Bless Your Appetite!

Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a bunch of other stuff, including good news, lucky advice, and tender rants. It arrives every Tuesday morning.

Sign up here for your free subscription.





Bless your appetite. May it be voracious and unapologetic.

Much respect for your buried needs and secret yearnings. May they flow into plain view for you to embrace and celebrate.

Congratulations for your willingness to name the unspeakable truths and acknowledge the embarrassing fears. May you be willing to rebel against your self-image for the sake of gaining access to deeper reserves of power and competence.





ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR DEMONS

You have to recognize the demons or else they'll annoy you like mosquitoes, But if you acknowledge their existence, if you say, "All right, here's a cookie, go sit in the corner." then you can go about your work and you don't have to go into depression about it. —James Broughton





SUPPORT

I was born under the sign of Cancerian the Crab. One of the potential weaknesses of our tribe is that we can tend to be almost pathologically self-sufficient. Some of us may find it challenging to ask for help and support. In my continuing effort to overcome this inclination, I'm asking for your support!

If you would like to contribute to me and my ongoing work, please visit my Virtual Tip Jar at Paypal.

+

You can also contribute to my well-being by buying the Expanded Audio Horoscopes I create every week. These forecasts are different in tone and content from the written horoscopes I provide here. They're my four- to five-minute-long ruminations about the current chapter of your life story. They're available here.





INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIVING A LIFE

Poet Mary Oliver provides us with this excellent guidance:

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

+

Here are some suggestions I would add:

Make the invisible dark force beautiful.

Create a song out of your moans.

Brag about your wounds.

Sneak gifts to your bad self now and then.

Dissolve the ties that bind you to hollow intelligence.

Train yourself in the art of unpredictability.

Play forever in time's blessing.

Lift up your heart unto the wild sun.

Distribute your favors to the vulnerable ones who can never pay you back.

Fall out of love with fear.

Make beautiful messes in the midst of ugly messes.





THE SUBVERSIVE POWER OF JOY
by Janey Stephenson:

"The unexpected, spontaneous and pleasantly disruptive nature of collective celebration is one of the great equalizers of social and political struggle.

"Holding onto and centering joy is a vital tactic for personal and group resilience, as well as political resistance to an agenda that seeks to enforce hierarchy and division through mass fear.

"Authoritarianism is directly incompatible with collective joy; it demands fear, obedience, hierarchy and an obsession with security and preparation for war.

"The unexpected, spontaneous and pleasantly disruptive nature of collective joy takes people off guard and is one of the great equalizers of social and political struggle."





DANCING TO DISSOLVE HIERARCHY

"Liberation movements have a long history of communal dance. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has documented the history of collective joy in her book "Dancing In The Streets." She argues that collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal "biotechnology" for binding groups together.

"Physical movement—a powerful escalation of typical protest chanting—not only releases emotion, it also creates bonding, trust and equality, dissolving hierarchy and increasing a sense of community."





MANY KINDS OF MEDITATION, NOT JUST ONE

"Lama Surya Das, the "Buddha from Brooklyn," is one of the handful of Westerners who have been teaching meditation for decades. And yet, he says we’re doing it wrong.

Lama Surya Das says there are other ways to meditate besides those that are currently popular: "So many people seem to be moving narcissistically into self-centered happiness-seeking and quietism, not to mention the use of mindfulness for mere effectiveness," he says. "True meditation generates wisdom and compassion, which may be very disquieting, at least in the short term."

"'Quiet your mind' or 'calm and clear your mind' are instructions I hear way too much," he says. "Some teachers actually encourage people to try to stop thinking, when in fact meditative awareness means being mindful of thoughts and feelings, not simply trying to reduce, alter or white them out and achieve some kind of oblivion."

"The anti-intellectual meditators, thought-swatters and imagination-suppressors have long ruled meditation-oriented circles in the West," he says. "But authentic meditative practices can enhance and even unleash the creativity and imagination.'

You don’t have to quiet the mind to do many of the types of meditation he proposes. They don't involve trying to find a quiet 'moment of Zen' apart from the messy, noisy world of work, family and children, but rather inviting all of the noise into meditation.





TIME FOR A FEW LOVE ERUPTIONS

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

+

Love imperfectly. Be a love idiot. Let yourself forget any love ideal. —Sark

+

Love is the only game where two can play and both win. —Erma Freesman.

