I was used to surfing waves of synchronicity; collecting meaningful coincidences was my hobby. But this scrawl on the wall was a freaking tidal wave of synchronicity. Babushka was coming to Roy Rogers today in order to discuss with me the prospect of jumping on a Greyhound bus together sometime in the next couple of weeks and heading out to the place we’d heard was a bohemian paradise: Santa Cruz, Calif.

I strained to see some smaller print beneath the message on the wall. “You know you’ll never become the artist you were meant to be,” it warned, “until you come live in Santa Cruz.”

Whatever strange angel had scrawled those words seemed to have lifted them directly from the back of my subconscious mind. The idea expressed there matched my hope and fear precisely. It had become increasingly clear to me in recent months that my aspirations to be a culture hero — a poet and musician with a healing and inspirational effect on my community — were doomed to chronic frustration as long as I resided in the Deep South, even in a college town like Chapel Hill, where I would never be any more than a weirdo, a cross between a village idiot and a marginally entertaining monstrosity. In that moment, my fate gelled.

By the first day of spring, Babushka and I had arrived in Santa Cruz with $90 in our pockets. We were gleefully homeless, sleeping in the park by day and spending large parts of each night hanging out in all-night restaurants. Within a few months I had a tiny studio apartment in a basement beneath a garage. And barely three weeks after I stumbled off the cross-country Greyhound bus, I performed at an open mike at the Good Fruit Company cafe.

With a burst of pent-up energy, I did a rash of poetry readings and performance art spectacles in a variety of cafes, as well as countless guerrilla street shows. I xeroxed and sold 200 copies of my first homemade chapbook, “Crazy Science,” and practiced the art of compassionate demagoguery in a semi-regular late-night show, “Babbling Ambiance,” on a local radio station.

There was only one factor darkening my growing exhilaration: grubby poverty. None of the music or spectacles I was creating earned me more than the cash I plowed into making them happen. And I resented life’s apparent insistence that I was supposed to take time out from my ingenious projects to draw a steady wage.

Given my hardship, I was extremely receptive when I chanced across an opportunity to make money through creative writing. My barely serviceable one-speed bike had recently been stolen. In my search for a used replacement, I turned to the classified ads of the Good Times, Santa Cruz’s largest weekly newspaper. As I scanned the “Misc. For Sale” section, my eye tripped across an intriguing invitation one column over: “Good Times is looking for an astrology columnist. Submit sample column.”

I was confused. I thought the paper already had an astrology column. I leafed through it, but it was gone. Had the author quit? Not that I’d be sorry to see him go. My impression of his writing, from the few times I had read it, was that it covered the whole range between mawkish New Age clichis and unfunny silliness.

Of course I had always despised all astrology columns; his was actually more entertaining than most. Though I was an advanced student of astrology, not a teacher, I had high standards about how the ancient art should be used. And I considered newspaper horoscopes to be an abomination. Without exception, they were poorly written and unforgivably dull. They encouraged people to be superstitious and made the dead-wrong implication that astrology preaches predetermination and annuls free will.

It was bad enough that their blather fed gullible readers inane advice that pandered to the least interesting forms of egotism and narcissism. Worst of all, they were based in only the most tenuous way on any real astrological understanding. Any reputable practitioner would have told you, for instance, that in order to assess the cosmic energies with any authenticity, you’d have to meditate on the movements and relationships of all the heavenly bodies, not just the sun. But newspaper horoscopes based their ersatz “predictions” solely on the sun’s position. They made the absurd proposition that the lives of millions of people who share any particular “sun sign” are all headed in the same direction.

In full awareness of all these truths, I struggled to drum up a rationalization for pursuing the gig — I wanted to write the column in ways that would not feel fraudulent. That’s when I hatched my plan to become a poet in disguise.

Both in and out of academia, I had long been composing stuff that loosely qualified as poetry. True, I couldn’t help but notice that the culture at large regarded poetry as a stuffy irrelevancy; people I considered huge talents, like John Berryman, W.S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell, were not getting rich selling their lyrical creations.

To a degree, I sympathized with the hoi polloi’s underwhelming appreciation of the art form I loved so much. The majority of poets were humorless academics who seemed to have studied at the feet of a single constipated celibate. It was shocking how little entertainment burst from the caste I thought should be in charge of mining the frontiers of the imagination. I was perfectly willing for poetry to be demanding, complex and subtle, and even maddeningly mysterious. Yet the whole point of poetry in my opinion was to dynamite the ruts cut by ordinary waking consciousness, to sabotage clichi and common sense, to reinvent the language. But why did so much of this noble effort have to be uniformly listless, pretentious and inaccessible?

