What Life Story Will You Create for Yourself in the Coming Months?

You still have one more week left to listen to my in-depth EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES about Your Long-Range Future.

What will be the story of your life in the coming months? What new influences will be headed your way? What fresh resources will you be able to draw on? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?

To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports, go here.

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then access the horoscopes by clicking on "Long Range Prediction." Choose from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Each part is a standalone report, not dependent on the other two.

Who do you want to become between now and January 2020? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do? How can you exert your free will to create adventures that'll bring out the best in you, even as you find graceful ways to cooperate with the tides of destiny?

If you'd like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your Big-Picture outlook.

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Each of the three-part reports is seven to nine minutes long. The cost is $6 per report. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

P.S. You can also listen to a short-term Expanded Audio Horoscope for the coming week: "This week (March 12, 2019)"





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.

Read past issues of the newsletter.

Sign up here for your free subscription.





Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane.
—Anne Lamott

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible
—Rebecca Solnit

The perfect is the enemy of the good.
—Voltaire

Excellence does not require perfection.
—Henry James





THE ART AND SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL COMPASSION'

Has there ever been a time in the history of civilization when masses of people were actively cultivating a capacity for transcendental empathy? Have there ever been so many of us attuned to and concerned for the suffering of those we've never met?

In his book *Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming*, Paul Hawken argues that organized political action devoted to advancing the rights of others is a relatively new phenomenon. The drive to abolish slavery was where it began. In recent decades it has grown exponentially, becoming a global crusade to improve social justice, economic conditions, human rights, and environmental health.

By Hawken's estimates, there are well over a million organizations engaged in the effort, which thrives without centralized leadership, charismatic front men, or a fixed ideology. Because of its grass-roots ubiquity, it is largely invisible to the mass media and underestimated by politicians.

Some day, maybe 500 years from now, our descendants will have installed the art and science of universal compassion as the first law of civilization. And I bet they will give honor to us, the people alive on the planet today, as the heroes who gave critical mass to their prime directive.

Read more.





CHOOSING WHICH OF YOUR THOUGHTS TO EMPHASIZE

My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.
—Anne Lamott

In other words, you can decide which of the thoughts and images that bubble up from your unconscious will be the ones you act on and identify as belonging to your intentions.

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You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.
—Elizabeth Gilbert





EVIL IS BORING

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates: considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artists; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

- Ursula K. Le Guin

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See the video of my performance piece, "Evil Is Boring"





HEALING FROM THE LIES

Take a day to heal from the lies you've told yourself and the ones that have been told to you.
—poet and activist Maya Angelou


Take fifty-five days to heal from the lies you've told yourself and the ones that have been told to you. Or two hundred days. Or four hundred thirty-nine days. No more than a thousand, though.
—Mash-up of me and Maya Angelou





WANT TO GET YOUR ASTROLOGICAL CHART READ?

If you want your personal chart done, I recommend a colleague whose approach to reading astrology charts closely matches my own. She's my wife, RO LOUGHRAN. Her website is here.

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation. She is skilled at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your connection with your own inner wisdom.

In addition to over 30 years of astrological experience, Ro has been a licensed psychotherapist for 17 years. She integrates psychological insight with astrology's cosmological perspective.

Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.

Check out Ro's website.





MY DAUGHTER ZOE'S CURATION

On Tuesday, March 19 at 7 pm, my daughter Zoe Brezsny is curating a poetry reading by Kim Rosenfield and Michael Dickman. The event is at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 548 West 22nd Street in New York City. It's free.

When asked to describe her aesthetic inclinations, Kim Rosenfield has said, "Every day I wake up with a brand-new attitude. I always want to experiment." Critics who have reviewed her five published books agree that she has succeeded at making a high art of that task.

Rosenfield's book RE-EVOLUTION has been described as "part text-book, part poem, part song-of-science, part feminist guide-to-living."

In her GOOD MORNING--MIDNIGHT, she artfully and humorously juxtaposes the language of science, money, and fashion so as to critique how they define and limit women.

