Your Joyous Truths

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Cosmic Joke Alert: Long-term luck may initially be disguised as short-term upheaval.

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All your adult life, the universe has played tricks on you. Some of them have been so convoluted and enigmatic that you didn't even get the joke. But lately the universe's pranks have become more comprehensible, and have even seemed to display a touch of kindness.

What's going on? Have you finally paid off your ancient karmic debt? Has your sense of humor expanded so much that you can now laugh at what once made you cringe?

Maybe you're simply beginning to cash in on the strength and smarts you've been forced to cultivate over the years in order to deal with all of God's mischief.





HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

I love your pilgrim soul and I love your ever-deepening eyes.

I love how unflinchingly you peer into the heart of your own darkness.

I love how you're making yourself more and more receptive to truths in their wild states.

I love how you can lose yourself in passion but never shirk your commitment to the good and the true.

I admire the way you never bear a grudge against the mountains that are in your way, but rather just set to work getting around them.

I love your commitment to deciphering the code you left for yourself before you came into this life.





THE ART OF INTIMACY

Gertrude Stein said love thrives through "the skillful audacity to share an inner life."

It suggests that expressing the truth about who you are is not something that amateurs do well. Disciplined practice and ingenuity are required. It also implies that courage is an essential element of successful intimacy. You may have to be adventurous if you want to weave your life together with another's.

Comments? Refutations? Action steps?





PLEASURE AS A KEY TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH?

Assume that your drive to experience pleasure isn't a barrier to your spiritual growth, but is in fact essential to it. Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy can make you a more ethical and compassionate person. Imagine that feeling good has something important to teach you every day.





HOW DID YOU FIND MY HOROSCOPES?

I'd like to hear your story about how and where you first discovered my horoscopes. Tell me at Truthrooster@gmail.com.





I'm sad to hear that New York's Village Voice is closing down forever. I learned a lot about writing by reading the Voice in the 1980s, then experienced the great fortune of having my column Free Will Astrology published in its pages every week from 1999 to 2013.

Many people who first found out about my column did so by reading it in the Village Voice.

More on the story.





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.

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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.

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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.





I invite you to speak the following words:

"I pledge to see my problems as tremendous opportunities and my flaws as imperfect or unripe talents."

"I pledge to remember that I am not only a sweating, half-asleep, excitable, bumbling jumble of desires, but that I am also an immortal four-dimensional messiah in continuous telepathic touch with all of creation."

"As long as I live, I vow to die and be reborn, die and be reborn, die and be reborn, over and over again, forever reinventing myself."

"I vow to love and honor both the life I wish I had and the life I actually have. I vow to love and honor my highs and my lows, my yeses and noes, my give and my take.

"I pledge to wake myself up, never hold back, have nothing to lose, go all the way, kiss the stormy sky, be the hero of my own story, ask for everything I need and give everything I have, take myself to the river when it's time to go to the river, and take myself to the mountaintop when it's time to go to the mountaintop."

"I promise to be stronger than hate, wetter than water, deeper than the abyss, and wilder than the sun."





IMAGINAL HYGIENE

"Imaginal hygiene is the inner art of self-managing your imagination, to defend it from forces that compromise, pollute, colonize, shrink, and sterilize it, and to cultivate those that illuminate, expand, and nourish it."

The above is an excerpt from a wonderful piece by M. T. Xen, which I highly recommend.

You can also listen to my six-minute take on the power of your imagination.

Or read my piece here.





THE 80% RULE

Readers of my horoscope column "Free Will Astrology" are sometimes surprised when I say I only believe in astrology about 80 percent. "You're a quack?!" they cry. Not at all, I explain. I've been a passionate student of the ancient art for years. About the time my over-educated young brain was on the verge of desertification, crazy wisdom showed up in the guise of astrology, moistening my soul just in time to save it.

"But what about the other 20 percent?" they press on. "Are you saying your horoscopes are only partially true?"

I assure them that my doubt proves my love. By cultivating a tender, cheerful skepticism, I inoculate myself against the virus of fanaticism. This ensures that astrology will be a supple tool in my hands, an adaptable art form, and not a rigid, explain-it-all dogma that over-literalizes and distorts the mysteries it seeks to illuminate.

Read the rest of this essay.





I AM YOU AND YOU ARE ME AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER

"Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves.

"The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.

"Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred."

~ Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation"





LIVING IN THE INQUIRY

“I find that a lot of people are more invested in position-taking than they are in the inquiry. Generally speaking, I am in the inquiry. I live in the question. People have so many positions, and usually the evidence is not strong enough for them really to be so confident in those conclusions. There are just a lot of things that are not certain.”

- Jerry Brown, quoted in The Atlantic