This is going to be a short one today folks. At least I hope so. I’m on day twenty-one of a thirty day Bikram Yoga challenge and, though I made it through a Boston winter without getting sick, with basically no heat in this impressive looking but ridiculous apartment in which I find myself, I now have some combo platter of Dickensian illnesses that would seem to combine consumption, rickets, pleurisy and gout. I jest (ish), but oucha-magaoucha do I feel like pooh warmed over; and Monday is a big client day and I must be sparklingly alert. Snap out of it.

I’m not sure what it is in my newly emerging personality that is manifesting as daily challenges—the yoga, this Blague—plus the horoscopes and other writing, our priority consultancy, the production and direction of a new Afterglow Festival, for which I must now begin fundraising in earnest, not to mention a number of upcoming shows by Starsky + Cox, both separate and together. Believe me I’m not complaining, I’m going somewhere with this: Today’s Sabian Symbol for 10° Aries is A Teacher Gives New Symbolic Forms To Traditional Images and I immediately think of re-branding, changing the headline, and reinvigorating old modes with powerful new widgets.

So the above litany: That was the old me feigning to be dragged through the new normal. In truth, I’m not planning to stop daily yoga after just a thirty-day challenge—I hope to do it every day for the rest of my life. I’m not shying away from the Cosmic Blague, it requires at least a year of my attention and so I have to sit back and enjoy the ride; and, as has always been the plan, I’d like to die in the wings during a live performance where I’m, forviging the pun, killing it. So I’m giving over to these new forms, now, in my daily existence and letting myself, if not my brand, be changed by them, so I can meet the future more as I see myself. Gosh I hope that made sense.

Dane Rudhyar speaks of today, 10° Aries, as embodying a “revision of attitude at the beginning of a new cycle of experience”; the traditional images we have of ourself and our circumstance might be outmoded, and we need new forms that suggest a wider range of meaning. This isn’t personal. We needn’t have an emotional take on, or reaction to, what is our new design for living We’ve made decisions and we’re sticking to them. This is us now. And we need a new abstract form to mark this shift in our outlook. And it all begins with that ‘tude.

Short of pulling a Prince and branding ourselves with some kind of unpronounceable symbol, or taking on a Ziggy Stardust persona, or inventing a new pronoun to which others might refer to us—all valid moves that great artists and thinkers have done to mark their development—we should at least think about, today, what might emblemize us. What have we stood for? How has that changed? What do we mean (to ourselves and others), now? And what might be our logo. Did you know that the first ever logo to be trademarked was the Bass red triangle in 1876. Thank you Wikipedia.

The fact is that the meaning and interpretation behind any symbol are endless. Especially this symbol which is about new symbolic assignations being added to, or replacing, older “traditional” ones. And it’s awfully generous, isn’t it, for this teacher to be shedding new light on some old forms. Gosh, I wonder if I know anybody like that? Hmmm. The point is we are making progress. We are not static beings. We are not locked into our own traditions and so, every so often, we need new symbols for ourselves, even, to mark or growth in wisdom.

When I was twenty-one I toyed with calling myself Pan and moving to Paris to be an androgynous cabaret artist. Well I did move to Paris but I have never been that androgynous due to hairy Italian genes; and it took me another twenty years to attempt cabaret. But it didn’t not happen. I had the symbol, the form in my mind, way back when. And as most do, I took on a new name when I began working as a professional astrologer-metaphysician. Granted, we had invented the His & Her Horoscope column for Teen People and I didn’t want my New York Times editors to know that it was me writing it, but still there was a tradition of doing this. Alan Leo. Athena Starwoman. Linda Goodman. Dane Rudhyar. The name happened first and then I sort of grew into it. I think that’s how it works. We change our attitude and we mark it with some word or picture, if only in our mind, and then we grow in that direction. Esso just sounds so mid-twentieth century—but Exxon, now that’s a name that could travel into the new millenium.

So, today, ask yourself: What’s your attitude? And how would you characterize it in a word or in an image. What emblemizes the new you? I think I’ll be a big blue ball. Interpret that to your hearts’ content.

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