Rosenfield's wise and witty experiments are fueled by the mastery she has achieved in her other job as a psychotherapist.

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One critic says that Michael Dickman's poems "bring us back to the wonder and violence of childhood, and the desire to connect with a power greater than ourselves." Another critic writes that his poems are "lithe and seemingly effortless," and have a piercing emotional power.

A third critic lauds Dickman for offering "an uncompromising vision of joy and devastating loss through a strict economy of language and an exuberant surrealism."


More info.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

For more about the good news stories below, plus links to the articles that provide full evidence, go here.

1. The world passed 1,000 GW of cumulative installed wind and solar power this year. 10 years ago, there was less than 8 GW of solar.

2. Solar and wind continued their precipitous cost declines. In the second half of 2018 alone, the levelized cost for solar fell by 14% and the wind benchmark by 6%. In many parts of the world it’s now cheaper to build new clean energy than it is to keep dirty energy running.

3. Allianz, the world’s biggest insurance company by assets, said it would cease insuring coal-fired power plants and coal mines, and Maersk, the world’s largest maritime shipping company, said it would begin ditching fossil fuels, and will eliminate all carbon emissions by the year 2050.

4. Repsol became the first major fossil fuels producer to say it would no longer be seeking new growth for oil and gas.

5. California unveiled the most ambitious climate target of all time, with a commitment to making the world’s fifth biggest economy carbon neutral by 2045.

6. China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, revised its renewable energy target upwards, committing to 35% clean energy by 2030.

7. Chile said it had managed to quadruple its clean energy sources since 2013, resulting in a 75% drop in the average cost of electricity.

8. The United States set a new record for coal plant closures in 2018, with 22 plants in 14 states totaling 15.4GW of dirty energy going dark.

9. 11 European nations either closed their coal fleets or announced they will close them by a specific date, including France by 2023, Italy and the UK by 2025, and Denmark and the Netherlands by 2030.

10. Some of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds, representing more than $3 trillion in assets, and Black Rock, the world’s biggest fund manager, with assets worth $5.1 trillion, said they would only invest in companies that factor climate risks into their strategies.

11. The Indian government by reduces the price of 390 cancer drugs up to 87%.





I've gathered together all of the Long-Range, Big-Picture Horoscopes I wrote for you, and bundled them in one place. Go here to read a compendium of your forecasts for 2019.





FREE YOUR BODY

Free your body. Don't ruminate and agonize about it. Do it simply and easily. LOVE YOUR BODY!

Be brave and forceful, gentle and graceful. Free your sublimely imperfect, riotously intelligent body. Allow it to be itself in all of its mysterious glory. Love your body exactly as it is.

Praise your body. Thank your body. Tell it you adore its uncanny majesty . . . you yearn to learn more of its secrets . . . you promise to treat it as your beloved ally.

Be in love with your body—no shame, no apology. Be in awe of your body's unfathomable power to endlessly carry out the millions of chemical reactions that keep you alive and thriving.

How can you not be overwhelmed with reverence for your hungry, curious, resourceful, unpredictable body?

Study your body's magic. Exult in the blessings it bestows on you. Celebrate and beautify its fierce animal elegance.





HOMEWORK

Homework: Talk about the time a breakdown mutated into a breakthrough; or a spiritual emergency evolved into a spiritual emergence; or a scary trial led to a sacred trail.





YOUR TITLES?

Please let me know if you are deserving of any of the following titles. (I will alert the proper accreditation committee.)
• Empathy Master with Extraordinary Compassion
• Perfect Embodiment of Feisty Wisdom and Cute Boldness
• Eternal Reservoir of Smart Eros
• World’s Most Practical Idealist with Flexible Strategies
• Humankind’s Greatest Genius of Intimacy
• Jaunty Healer with Encyclopedic Knowledge of the Soul's Ways
• Greatest Lyrical Therapist Who Humanizes Machines and Machine Consciousness
• Hero or Heroine from the Triumphant Future
• Power Incarnate with Endless Creativity to Foster Social Justice
• Greatest Humble Person Who Ever Lived
• Ecstatic Saint Who Expresses Absurd Amounts of Magnanimity and Generosity
• Most Humorous Leader Who Makes Everyone Laugh for Righteous and Healing Reasons
• World’s Greatest Struggler and Happiest Sufferer
• Tricky Joy-Summoner
• Lyrical Perceiver Who Sees Impossible But True Sights
• Master of Conversing with Stones, Wind, and ”Inanimate” “Objects”
• Lode-Star Inspiratrix of the Quest to Preserve Medicinal Nonsense
• Blithe, Breezy Power Incarnate
• Trickster Feminist Spell-Caster of Total Life Enjoyment





DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FEARFUL FANTASIES AND ACCURATE INTUITIONS

For more of my views on the difference between fearful fantasies and accurate intuitions, GO HERE.





WE COME FROM DUST

We come from dust. To dust we will return. That's why I don't dust my shelves. It could be someone I know. MORE.





DADDY WITCH

For many years, while plying my trades as a writer and musician, I also pursued a third calling as Daddy Witch -- which involved me helping to care for my daughter Zoe and her best friend Max.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

For more about the good news stories below, plus links to the articles that provide full evidence, GO HERE.


1. Global suicide rates have dropped by 38% since 1994, saving four million lives, four times the number killed in combat during the same time.

2. According to the UNDP, 271 million people in India moved out of poverty since 2015, and the country’s poverty rate has been cut nearly in half.

3. India also continued the largest sanitation building spree of all time. More than 80 million toilets are estimated to have been built since 2014.

4. The International Energy Agency said that in the last year, 120 million people gained access to electricity. That means that for the first time since electrical service was started (1882), less than a billion of the world’s population are left in darkness.

5. A new report showed that the global fertility rate (average number of children a woman gives birth to) has halved since 1950. Half the world’s countries are now below replacement levels.

6. Bangladesh revealed that it had reduced its child mortality rate by 78% since 1990, the largest reduction by any country in the world.

7. Remember how the global media worked itself into a frenzy over Cape Town’s water shortages and Day Zero in 2017? Strangely, nobody reported in 2018 how Cape Town successfully averted the crisis.

8. Respiratory disease death rates in China have fallen by 70% since 1990, thanks to rising incomes, cleaner cooking fuels, and better healthcare.

9. The share of black men in poverty in the United States fell from 41% in 1960 to 18% today, and their share in the middle class rose from 38% to 57% in the same time.

10. A new global youth survey showed that young people in all countries are more optimistic than adults. Nine in 10 teenagers in Kenya, Mexico, China, Nigeria, and India reported feeling positive about their future.





WHAT'S MY RELATIONSHIP WITH INTUITION?

The quirky and elegant Conduit magazine did a ten-page interview with me. Here's a brief excerpt:

CONDUIT: Can you talk about your relationship with intuition?

ROB BREZSNY: One reliable source of intuition is formulating good questions and having an intention behind the questions: "What is it that I need to learn today?", "What is it that I need to learn today?", "What is it that I need to learn to live my life better?", "What is it that I need next to write my book?"

My sense is that intuition often reveals what you need to do next, although not necessarily the big picture. And if we're content with not pressuring intuition to always give us a mountaintop perspective, but rather just to answer for us, "What happens next? What do I need to do next?", I think that's a better relationship with intuition.

Four more things I'll mention about intuition: Working with dreams is fraught with the possibility of descending into chaos, but with practice and the development of skills, it can become a crucial source of intuition. I really value my ability to do one of the primary Jungian practices, which is shadow work -- dealing with those aspects of me that are unripe and dumb. Dreams have been crucial in helping me unlock the magic of dealing with my shadow and transforming my shadow.

Another good practice for intuition is to ask the question, "What does my death say?" On one's deathbed, what does one want to look back at and say, "That was important. That was important. That was important. No, that wasn't so important." So one's death can be a tonic informant that helps intuition really focus and come into maximum usefulness.