And then there was my secret agenda. I was peeved that so few of “the antennae of the race” had enough courage and integrity to blow their own minds with psychedelic drugs. How could you explode the consensual trance unless you poked your head over onto the other side of the veil now and then? Allen Ginsberg, at least, had the balls to go where shamans go. Berryman seemed to have accomplished the same feat with the help of alcohol.

As for myself, I had been drawn to and in contact with the other side of the veil long before resorting to psychedelic technology. I regularly remembered and treasured my dreams throughout childhood, and when I was 13 years old I also began to record them. This fervent ongoing immersion in the realm of the dreamtime imbued me early on with the understanding that there were other realities besides the narrow little niche that most everyone worshipped.

As I gained confidence in the suspicion that my formal education had tried to conceal from me nine-tenths of reality, I tuned in to the paper trail documenting the existence of the missing part. It had been mapped by shamans, alchemists and magicians for millennia — so my readings of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves and Mircea Eliade revealed. Their work in turn magnetized me to the literature of Western occultism, whose rich material was written not by academics but by experimenters who actually traveled to the place in question.

The myriad reports were not in complete agreement, but many of their descriptions overlapped. The consensus was that the other side of the veil is not a single territory, but teems with variety, some relatively hellish and some heavenly. And there was another issue on which all the explorers agreed: Events in those “invisible” realms are the root cause of everything that happens down here. Shamans visit the spirit world to cure their sick patients because the origins of illness lie there. For cabalists, the visible Earth is a tiny outcropping at the end of a long chain of creation that originates at a point both inconceivably far away and yet right here right now. Even modern psychotherapists believe in a materialistic version of the ancient idea: that how we behave today is irrevocably shaped by events that happened in a distant time and place.

As I researched the testimonials about the treasure land (which almost everyone I’d ever known had conspired to hide from me), I registered the fact that dreams and drugs were not the only points of entry. Meditation could give access, as could specialized forms of drumming, chanting, singing and dancing. The tantric tradition taught that certain kinds of sexual communion can lead there. As does, of course, physical death. I wanted to try all those other doors except the last one.

In my work with dreams I had seen a steady growth of both my unconscious mind’s ability to produce meaningful stories and my conscious mind’s skill at interpreting them. But my progress was sketchy in the work of retrieving booty from the holy places where drugs took me. The big problem was that unlike the other techniques on the list, the psychedelic substances bypassed my willpower. Their chemical battering ram simply smashed through the doors of perception. No adroitness was involved on my part, no craft. One of my meditation teachers referred to drug use, no matter how responsible, as “storming the kingdom of heaven through violence.” Gradually, then, I ended my relationship with the illegal magic that had given me so much pleasure.

Instead I affirmed my desire to build mastery through hard work. Dream work, meditation and tantric exploration became the cornerstones of my practice. I must confess, however, that my plans did not immediately bear the fruit I hoped they would. Even my most ecstatic lucid dreams and illuminated meditations, I’m afraid, did not bring me to dwell on the other side of the veil with the same heart-melting vividness once provided by my psychedelic allies. Even my deepest tantric lovemaking and music-induced trances failed to provide the same boost.

But then, after a while, into my life came a consolation: the 19th-century artist and visionary William Blake. My encounter with his work alerted me to the fact that there is yet another name for the fourth dimension — a name that also describes a common, everyday human faculty that most of us take for granted. Here’s the special message Blake seemed to have written just for me in “A Vision of the Last Judgment”:

This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite and Temporal. There exists in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature. All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, the Human Imagination.

I exulted in this discovery. Blake became a secret weapon I could use in my covert war against all the poets who refused to be antennae of the race, against all the poets who regarded the visible world as the only one that deserved to have poetry written about it.

It’s true, however, that some of these poets, whom I called “materialists,” were great inspirations to me. William Carlos Williams, for instance, taught me much about the art of capturing the concrete beauty of each earthly moment. I loved this Williams’ poem:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Williams was, for me, the best of the materialist poets. His work exhorted me to hone my perceptions and employ vigorous language. But my old pal William Blake gave me the doctrinal foundation with which I could rebel against Williams and rise to an even higher calling. Blake suggested that the worlds you dream up in your imagination might be more real than the red wheelbarrow.

