My horoscope from Rob Breszny.

Is your schedule too rigid to allow magic to seep in? Then mutate that schedule, please. Is your brain so crammed with knowledgeable opinions that no fresh perceptions can crack their way in? Then flush out some of those opinions. Is your heart so puckered by the stings of the past that it can’t burst forth with any expansive new invitations? Then unpucker your heart, for God’s sake.

—Free Will Astrology, week of 9/28/06

I’ve been feeling mighty puckered of late. It nags me, this awareness that I’m not kind inside my head. I mean this — I really, truly have a nasty, gnarly, judgmental, denigrating, callous aspect that is far more vocal than I would like. A couple of other statements caught my attention that I wish to enlarge, print, and plaster where I will see it. One I found at Jack’s Zen blog.

The three marks of an awakened life are presence, happiness, and kindness.

I agree that these are some of the marks. I also believe that happiness follows from kindness. My unkind thoughts indicate I’m not so happy and increase my unhappiness. One way to alter this is the consciously practice redirection of thought. Consciously regarding people with compassion lightens my soul, which nurtures happiness. Usually, when I am not present, I am thinking about an annoyance in the past, a worry about the future, or some other abstract construct about what life and people should or should not be.

Another passage caught my eye; it’s in the “about me” section of a blog that’s new to me, True and Useful.

I once read in a Buddhist text that we should aspire to speak only what is true and useful. Of course, what is true and useful for some might seem dishonest or of no value to others. Still, it seems worth the effort to pass our never-ending stream of thoughts through a true and useful filter before expressing them as spoken words.

And what if we apply this filter not only to what we speak but also to what we hear and read? How much of the information that bombards us daily is both true and useful? Does much of it seem either true but of dubious value or appear to be helpful but turn out to be false?

Fortunately, I do manage to apply a filter to my speech much of the time. I’ll give myself props for that. However, what I’d really like is to avoid manufacturing those thoughts completely. Also, I think applying this filter to what one absorbs is a worthy idea.

Back to Free Will Astrology. Breszny followed the horoscope with a “sacred advertisement,” and I rather enjoyed it. The ones that intrigued or resonated most are bold.

SACRED ADVERTISEMENT

While you and I are together here:

• Your favorite phrase is flux gusto
• The colors of your soul are sable, vermilion, ivory, and jade
• Your magic talisman is a thousand-year-old Joshua tree whose flowers blossom just one night each year and can only be pollinated by the yucca moth
• Your holiest pain comes from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you’d like the world around you to change
• Your soil of destiny is peat moss
• Your mythic symbol is a treasure chest dislodged from its hiding place in the earth by a flood
• Your lucky number is 13 to the 13th power
• Your sweet spot is in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics
• A clutch of frog eggs from an unpolluted river is your auspicious hair-care product
• The anonymous celebrity with whom you have most in common is the jester who followed Buddha around and kept him loose
• The question that perks you up when your routine becomes too rote is this: What possesses the bar-tailed godwit to migrate annually from Alaska to New Zealand by hitching rides on gale-force winds?