The other thing is that intuition is aided immeasurably by moving, by walking. I don't know if that's true for everybody. Walks and nature are important for me being able to tune into intuition that turns out to be useful and enduring. So often I'll take a notebook with me, or a recorder with me, to capture those intuitions that come to me while I'm walking.

There's one other thing. The practice of intuition takes place best when you have gone as far as you can with your intellect. In other words, I can't skip the stage of the process of research, of thinking hard, of using my logic, of being reasonable. That's crucial for generating intuition that's accurate and useful.

And once I've done the research, once I've tried to think my way to being as objective as possible -- and that involves using the scientific method -- then I hand it over to intuition and say, "Well, what more can you tell me, given that I've come this far with all this analysis? What can you add to it?"





WHAT DO I MEAN BY "FREE WILL" ASTROLOGY?

Here's more of the interview that Conduit magazine did with me.

CONDUIT: Can you say what you mean by "Free Will Astrology"? It sounds like an oxymoron.

ROB BREZSNY: My approach to astrology is quite different from a lot of mainstream astrologers. I'm not alone in that. There are a few colleagues who share what I might call an allergy to how traditional astrology is practiced. I already had that allergy when I was young, when I first began writing the column many years ago.

Back then, I didn't like astrology columns, and I didn't like a lot of the ways astrology was practiced. Then as now, astrology in the hands of many practitioners tends to make people afraid of the future, fills them with ideas about there being some sort of fixed destiny that they're being pulled toward and that they're helpless to resist. That kind of thinking was and still is repulsive to me.

I didn't like astrology columns, because they were watered-down versions of the complex art of astrology, which was practiced, after all, by seminal psychologist Carl Jung.

So when I first got the opportunity to write an astrology column -- I was dirt poor and didn't have a job -- I decided if somebody's going to do it, it might as well be me, someone who's trained in poetry, loves language, and respects the free will of the people who might be my audience.

The bedrock of my practice has always been the idea that the planets may impel, but they don't compel. A study of the configurations of planets shows us the archetypal forces that are coalescing, dissolving, and becoming active in our lives. That can instruct us on how to use our free will to best activate the best versions of those archetypal forces as they coalesce and dissolve.

So for me, "free will astrology" conveys the notion that we have far more power than we might imagine over the way that we express the bigger forces that are at work in our lives.

My aspiration is not to condemn my readers to a particular fate that they can't avoid, but rather to show them the options that are available: the higher level, the mid-level, and the low-level ways in which they might express the archetypal forces, and to nudge them in the direction of finding where the highest-level expression of those forces might be.





HOW I GOT STARTED IN THE BEAUTY AND TRUTH BUSINESS

For more of my description about how I got started writing my column "Free Will Astrology," GO HERE.





SUFFERING COMPETITION?

A stranger who had read my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia came up to me at a party and sneered, "You haven't suffered enough to have earned the right to be an optimist. It's easy to have a rosy outlook, like you have, when your life has been so easy and peachy."

I didn't respond, because it's my policy not to take trolls seriously. But in case anyone out there is wondering whether I've experienced sufficient pain to have earned credibility as an optimist: the answer is yes, I have.

I'll be glad to provide a résumé of my suffering to the Credentials Committee, upon request.

And by the way, how are you doing with your suffering?





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

For more about the good news stories below, plus links to the articles that provide full evidence, GO HERE.

1. New Zealand became the second country in the world (after the Philippines) to pass legislation granting victims of domestic violence 10 days paid leave.

2. Scotland became the first nation in the world to guarantee free sanitary products to all students, and India’s finance ministry announced it would scrap the 12% GST on all sanitary products.

3. Canada became the second country in the world to legalize marijuana. A major crack in the grass ceiling, and a wonderful moment for fans of evidence-based decision making everywhere.

4. In a major milestone for human rights in the Middle East, a Lebanese court issued a new judgment holding that homosexuality is not a crime.

5. Trinidad and Tobago’s high court ruled that the Caribbean nation’s colonial-era law banning gay sex was unconstitutional.

6. Tunisia became the first Arab nation to pass a law giving women and men equal inheritance, overturning an old provision of Sharia Islamic law.