(Might be was the key qualifier. Even then, at an unripe age, I was cautious about the indiscriminate use of this liberating proposition. I had read the Russian occultists Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, and they had made me aware that the out-of-control imagination is the function by which most people lie to themselves constantly, thereby creating hell on Earth. Obviously, this was not the kind of imagination Blake meant, and I vowed to keep that clear.)

More real than a red wheelbarrow. Blake showed me there was another way to access the fourth dimension: working as a creative artist, striving to discipline and supercharge the engine of the imagination. That was an extremely pleasurable realization. Furthermore, if it were true, as Blake and the shamans said, that every event on Earth originates in the spirit world, then the skilled imaginer was potentially God’s co-creator — not just describing conditions here below but creating them. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to fly away into the fourth dimension, reconnoiter the source of the messed-up conditions on the material plane and give them a healer’s tweak.

All those thoughts became fodder as I tried to imagine a way I could write a weekly astrology column without violating my integrity. I wanted the gig badly. One way or another I was going to get it. But I would feel so much better about myself if I could refute the accusations of “Fraud! Panderer!” with highfalutin bullshit about William Blake and the shamanic tradition.

“More Real Than a Red Wheelbarrow.” Why not call my “horoscope” column that? There was certainly no International Committee on Standards for Horoscope Columns that I would have to answer to. For that matter, as long as I shaped my horoscopes like love letters to my readers, it was unlikely they’d complain about all the Blake-ian, shamanic stuff I’d wrap it in.

Before spying the help wanted ad in the Good Times, I’d hated astrology columns because I knew they had no basis in astrological data and could not possibly be an accurate rendering of so many readers’ lives at the same time. I now argued from a different angle. What happens to people, I told myself, tends to be what they believe will happen to them; the world runs on the fuel of self-fulfilling prophecies. Therefore, couldn’t it be said that my oracles would be accurate by definition, since anyone who regarded them seriously would subconsciously head in the directions I named? As long as I diligently maintained an optimistic and uplifting tone, no one could fault me for manipulating people in such a way.

My very first column took me an agonizing 40 hours to compose. It had some good moments:

What you have at your command, Scorpio, is a magic we will discreetly not call black. Let’s say, instead, that it’s a vivid, flagrant gray. At your best you’ll be a charming enfant terrible playing with boring equilibriums, a necessary troublemaker bringing a fresh breath of messy vigor to all the overly-cautious game plans. If you can manage to inject just a little bit of mercy into your bad-ass attitude, no one will get stung and everyone will be thoroughly entertained.

Still, the first offering and many after it fell short of my lofty formulations. My work was sufficiently yeasty, though, to capture the favor of the Good Times’ boss. Or maybe he saw that I was supremely adept in the arts of spelling and grammar, and looked forward to an easy editing job. For all I know, of course, I was the only applicant for the job. It’s not as if the financial rewards alone would have drawn a crowd. As I found out during my new editor’s congratulatory handshake, the pay was $15 a week. I regarded it as a fortune, though, considering that I was getting paid to be a poet in disguise.

My secret long-term agenda, after all, was to build an imagination strong enough to gain regular access to the fourth dimension without the aid of psychedelics. What could be better training for that than a weekly assignment to spew out 12 oracular riffs and shape them into terse word-bombs?

Well, guess what, the Earth moved and wrecked everything! Over the past several thousands of years, the pull of the moon’s gravity has shifted the Earth by about a month, says Parke Kunkle, a board member at the society.

Like the cast list of the high school play your mom made you try out for, here’s your new part:

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16.
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11.
Pisces: March 11-April 18.
Aries: April 18-May 13.
Taurus: May 13-June 21.
Gemini: June 21-July 20.
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10.
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16.
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30.
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23.
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29.
Ophiuchus:* Nov. 29-Dec. 17.
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20.

* Discarded by the Babylonians because they wanted 12 signs per year.

If you need me, I’ll be feeling crabby or “tried and true” instead of my usual “masculine.”

UPDATE: It’s all fake! Sort of.

Professional astrology and author Matthew Currie contacted Salon to point out the fact that this kind of story is nothing new. Apparently, the Minnesota Planetarium Society is engaging in what Currie quickly called a “straw man argument” constructed to debunk the field of astrology.

Currie makes this basic distinction. Astrology is NOT astronomy and vice versa. The two fields diverged a long time ago and today, the very term “Zodiac” is used differently within each discipline. Currie explains the two meanings of the Zodiac:

The Zodiac, the twelve divisions of the sky made up of the horoscope signs, and the Zodiac, the band of constellations in the sky, are two different things. This is how a lot of skeptics of astrolgoy trick people to convince themselves and others that there’s nothing to astrology. But in reality, we’re talking about two different things.