+

When I think of you,
fireflies in the marsh rise
like the soul's jewels,
lost to eternal longing,
abandoning my body
—Izumi Shikibu

+

Love is a great beautifier. —Louisa May Alcott

+

Fall in love over and over again every day. Love your family, your neighbors, your enemies, and yourself. And don't stop with humans. Love animals, plants, stones, even galaxies. —Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat

+

Be my ruckus, my perfect non-sequitur. Be my circuit-breaker, my lengthening shadows at dusk, my nest of pine needles, my second-story window. Be my if-you-stare-long-enough-you’ll-see. Be my subatomic particle. Be my backbeat, my key of C minor, my surly apostle, my scandalous reparté, my maximum payload. Be my simmering, seething, flickering, radiating, shimmering, and undulating. —Andrew Varnon

+

I love you between shadow and soul. I love you as the plant that hasn’t bloomed yet, and carries hidden within itself the light of flowers. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. Because of you, the dense fragrance that rises from the earth lives in my body, rioting with hunger for the eternity of our victorious kisses. —Pablo Neruda

+

You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day’s wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you. —George Bernard Shaw

+

The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy. The merest whisper of your name awakes in me a shuddering sixth sense. I am longing for a kiss that makes time stand still. —a blend of words from Edgar Allan Poe, Pamela Moore, and John Keats

+

We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. I want to hold you close like a lute, so that we can cry out with loving. Would you rather throw stones at a mirror? I am your mirror and here are the stones. —Rumi

+

I love you more than it’s possible to love anyone. I love you more than love itself. I love you more than you love yourself. I love you more than God loves you. I love you more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the history of the universe. In fact, I love you *more* than I love you. —Me

+

For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining. —James Hillman

+

Our love is like a well in the wilderness where time watches over the wandering lightning. Our sleep is a secret tunnel that leads to the scent of apples carried on the wind. When I hold you, I hold everything that is–swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maple trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread that the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives. —Pablo Neruda

+

Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body’s deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body’s superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity."– Henri Nouwen

+

Let’s heat up the night to a boil. Let’s cook every drop of liquid out of our flesh till we sizzle, not a drop of come left. We are pots on too high a flame. Our insides char and flake dark like sinister snow idling down. We breathe out smoke. We die out and sleep covers us in ashes. We lie without dreaming, empty as clean grates. Yet we wake rebuilt, clattering and hungry as waterfalls leaping off, rushing into the day, roaring our bright intentions. It is the old riddle in the Yiddish song, what can burn and not burn up, a passion that gives birth to itself every day. —Marge Piercy





HEROINES

I'm soliciting your nominations for older women heroes who are perpetrating rebellious compassion and dissident magic and healing uproar and inspiring memes. Who do you nominate? Here are some of my top choices. Send your votes to Truthrooster@gmail.com.

Starhawk
Deena Metzger
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
bell hooks
Joy Harjo
Carolyn Myss
Arundati Roy
Pema Chodron
Sandra Cisneros
Vandana Shiva
Amy Goodman
Rebecca Solnit
Naomi Klein
Bernice Johnson Reagon
Max Dashu
Rita Dove
Ysaye Maria Barnwell
Anne Waldman
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Jean Houston
Patti Smith
Elizabeth Warren

A few quotes:

How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth? How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity? How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future? —Starhawk

+

We want to be God in all the ways that are not the ways of God, in what we hope is indestructible or unmoving. But God is fragile, a bare smear of pollen, that scatter of yellow dust from the tree that tumbled over in a storm of grief and planted itself again. —Deena Metzger

+

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from *Women Who Run With the Wolves*: 1. The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead. 2. If you have ever been called defiant, incorrigible, forward, cunning, insurgent, unruly, or rebellious, you're on the right track. If you have never been called these things, there is yet time. 3. What must I allow to die today in order to generate more life tomorrow?

+

The moment you come to trust chaos, you see God clearly. Chaos is divine order, versus human order. Change is divine order, versus human order. When the chaos becomes safety to you, then you know you're seeing God clearly. —Caroline Myss

+

In her essay "The Possible Human," Jean Houston describes amazing capacities that are within reach of any of us who are brazen and cagey enough to cultivate them. We can learn to thoroughly enjoy being in our bodies, for example. We can summon enormous power to heal ourselves; develop an acute memory; enter at will into the alpha and theta wave states that encourage meditation and creative reverie; cultivate an acute perceptual apparatus that can see "infinity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower;" and practice the art of being deeply empathetic.

+

Vandana Shiva: Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient.

+

Elizabeth Warren: There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory . . . Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.





My book
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia is available at Amazon and Powells.

Below are excerpts.

I invite you to meditate on the relentlessness of your yearning for love. Recognize the fact that your eternal longing will never leave you in peace. Accept that it will forever delight you, torment you, inspire you, and bewilder you -- whether you are alone or in the throes of a complicated relationship.

Understand that your desire for love will just keep coming and coming and coming, keeping you slightly off-balance and pushing you to constantly revise your ideas about who you are.

Now read this declaration from the poet Rilke and claim it as your own: "My blood is alive with many voices that tell me I am made of longing."





THOUGHT EXPERIMENT'

Here's a thought experiment you could try for the next 24 hours: Every time a negative or fearful thought rises up, substitute a thought, imagination, or memory that energizes you and makes you feel genuinely good.





RADICAL AUTHENTICITY

"I've been practicing radical authenticity lately," my friend Brandon told me. "I'm revealing the blunt truth about unmentionable subjects to everyone I know. It's been pretty hellish -- no one likes having the social masks stripped away -- but it's been ultimately rewarding."

