Monday 8/30 - Lunar 7/23

When we fall into a pit, clawing at the walls makes our hands bleed. Let our prison become a hermitage! Group efforts succeed, so rest in your team. Going out on a limb, making your case, and forcing any kind of progress will have “three times the negative result.” Great day instead to give gifts, make offerings, and find our place within our community.

Tuesday 8/31 - 7/24

Today is good for most things. Celebrations, the arts, doing stuff, going places. Harmony is in the air. A day of natural beginnings and endings. Enjoy with moderation.

Wednesday 9/1 -7/25

We are released from Monday’s prison—er, hermitage. Let things open up by themselves. New resources arrive. Good for weddings and funerals. Continue with your regular stuff. All of it’s supported. The blessings of the ancestors rain down. There could be arguments among family members, so it’s a good day to bite your tongue or “avoid feasting with relatives,” as the Tibetan calendar advises.

Thursday 9/2 - 7/26

Today bridges the esoteric and the practical. Excellent day for rites, initiations, and transmissions, as well as starting a business, building a home, and digging a well (doing research). The people we bury today rest peacefully and benefit the surviving relatives. Consult the oracle for more info.

Friday 9/3 - 7/27

Deep and honest spiritual revelation is available today while we vacuum. Clean house, rest, and retreat. That’s what the qi is doing. Perfect day to go to the doctor and continue medical treatment. If you flirt today, you’ll get your feelings hurt. There could also be literal floods.

Saturday 9/4 - 7/28

Today is great for abandoning all notions of self-righteousness, and allowing adversity to polish us. Any bad situation will be made worse by overreacting. It’s back to the “hermitage” for us. Leisure and gift-giving go well. Once, when Ming asked me how I was doing, I said, “Monkey in a Tiger Year” as short-hand for not good. He pointed out how lazy and uncreative my take was: “Not very dynamic use of the auspice." Every day is good for something.

Sunday 9/5 - 7/29

If you feel nervous, it’s not personal. Today we’re affected by events we did not directly cause. The solar index tells us, “Do less, have less, show less, seek nothing.” That’s success.

One day many years ago when I was leaving acupuncture school, I saw an old man stumbling on the sidewalk in Berkeley. He looked disoriented, so I asked if he wanted help. He told me he was trying to get back to his assisted living facility, but had lost his bearings. His name was Dragon, and he had fled Japan to escape his fate as an acupuncturist. (Blind people in Japan had to either become a doctor or sell lottery tickets.) He didn’t want to do those things, so he came to America. As we walked, it started to rain. It took us about an hour to get there, so we were able to cover a lot of ground, but the last thing he told me seemed to come out of nowhere: “Anxious people shouldn’t use astrology. It just makes them more anxious.”

I’m reminding myself to keep a light heart, play with the auspices, and cultivate a general lack of preferences. If any of this makes you anxious, stop reading and use your intuition-as-oracle. Or if you’re adventurous, counter the auspices for the sake of science. See what happens! Ming used to tell stories of monks cutting each other’s heads off because they’d never tried that before. LOL. Experiment within the parameters of your view and the rules that govern your consensus reality. Have fun. None of this is too serious. Not even death.