So it might be safe to assume that the ASTRONOMERS in Minnesota recalibrated the Zodiac made up of the constellations while the ASTOLOGERS actually all agree on the twelve divisions.

Are you as relieved as I am?

Read more about astrology on Matthew Currie’s blog.

The IAU’s vote has rendered astronomy textbooks obsolete; seven decades’ worth of science projects are suddenly off the mark. But the consequences of this new classification don’t merely affect labs and classrooms, but stargazing astrologers the world over. Now that Pluto’s just a marginalized ball of ice, will our luck change for the better — or worse? Will the IAU’s decision redirect our love lives? To find out, Salon phoned Cheryl Lee Terry, who writes the “Planet Terry” horoscope column for Time Out New York.

How will Pluto’s demotion affect astrology?

It really doesn’t matter, because there are a lot of heavenly bodies floating around that we count in our equations. Astronomers give names to planets — we just consider them heavenly bodies that we interact with. If the astronomers want to say it’s not a planet, that’s great, but it’s not going to change Pluto’s influence. So we believe in Pluto. It’s really been active. This has been a pretty bad month, and Pluto has been one of the instigators.

So Pluto helped bring about its own demise?

There’s a bad aspect to Aug. 31 that comes around once every 48 years — let me look at my calendar. Oh, that’s Saturn. We’ve had some very bad asteroid hits in the past month. On the 17th, when the peace talks were happening, Pluto had a good meeting with the sun. But the war isn’t over. [Laughs] It doesn’t take an astrologer to figure that out.

It’s a new moon for me today. You’re the third phone call I’ve gotten that’s good for my career. Right now for you, there are a lot of financial concerns.

Actually, that’s true. My apartment was robbed on Tuesday.

Everything’s all about money now. In September, you’ll be feeling better about things. Security’s a big issue right now for all Cancers. If I were to tell you something — because you’re young — you want to let go of relationships small and big. Just relax your grip. How old are you?

I’m 25.

You’re going into your Saturn return. You’re coming into this huge change in your life. I don’t know if you’re leaving your job —

It’s my last day interning at Salon.

You’ve got a really hard year ahead of you, but in a good way. It will be big challenge. It’s really kind of exciting.

Wow, thanks. Getting back to Pluto, does the planet have a personality that you could describe?

He — we call Pluto a he — is manipulation. His personality is Machiavellian. Obsessions, compulsions, influence peddling. And the big one is transformation. When you get into a heavy Pluto stage, you’re transforming your life. Pluto when he’s bad is compulsive and obsessive. When he’s good, he’s there to transform you and push you along. He takes no prisoners. When he comes in contact with your sign, you either transform your life or learn a hard lesson.

Basically, they’re changing the label, and that doesn’t matter to me. Just like if you change your name, you’re still the same person. We love him too much — they can’t take Pluto away from us.

Evan: April 4, 1973, 4 p.m. Aries Water Ox, hour of Monkey.
Lily: Jan. 4, 1973, Capricorn Water Rat, hour unknown.
Ruby: July 2, 1995, 11 a.m., Cancer Wood Pig, hour of Horse (Snake cusp).
Saskia: Feb. 21, 1998, 1 a.m. Pisces (Aq cusp) Earth Tiger, hour of Ox (Rat cusp).

According to Chinese lore, the Ox, which you might think of as an unflashy kind of creature, managed to win second place in the Chinese year ranking, because he had such a good nature; he knew how important it was to be helpful to others. As the story goes, all the animals were summoned to Buddha to say goodbye as he prepared to lift off from Earth. The 12 animals that showed up to pay their respects earned a place on the astrological calendar according to the order in which they turned up. The Rat, who had been cleverest about rounding everyone up, made sure to be first by catching a ride in on the back of the dutiful, compliant Ox. The powerful, beautiful Tiger knew from respect; he was right behind them. Headstrong Horse only placed seventh, despite his speed, because he resented being told where to go. And the naughty Pig came in last, but did at least show up, which was worth something!