"I admire your boldness in naming the currents flowing beneath the surface," I replied, "but I'm curious as to why you imply they're all negative. To practice radical authenticity, shouldn't you also express the raw truth about what's right, good, and beautiful? Shouldn't you unleash the praise and gratitude that normally go unspoken?"





TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING

"To hell with my suffering," wrote Arthur Rimbaud in his poem "May Banners." I invite you to make that snappy phrase your mantra for now. Anytime you feel a sour thought impinging on your perceptions, say, "To hell with my suffering."

And immediately follow it up with an expostulation from another Rimbaud poem, "It's all too beautiful."

You could be ruthless about it. If you sense an imminent outbreak of pettiness, or if a critical little voice in your head blurts out a curse, or if a pesky ghost starts to nag you, simply say, "To hell with my suffering," and then, "It's all too beautiful."





TELEPATHICS ANONYMOUS

Telepathics Anonymous is a 12-step program for those who aren't aware of how the thoughts and feelings of others leak over into their own.

Are you suffering because you imagine your psyche is an utterly separate and sealed-off territory? Would reality make a lot more sense if you knew for sure that you are in continual extrasensory contact with more souls than you can imagine?

Telepathics Anonymous offers proof that human minds overlap all the time!

As a get-­acquainted gift, Telepathics Anonymous would like to present you with an omen concerning the future of your relationship with love. Look for it exactly 95 hours and 19 minutes from right now.





ATTUNE YOURSELF TO BEAUTY

What do you need to kill off in yourself in order to tune in to the beauty that's hidden from you? What worn-out shticks are blinding you to the blessings that life is conspiring to give you?

Which of your theories may have been useful and even brilliant in the past but are now keeping you from becoming aware of the ever-fresh creation that unfolds before you?





THROW A PARTY FOR ALL THE PEOPLE YOU ARE

Throw a party for all the people you've ever been and all the different selves who live within you. Invite the teenager who once seethed with frustrated potential and the four-year-old who loved nothing more than to play.

Include the hopeful complainer who stands in the shadows and dares you to ask for more, as well as the brave hero who comes out every now and then to attempt seemingly impossible feats of happiness.

Don't forget any of the various personalities who have contributed to making you who you are, even the "bad" ones. Celebrate your internal diversity. Marvel at how good you are at changing.

(For extra credit, you could also invite all the characters you've been in past incarnations, like the Balinese puppet-maker and the Nigerian herbalist and the Chinese midwife and the African savannah elephant.)





FOUR ADDICTIONS

Our ability to pursue our dreams can be inhibited by four addictions:

1. an addiction to what other people think of us;

2. an addiction to creating melodrama in a misguided quest for excitement;

3. an addiction to believing we're imprisoned by what happened in the past;

4. an addiction to negative thoughts that fill us with anxiety.

(Thanks to success coach Tom Ferry for these ideas.)

The good news is that it is your birthright to beat all four of those addictions. The work won't come fast or early, and it may never be perfect. But it's quite possible.





DO YOU REALLY NEED TO CHANGE THE SUNSET?

"When I look at a sunset, I don't say, 'Soften the orange a little on the right hand corner, and put a bit more purple in the cloud color.'" Pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers was describing the way he observed the world. "I don't try to control a sunset," he continued. "I watch it with awe."

He had a similar view about people. "One of the most satisfying experiences," he said, "is just fully to appreciate an individual in the same way I appreciate a sunset."





ALTER YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS?

refusing to use the word "I" for 72 hours

acting with absolutely no ulterior motives

dancing in the dark, in slow motion, with your clothes on inside-out

witnessing an event considered impossible by your rational mind

reviewing in painstaking detail the history of your life

creating something beautiful out of something ugly

achieving telepathic connection with all of creation

forcing yourself to laugh for ten minutes straight

calling everything by its wrong name

renouncing your horoscope

making animal noises

looking at yourself in the mirror for an hour





WHAT IS WILDNESS?

Here's the definition of "wildness" offered by Robert Bly in his book, "The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart": To be wild is not to be crazy like a criminal or psychotic, but "mad as the mist and snow." It has nothing to do with being childish or primitive, nor does it manifest as manic rebellion or self-damaging alienation.

The marks of wildness, Bly says, are a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and a vivacious curiosity in the face of the unknown.





POWER OF YOUR IMAGINATION

When I studied method acting with filmmaker David Mamet, he urged us to cultivate such a vivid imagination that we could taste the pretend coffee that we drank out of an imaginary cup.

We'd feel the heft of the cup in our hand and the steamy heat rising. We'd hallucinate the bitterly flavorful smell, and the muscles of our face would move the way they might if we were sipping the actual factual coffee.

Pop star Lady Gaga didn't work with Mamet while she was maturing as an actress, but she got similar teachings. She told New York magazine that she can "feel the rain, when it's not raining." And more than that: "I can mentally give myself an orgasm."

It's your birthright to develop an imagination like that. You'll have to work hard at it, though.

Are you interested?