. As February and March roll in, do not allow TV commercials and window displays to prematurely seduce you out of winter’s hibernation with the sexy glint of Easter bonnets, budding tulips, and springtime pastels. We are still firmly in the grip of Earth’s rest. Don’t speed the clock — that is precisely the Yang treadmill at work. Eke out the remains of time here. You should feel as rewarded and celebrated for doing nothing as you are for doing everything else. Slow down and do so with kindness, tenderness, and patience. This is the correction for life’s hardness, not “hot yoga three times a week.” See through the spell of “I have too much to do to slow down.” To repeat that to yourself means that the advertising of a deranged world has worked on you, too. Understand a new relationship with time itself — where you no longer see it as a bully or thief, but rather as a generous parent or gracious choreographer who directs you to move carefully, with intention, with breath and above all, grace. Take a slow walk — but don’t make it a “Yin Challenge” for Facebook. You don’t need to push against something to grow. That whole idea is deranged advertising, too. Drift directionless into the mysterious night sky without wondering why, or what comes next. To even sit still and simply tell yourself, “I don’t know how this will turn out, lots can happen,” is Yin. Do not lose your softness or use it as fuel for self-loathing. That is the way the world kills you. Dim the light. Always keep something beautiful in your mind. For what it’s worth, all the gifts in my life are Yin. My two moms — for all of their hardness and impenetrability — taught me everything I know about fostering care, listening, and benevolence. My idiot boyfriend — a very Yang New Yorker with a fiery mind buried in a hard exoskeleton of intensity — will hear a lovely piece of music or witness some act of true generosity so kind that it instantly calls his bluff and rolls him on his back, exposing his soft belly to the tender world once again. And twilight, my favorite time of day, the brightness and bang of sunlight exhausting itself, making way for the first shadow of darkness — literally Yin consuming Yang and announcing itself again, something beautiful turning into something else that is beautiful. Russell Brown is an acupuncturist and owner of POKE Acupuncture in Los Angeles and does not count SoulCycle as a “Yin” activity. | | | | |  Illustration by Ghazaleh Rastgar | AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18) Happy birthday, Aquarius! As the Water Bearer, people often mistake you for a water sign, when in fact you are air — at times an invisible protection for those around you, at times as weightless as space. This month, give yourself permission to be water, too — feeling, flowing, taking up visible space. You’ve been carrying the bucket around for a long time. PISCES
(February 19 to March 20) It’s important to be inspired by art, music, and literature. But if you find yourself comparing your life to a piece of art, remember that art is art and life is life. There’s a reason why people make art. If life were enough, there would be no need. ARIES
(March 21 to April 19) Terms and conditions of being alive: No one really knows why we’re here — which is great, actually. Making our own meaning is exhausting, but also, it's better than being told what to do. If you aren’t enjoying the mystery this month, find a person to help. You'll be given an instant purpose. TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20) The term homo sapiens is Latin for “wise man,” but what does wisdom mean to you? This month, consider the wisest people you have known. Look for their commonalities. Was it curiosity, kindness, patience, and/or something else that allowed them to convey what they knew to you in a way that you could hear it? Prioritize this quality. GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20) Baby yourself a little bit this month. If you need help, ask for it. If you’re tired, take a nap. If you’re hungry, reach for food. If your needs aren’t being met, express that. Don’t be afraid to soothe what aches in you. If you are afraid, do it anyway, and see that the world continues to turn. CANCER
(June 21 to July 22) This month, it’s time to amplify your throat chakra. Wear blue, the color of this chakra. Speak up even when you are afraid. Sing in the shower, in the car, and try to get a private room at a karaoke place. Eat blue-raspberry Popsicles. Eat ice-blue mints. Eat blueberries. Visualize your throat filled with aqua light. Only say yes when you mean it. LEO
(July 23 to August 22) Do you ever look back at something you did in your life and feel so embarrassed that you kind of squeal a little? This month, take a look at some of your most shameful memories and ask yourself what it is about them that gives you the heebie-jeebies. If you were judged by others, were they themselves perfect? If you were judged by yourself, was it a fair trial? VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22) Sometimes we don’t want to grow anymore. Sometimes it’s like, OK, that’s enough, I’ve learned my lessons, can I just chill in this incarnation or mind-state or sort-of-bad-habit that doesn’t cause pain to anyone else but me? This month, you may be reminded that we don’t always control the pace, frequency, or intensity with which we grow. Let life do its thing to you. There will be flowers. LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22) What would it mean to refuse to be victimized, not by others but by yourself? What are the pressures you place on yourself because you think you “should” be something other than what you are at this very moment? Where did you get the idea of what you should be? Is it necessary? Is it true? SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21) Forgiveness seems to be an unpopular concept in our culture right now, and maybe it never was super-beloved. Personally, I’m a big fan of forgiveness, not because it lets the other person off the hook but because it allows me to stop replaying a past harm in my mind every damn day. I have not been able to force a feeling of forgiveness. But being open to it, just a crack, is a good place to start. SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21) Sometimes we write off the interests of those we love as things we will never understand, without even exploring them. Maybe they appear too boring, complicated, loud, or violent, and we immediately write them off. This month, take some time to get to know an interest of one person who is close to you. Observe with full attention, ask questions, and maybe participate. CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19) One thing that’s not so bad about having suffered is that our experience eventually can be helpful to others — sometimes even in a way that feels like redemption. What have you been through that others may be going through right now? Where can you find them? Melissa Broder is the author of the forthcoming novel The Pisces (Hogarth, May 2018), four collections of poems, including Last Sext (Tin House 2016), as well as So Sad Today, a book of essays from Grand Central. | | | | | | | | |
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