7. Pakistan’s parliament passed a landmark law guaranteeing basic rights for transgender citizens and outlawing all forms of discrimination by employers.

8. Scotland became the first country in the world to include teaching of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex rights into its state school curriculum.

9. Nepal became the 54th country in the world, and the first country in South Asia, to pass a law banning corporal punishment for children.

10. Quietly and unannounced, humanity crossed a truly amazing threshold in 2018. For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty.





GENTLY UPROARIOUS REMINDER

I'll remind you who you are: You're an immortal freedom fighter who longs to liberate all sentient creatures from their suffering. You're a fun-loving messiah who wants to help your fellow messiahs claim the ecstatic awareness that is their birthright.

Remember: you're a vortex of fluidic light that has temporarily taken on the form of a human; you agreed to experience amnesia about your true origins.

That's why you're such an indomitable creator and crucial collaborator in our 14-billion-year campaign to bring heaven all the way down to earth.

I'm not speaking metaphorically. You are a mutant deity in disguise—not a Buddha or a Christ exactly, but conjured from the same fire. You have been around since the beginning of time and will be here after the end.

Every day, you're getting better at playing the preposterously amusing master game we all dreamed up together before the Big Bang bloomed.





BARBARA KINGSOLVER SAYS . . .

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

~Barbara Kingsolver

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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

~Barbara Kingsolver

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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.

~Barbara Kingsolver

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It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

~Barbara Kingsolver

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If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

~Barbara Kingsolver

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Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

~Barbara Kingsolver

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There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.

~Barbara Kingsolver





Check out my Instagram page.





THREE SPIRITUAL TASKS

Here are three spiritual tasks I'm working on:

1. to develop the capacity to thrive in the midst of raging contradictions;

2. to be discerning as I protect myself from people's flaws while at the same time being generous as I celebrate their beauty;

3. to refrain from dividing the world into two groups, those who help and agree with me and those who don't.





Imagine you hear these words: "I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you . . . There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love . . . I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me."

(written by Elizabeth Gilbert)





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

For more about the good news stories below, plus links to the articles that provide full evidence, go here.

1. After five successful, annual rounds of large-scale, school-based deworming across Kenya, worm-related diseases have fallen from 33.4% in 2012 to 3% today.

2. Russians are drinking and smoking less than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union, with tobacco use down by 20% since 2009, and alcohol consumption down by 20% since 2012.

3. Tanzania revealed that in the last ten years, it has reduced the malaria death rate by 50% in adults and 53% in children.

4. The WHO certified Paraguay as having eliminated malaria, the first country in the Americas to be granted this status since Cuba in 1973.

5. Costa Rica’s Supreme Court ruled that the country’s same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional, and gave the government 18 months to change it.

6. New research revealed that in the last two decades, female genital mutilation has fallen from 57.7% to 14.1% in north Africa, from 73.6% to 25.4% in west Africa, and from 71.4% to 8% in east Africa.

7. India’s highest court struck down a century-old prohibition on homosexual sex, calling the Victorian-era law “irrational, indefensible, and manifestly arbitrary.”

8. Morocco passed a landmark law that criminalizes violence against women, and imposes harsh penalties on perpetrators.

9. Germany released new figures showing that more than 300,000 refugees have now found jobs, and the share of MPs with migrant backgrounds has risen from 3% to 9% in the last two elections.





DEAR READERS: I'm wildly grateful for all the support you provided in response to my request for help in the last two weeks! It was exciting to feel you express your love for my work in such a practical way. May the blessings you delivered to me be returned to you threefold!

Of course, I'm still open to further assistance! If you'd care to donate, visit my Virtual Tip Jar at Paypal. (Use the "Friends and Family" option.)





Time for LOVE!!

"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

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

—Sark

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"Love is the only game where two can play and both win."

—Erma Freesman.

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

—Izumi Shikibu

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"Love is a great beautifier."

