TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Naturalist John Burroughs was addressing your current needs when he wrote the following: “The lesson which life constantly enforces is ‘Look underfoot.’ You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Every place is the center of the world.” Let’s finish up this little pep talk, Taurus, with some advice from Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): One of my readers, Elizabeth Whitsage, told me a story of when she was working at Disneyland selling mouse-eared balloons. Every so often a mother, father, and young son would come up to her, the parents asking in enthusiastic voices “What color do you want?” and the son answering “Pink!” One parent, usually the father, would recoil in horror and say something like, “No, son, don’t you want red or blue?” But before the child could reply, Elizabeth would whip a pink balloon out of the bunch and wrap its string around his wrist. Then she’d smile and say to the dad, “That’ll be one dollar, please.” Keep this story uppermost in mind during the week ahead, Taurus. Make sure that you always get and always give your personal equivalent of the pink balloon.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In his book *The Gulag Archipelago,* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documents the Soviet Union’s oppression of many ethnic groups between 1918 and 1956. “Only one nation would not give in, nor acquire the mental habits of submission,” he noted. “These were the Chechens. They never sought to please, to ingratiate themselves with the bosses . . . No one could stop them from living as they did.” I don’t mean to imply that the manipulative pressures coming to bear on you, Taurus, are anywhere near as severe as what the Chechens experienced. In fact, your version might be rather covert or subtle. But I urge you, nevertheless, to stand up in defense of your independent spirit with a Chechen-like clarity and ferocity.