The Ox and the Rat have had a complex relationship ever since then; better as lovers though than as co-workers, because every now and then, an Ox in an office begins to wonder if his Rat colleague might be taking advantage of him in some way. But in a romantic relationship, they get along famously. The Ox is enchanted by the Rat’s sparkle, while the socially astute, family-building Rat enormously respects the Ox’s trustworthiness and perseverance. The Ox and Rat combination is a wonderful way to head a household. Evan has a really lucky combination; Ox grounds him, while his Monkey birth hour gives him poise, humor and shrewd business sense, and makes him more adaptable than some Oxen. (His Water year sign gives him another boost in adaptability.) Meanwhile, his Aries birth month gives him creativity, ambition and strong family sense. Aries natives thrive when they feel indispensable to a close network of relatives. I think that, in Evan’s case, Aries moodiness will be lightened by the Monkey wit and the Ox’s innate “let’s just get on with it” mentality.

Lily also has a well-balanced meld; her subtle, social, adept, quick-thinking, acquisitive Rat character is wedded to the pragmatic, thoughtful, Capricorn month; which means she is a woman who makes decisions for long-term, and never makes them lightly. She will not be flighty, she knows how to ride out difficulties, and Water Rat is especially gifted at sensing other people’s emotions, so she’ll be a great smoother-over of any difficulties.

Now, the girls! Evan gave their birth times as on the hour — 11 a.m. and 1 a.m. But he should check their birth certificates, and make sure that isn’t over-general, because those are both cusp times; 10:59 a.m. is the hour of the Snake, 11:01 a.m. is the hour of the Horse; whereas 12:59 a.m. is the hour of the Rat, and 1:01 a.m. is the hour of the Ox.

Assuming Ruby is in fact a Cancer Wood Pig, born in the hour of the Horse, she will be loyal to her family and eager to please. Pig is strongly compatible in the parent-child relation with both Rat and Ox. Ruby’s Cancer month makes her potentially quite sensitive and emotional, and the Cancer-Pig meld can produce greediness for pleasure and possessions, and problems with self-discipline. Still, I believe the fortunate Wood year birth reins in the Pig propensity to excess here, — besides granting her the gift of good judgment and unusual tact — so I think Ruby will be just fine. You might try to gently guide her to establish sensible limits for herself early on, just in case. Pigs are usually very popular and make friends easily, and Wood Pigs are especially generous and lovable. Ruby’s Cancer sun sign means she will be good at very many things, but will have a hard time figuring out what she cares most about, or wants to do with her life, in school and later work. On the whole, she’ll be a sunny child, quietly sociable, well-meaning and hardworking. Any bursts of excitability will probably come from her restless Horse-hour birth.

It’s funny that, as you sense, Saskia really is more of a wild card, at least as far as her moon sign is concerned. Tigers get along a wee bit better with Rats than with Oxen, but the relationship still takes work and communication. The most important thing for you and Lily to keep in mind is that Tiger does not respond well to criticism. They are so noble and charming that if they sense they are failing to please, they can’t believe it — it feels to them like a great injustice. So try to hold your tongues unless something really matters. However, if Saskia was born in the hour of the Ox, you lucked out; she will approve of you and respect you on a basic, unshakable level. Also, being an Ox-hour Tiger, she’ll probably feel free to tell you if she’s mad (Pisces may mute this effect; try to be observant), so any grievances are likely to get aired, rather than fester.

As a Tiger, Saskia might be more flamboyant and attention-seeking than the three of you; if so, try not to think that different is wrong. Still, as an Earth Tiger, the calmest and most realistic of the Tiger years, she should be fairly well-attuned to the rest of the family, and her Pisces sun sign will also help make her get along well with you and Lily — Ox and Rat. Pisces girls are the most inscrutable sign in the calendar; calm, feminine, perfectionist and socially astute, they try to blend in to their surroundings. While projecting feminine gentleness, and seeming to defer to their superiors and elders, they manage to subtly lay down rules for behavior that people in their families and peer groups can’t resist following.

More good news: Saskia and Ruby should get along very well; Pigs and Tigers quarrel a lot, but they have strong bonds and great affinity for each other, and will make each other laugh.

So relax — it looks like there won’t be strife in the Ark, or rather, none sent by the stars!

And yet, she wavers, “We never quite jumped in with both feet, and though we’re compatible in many, many respects, I’m still a little bit of a wild child with self-destructive tendencies, and Jasmine plays grown-up too much and sinks into bouts of passive-aggressiveness.” They both want to date others, but don’t want the affair to end — a proposition known as having your cake and eating it, too. “Should we gently put our relationship in the over-and-done-with stack,” Amanda asks, or “should we get into a counselor’s office now so as not to risk losing a lifelong love to the cauterizing barriers we will build without each other?”

Amanda: Dec. 29, 1969, noon hour. Capricorn Earth Rooster, hour of the Horse.

Jasmine: May 15, 1974, 9:02 a.m. Taurus Air Tiger, hour of the Snake.

If Jasmine, a well-rounded Taurus Tiger, knew how analytically and soberly Amanda, a conscientious Cap Rooster, regards their breakup, she would be mystified. The Rooster and the Tiger are not exactly compatible, not exactly incompatible; they both see the world through different windows. The Tiger looks out, takes in the whole terrain, assumes its hers for the taking, and wonders how she can best enjoy and use it; the Rooster looks out, notices the potholes, the fallen trees, the things that need fixing, and the troubling intruders and worries about how best to bring everything and everyone on the property into line. If the Tiger jumps into the landscape, the Rooster will think the Tiger also needs to be brought into line, but the Tiger will resist curtailments of its freedom. In short, the Rooster has control issues, the Tiger has “being controlled” issues.

As an Earth Rooster, Amanda does not shy away from difficult truths. She wants to get to the bottom of everything, and she never does a job halfway. If she is Rooster-like, she will tell people what she thinks needs fixing; if she is Hen-like, she will be much more tactful and quiet, but will know how to make her approval or disapproval felt. Her Capricorn Western sign reinforces her tendency toward duty, order and the success and public esteem that come from consistent hard work. Luckily, Amanda has been splashed with Horse by her birth hour, which puts some Technicolor in Kansas. Her strong, pragmatic character will be punctuated by bursts of intuition, caprice and emotionality. Nonetheless, the Earth Rooster-Cap blend produces a little more reality than the average pleasure-loving, praise-seeking Air Tiger can really bear; and the vivacious Horse hour, in addition to rounding out Amanda’s character, also gives her the wit to make really astute, painful criticisms. Here, it’s worth adding, Air Tiger’s self-serving nature can wound the Rooster; and if Amanda has lashed out at Jasmine verbally, she has probably had reason. Since Amanda says the couple has not fought much, it may be that Amanda has bottled up her anger, not wishing to estrange her captivating Tiger. Tigers can be sadistic, and Roosters need to make sure that in humoring their Tigers, they’re not mistaking masochism for patience — and letting themselves get plucked.

It is probably Jasmine’s Taurus sun sign that fuels this couple’s attraction. The reliable Taurus is an earth sign (like Capricorn) and helps ground Jasmine’s volatile Air Tiger moon sign. The Tiger year gives great charm, humor, popularity, intellect, strength and ability, but it does not give a firm work ethic, or a very solid notion of honor and commitment. Air Tigers can work hard, as other Tigers do, but they prefer to be more opportunistic — to get results from working not so very hard — and their moral choices tend to be based on expedience and personal benefit. Calling them on this will make them angry; to remain friends with a Tiger, you must continue admiring the Tiger. Tigers will not stay long with a nonfan. Also, Tigers ultimately like to be the boss in their relationship, which is hard for Roosters, who are equally prideful, to swallow. However, the blending of the conservative, traditional, fair-minded, dutiful Taurus with Tiger creates a nicely balanced personality. The Tiger charm will be wedded to the Bull’s greater sense of honor and mission. The Taurus deliberateness and rigidity will be lightened and broadened by the Tiger joie de vivre and creativity. In a couple of years, Jasmine’s Snake hour birth will assert itself more, calming her Tiger agitation and putting her more in tune with Amanda’s outlook. But can they ride out the wait?

Amanda and Jasmine’s Taurus and Capricorn earth signs attract them to each other, but their Moon signs bedevil them with Big Picture conflicts. Taurus Tiger likes to live in the moment and not over-analyze that moment; Capricorn Rooster likes to think long-term and evaluate the moment ad infinitum. Oxen (1973) and Snakes (1965 or 1977) warm to the Rooster approach, Tigers don’t, quite. Tigers tend to prefer the more impetuous signs, such as Dogs (1970) and Horses (1978).

Because both Amanda and Jasmine have very self-sufficient melds, they are each so complete in themselves that it may be hard for them to hook up with others; they are like two marbles, not like two puzzle pieces, they are non-interlocking players. If they choose to draw others into the game, they might try seeking partners who also have well-rounded melds but who have a birth year that is more compatible with theirs (as described above). Still, there’s no reason for Amanda and Jasmine to shoot each other out of the circle while they wait for the other marbles to turn up — as long as they can play nice.

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