—Louisa May Alcott

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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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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


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"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





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

For more about the good news stories below, plus links to the articles that provide full evidence, go here: https://tinyurl.com/ya8kb4rh

1. India registered a 22% decline in maternal deaths since 2013. That means on average, 30 more new mothers are now being saved every day compared to five years ago.

2. Ghana became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to eliminate trachoma. In 2000, it threatened 2.8 million people (15% of the population) with blindness.

3. The WHO revealed that teenage drinking has declined across Europe, the continent with the highest rates of drinking in the world. The country with the largest decline? Britain.

4. Since 2010, global HIV/AIDS infection rates have fallen by 16% in adults and by 35% for children. Most countries are now on track to eliminate infections by 2030.

5. In 2018, New York and Virginia became the first two US states to enact laws requiring mental health education in schools.

6. Malaysia became the first country in the Western Pacific to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis.

7. South Africa, home to the world’s largest population of people living with HIV, shocked health officials by revealing a 44% decline in new infections since 2012.

8. 25 million doses of a new cholera vaccine were administered globally, and preparations began for the largest vaccination drive in history.

9. France revealed a sharp fall in daily smokers, with one million fewer lighting up in the past year, and cigarette use among Americans dropped to its lowest level since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started collecting data in 1965.

10. Rwanda became the first low-income country to provide universal eye care to all of its citizens, by training 3,000 nurses in over 500 health clinics.





YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE ANYTHING YOU DON'T WANT TO BE

You don't have to be anything you don't want to be. You don't have to live up to anyone's expectations.

There's no need to strive for a kind of perfection that's not very interesting to you.

You don't have to believe in ideas that make you sad or tormented.

You don't have to feel emotions that others try to manipulate you into feeling.





EACH OF US IS A BLEND

Each one of us is a blend of life and death. In the most literal sense, our bodies always contain old cells that are dying and new cells that are emerging as replacements.

From a more metaphorical perspective, our familiar ways of seeing and thinking and feeling are constantly atrophying, even as fresh modes emerge. Both losing and winning are woven into every day; sinking down and rising up; shrinking and expanding.

In any given phase of our lives, one or the other polarity is often more pronounced. But sometimes they are evenly balanced; the Seasons of Rot and of Regeneration happen at the same time.

Where are you at in the cycle right now?





PHOTO OP

Photo of me in the desert surrounded by Love





ENRICHING OUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Many of us don't always know what we feel. We may have a vivid sense that we feel something, but we're not sure what it is. That's why musicians, writers, actors, and other creative people play such a crucial role in our emotional lives. Their work can help us articulate the enigmas fermenting within us.

But here's the problem: A majority of the artists who are easiest for us to find aren't exceptionally smart or original; they specialize in expressing hackneyed feelings.

Meanwhile, many of the very best creators "remain in relative obscurity because of their resistance to formula efforts," writes journalist Alan Cabal. "Mediocrities latch onto whatever hits and repeat it endlessly in pursuit of cash or celebrity or both." If we look to the latter for illumination, we're cheated.

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Proposed experiments:

Get tough with the lazy or wounded part of you that is drawn to the mediocrities.

Compile a roster of virtuosos who have developed a high level of proficiency in extracting esthetically exciting meaning from the fascinating chaos around us.

Expose yourself exclusively to their work, devotedly avoiding the mediocrities' stuff, for a given period, say 30 days. Describe how this transforms you.





SPECIFIC GOALS WORK BEST

"Having very broad and abstract goals may maintain and exacerbate depression. Goals that are not specific are more ambiguous and, therefore, harder to visualize.

"If goals are hard to visualize it may result in reduced expectation of realizing them which in turn results in lower motivation to try and achieve them."

- Researchers at the institute of Health, Psychology, and Society

Read more.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

For more about the good news stories below, plus links to the articles that provide full evidence, go here: https://tinyurl.com/ya8kb4rh

1. Spain said it would create a new marine wildlife reserve for the migrations of whales and dolphins in the Mediterranean and will prohibit all future fossil fuels exploration in the area.

2. Following "visionary" steps by Belize, UNESCO removed the Belize Barrier Reef, the second largest in the world, from its list of endangered World Heritage Sites.

3. Colombia officially expanded the Serranía de Chiribiquete (also known as The Cosmic Village of the Jaguars) to 4.3 million hectares, making it the largest protected tropical rainforest national park in the world.

4. Mexico said its population of wild jaguars, the largest feline in the Americas, grew by 20% in the past eight years, and 14 Latin American countries signed an agreement to implement a regional conservation program for the big cats through 2030.

5. In the forests of central Africa, the population of mountain gorillas, one of the world’s most endangered species, was reported to have increased by 25% since 2010, to over 1,000 individuals.

6. Canada signed another conservation deal with its First Nations people, creating the largest protected boreal forest (an area twice the size of Belgium) on the planet.

7. Chile passed a new law protecting the waters along its coastline, creating nine marine reserves and increasing the area of ocean under state protection from 4.3% to 42.4%.

8. The Seychelles created a new 130,000 square kilometer marine reserve in the Indian Ocean, protecting their waters from illegal fishing for generations to come.

9. New Caledonia agreed to place 28,000 square kilometers of its ocean waters under protection, including some of the world’s most pristine coral reefs.





WANT TO GET YOUR ASTROLOGICAL CHART READ?

If you want your personal chart done, I recommend a colleague whose approach to reading astrology charts closely matches my own. She's my wife, RO LOUGHRAN. Her website is here.

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation. She is skilled at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your connection with your own inner wisdom.

In addition to over 30 years of astrological experience, Ro has been a licensed psychotherapist for 17 years. She integrates psychological insight with astrology's cosmological perspective.

Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.

Check out Ro's website.





YOUR VOWS?

I invite you to speak these vows out loud:

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

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.

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

I promise to push hard to get better and smarter, grow my devotion to the truth, fuel my commitment to beauty, refine my emotions, hone my dreams, wrestle with my shadow, purge my ignorance, and soften my heart — even as I always accept myself for exactly who I am, with all of my so-called foibles and wobbles.





THE BEGINNING

Years ago, on a bleak January morning, I unexpectedly found my fortune. While waiting in the food stamp office for my monthly allotment, I grabbed the local newspaper and turned to its help wanted section. "Horoscope columnist needed, $15 a week," it said.

My first reaction was "feh." As a proud practitioner of the art of astrology, I'd always disliked horoscope columns for how they pandered to the superstitious instincts in people.

But on second thought, I mused, why not try to revolutionize the genre, So I dashed off 12 poetic horoscopes and submitted them. Success! So began my surprising career.

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Ah! But here's an important caveat: I wrote my Free Will Astrology column for 17 years before it earned me enough money to rise above the poverty line. I'm glad I stuck with it!

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"Follow your bliss and the money will come." I believed that quixotic slogan from the moment I first heard it many years ago. And I continued to cling to it even during those long lean eons when I was following my bliss like a madman and cooking my twice-a-day rice and beans on a hot plate in my one-room shack.

Now, at last, having graduated to more sumptuous digs and a more varied diet, I've acquired the wisdom to know that my beloved slogan is incomplete. It should read, "Follow your bliss and the money will come--although it might take 10 or 15 or, hell, even 20 years."





HAVING NO PROBLEMS MAY BE DANGEROUS

It may actually be dangerous to have nothing to worry about, no problems to solve, no friction to heat you up. That state can stimulate an unconscious yearning for any old dumb trouble that might stir up some excitement.

"We should feel excited about the problems we confront and our ability to deal with them," said Robert A. Wilson. "Solving problems is one of the highest and most sensual of all our brain functions."





A MILLION FORMS OF MEDITATION? A BILLION?

Many spiritual teachers say you're most likely to succeed at meditation if you sit quietly in a sanctuary. They believe you need to retreat from the world in order to develop compassionate objectivity about life.

The 18th-century Zen Buddhist teacher Hakuin Ekaku had a different view. "Meditation in the midst of activity is a billion times superior to meditation in stillness" was his motto.





“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”

— Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory