The Is a Perfect Moment

Are you willing to push hard to get better, become smarter, grow your devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your emotional intelligence, hone your dreams, negotiate with your shadow, cure your ignorance, shed your pettiness, heighten your drive to look for the best in people, and soften your heart . . .

even as you always accept yourself for exactly who you are with all of your so-called imperfections, never demeaning the present by comparing it to an idealized past or future?





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THIS IS A PERFECT MOMENT
(Hear this as a song)


This is a perfect moment.

It's a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because you and I are waking up from our sleepwalking, thumb-sucking, dumb-clucking collusion with the masters of delusion and destruction.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Their wars and tortures,
their crimes against nature,
extinctions of species
their engineered diseases.

Their spying and lying
in the name of the father,
sterilizing seeds and
trademarking water.

Molestations of God,
celebrations of shame,
mangling our dreams and
defiling our names.

Their ruthless commercials
and blood-sucking hustles,
their endless rehearsals
for the end of the world.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Their painful blessings are cracking open more and more gashes in the sour and shrunken mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." And through the fractures, ripe eternity is flooding in; news of our souls' true home is pouring in; our allies from the other side of the veil are swarming in, inspiring us to become smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

We are waking up.

As heaven and earth come together, as the dreamtime and daytime merge, we register the jolting and exhilarating fact that we are in charge -- you and I are in charge -- of imagining and discovering and animating a brash new world. Not in some distant time or faraway place, but right here and right now.

As we stand on this brink, as we dance on this verge, we cannot let the ruling fools of the dying world consummate their curses. We've got to rise up and fight their deranged logic; defy, resist, and prevent their tragic magic; uncork our sacred rage and supercharge it.

But overthrowing the psychopathic leaders is not enough. Protesting the well-dressed planet-rapers is not enough. We cannot afford to be consumed with our anger; cannot be obsessed and possessed by their danger.

Our mysterious animal bodies crave delight and fertility. Our ancient imaginations demand ever-fresh tastes of infinity.

In the new culture we are hatching, we need lusty compassion and euphoric duty, lyrical logic and insurrectionary beauty. In the new alliance we are mobilizing, we need radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and altruistic banks.

In the new covenant that we are midwifing,
We will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom.
We will embrace the cause of zoom and bloom.
We will outfox the banality of evil and hate;
we will summon the chutzpah to praise and create.
No matter how upside-down it all may appear,
we will have no fear
because we know this big secret:

All of creation is conspiring to shower us with
catalytic blessings. Life is crazily in love with us
--brazenly and innocently in love with us.
Our destinies always bring us exactly what we need
to liberate us from our suffering.

The winds and the tides are on our side, forever and ever, amen. The birds and snakes are scheming to make us their sacred soul mates.

The sun and the moon and the stars remember our real names, and our ancestors pray for us while we're dreaming.

We have guardian angels and thousands of teachers
provocateurs with designs to unleash us
helpers and saviors we can't even imagine
brothers and sisters who want us to blossom

Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up.

The roads they pave us
the places they save us
the tomatoes they grow us
the rivers they flow us

Their mysterious stories
and morning glories
Their loaves and fishes
granting our wishes

The songs they sing us
The gifts they bring us
the secrets they show us
above and below us

Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up.

(Hear this as a song)





GIVING AWAY STUFF FOR FREE

An entrepreneur approached me with a proposal: "Your work should be getting out to a bigger audience. People are starving for the message you're putting out. That's why you need me. With my marketing machine, your name could become as recognizable as Deepak Chopra's. Let's build an entertainment conglomerate and hawk a hundred Rob Brezsny-style products."

"Nah," I said. "People come to me seeking sanctuary from hype. They know I won't smack them upside the head with relentless sales pitches."

Meanwhile, I regularly get inquiries from marketers who want to pay me money for putting advertisements on my website or advertorials on my social media sites. I always say no. I have turned down tens of thousands of dollars in ad revenue.

I'm going on 24 years of maintaining this attitude. I launched my website in 1995, and have never once had a paid ad on it. I've offered over 1,200 of my weekly Free Will Astrology columns for free on that site. And I've been sending out this free newsletter, which includes the horoscopes and much more, since the year 2000.

I freely give away two hours' worth of my music on Soundcloud. I don't make any money from my Youtube videos. I freely give away large sections of my books "The Televisionary Oracle" and "Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia."

I've never bought an ad on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, although I'm considering doing so when my new books come out.

Have I been naïve? Idiotic? Overly idealistic? Too pure? Self-sabotaging? Woefully unrealistic?

I may need an advisor to help me think more robustly about all these matters.

Here are links to my various social media, where you can get more free stuff.

If you would like to contribute to me and my well-being, please visit my Virtual Tip Jar at Paypal. (Use the "Friends and Family" option.)





MY DAUGHTER ZOE'S POETRY SERIES

In May 2017, my daughter Zoe Brezsny graduated from Columbia University in New York with an MFA in Poetry. Since then she has been writing poetry (read it here) and curating poetry readings at Hauser & Wirth art gallery.

The seventh and final reading in her series happens Tuesday, May 21. It features Kay Gabriel and Shiv Kotecha. More info.

The event starts at 7 pm. Hauser & Wirth is located at 548 West 22nd Street in Manhattan.

See a family photo. From left to right: Zoe’s mother and my wife, Ro Loughran; me; Zoe Brezsny; Zoe’s boyfriend Mario Miron:





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.





TASTE YOUR NATIVE IMMORTAL AIR

Old-fashioned language delivering futuristic ideas, from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I am to invite people drenched in Time to recover themselves and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air.

I am to fire with what skill I can the artillery of sympathy and emotion.

I am to indicate constantly, though all unworthy, the Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, the Forgotten Good, the Unknown Cause in which we sprawl and sin.

I am to try the magic of sincerity, that luxury permitted only to kings and poets.

I am to celebrate the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time.

I am to console the brave sufferers under evils whose end they cannot see, by appeals to the great optimism, self-affirmed in all bosoms.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

Humans are leading the planet into the sixth mass extinction, with a million species in danger of disappearing forever. But there are practical actions we can take to call if off. Here are some:

Reverse the expansion of monoculture

Restore and protect coastal marine ecosystems

Protect fish for real

Put Indigenous people in charge of their own territory

Let wild areas remain roadless

Address economic inequality, lower consumption, expand access to education, and support sustainable technology

More details.





In a wheat field, a rose is a weed—even if that rose is voluptuous and vibrant. Translation: it's your sacred duty to identify the contexts in which you can thrive and then put yourself in those contexts.





Invitation: Go inward and contact the wisest source you know—call it your higher self, your holy guardian angel, Goddess or God, the genius of nature, or your strongest intelligence. Then pose this inquiry: What do I need to become aware of that I wouldn't even know to ask about?





CONGRATULATIONS if you've been having any of the following symptoms:

• spontaneous eruptions of gratitude

• a declining fascination with conflict

• seemingly irrational urges that lead to interesting discoveries

• yearnings to peer more deeply into the eyes of people you care about

• a mounting inability to tolerate boring influences that resist transformation

• an increasing knack for recognizing and receiving the love that's available to you





PEOPLE WHO HATE ASTROLOGY . . .

People who hate astrology assert that consulting a horoscope column or getting a reading from a professional astrologer is not a sound approach to making good decisions abut one's life.

The haters never follow up that assurance with a detailed revelation of what ARE valid ways to gather the data and insights and ideas so as to make good decisions about one's life.

Do they know about some Bureau of Acceptable Life Information that can help us determine what is and what is not worth consulting as we chart the course of our destiny?

I don't mean to be glib. I am honestly puzzled by the apparent certainty that there are unambiguous methods.

Would the astrology haters approve of the guidance and inspiration we have gleaned from our high school teachers? From our parents? From our friends? In my opinion, none of them are entirely reliable narrators; they are not to be trusted to deliver 100% accurate and wise counsel on how best to live our lives.

And how about the music of Florence and the Machine, and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and the movies of Akira Kurosawa? Is it a big mistake for us to eagerly take on influences from them, allowing their art to infiltrate our subconscious minds and subtly skew and shift our attitudes? Are we deluded?

Or how about the philosophy of the Upanishads or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or Susan Sontag? Or the psychological ideas of Carl Jung or Clarissa Pinkola Estes or Erik Erikson? Or the writing of Joan Didion or Pema Chodron or Kurt Vonnegut? Or the social science of Malcolm Gladwell? Or the economic theories of Paul Krugman? Are they all foolproof, unimpeachable sources of wise guidance that we can unconditionally rely on to steer our personal lives in a righteous direction?

Or should we be ruthlessly careful to draw our guidance and inspiration only from paragons of reason and science? Should our night tables be stacked with books by Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and mathematician Terence Tao? Should we read passages from their teachings every night in the expectation that they will shape us into paragons of reason and science? That they will unfailingly guide us to make good decisions about how to live?

I don't think so. It's fine if those tomes and others like it constitute part of our own personal Bureau of Acceptable Life Information. But we need to draw inspiration and education from a variety of other sources, as well—each of which, like Hawking and Darwin and Kasparov and Tao, is imperfect and incomplete.

It's perfectly reasonable to look to astrology as one of our sources, because astrology is a branch of psychology, as well as an art form—a mode of storytelling. It's designed to stimulate our imaginations as we ruminate on what it means to be a human being. It's an evocative mytho-poetic system that helps us identify and transform our subconscious patterns and have fun speculating about the big picture of our destinies.





My most recent book is
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. It's also available here. Here's an excerpt:


THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR FEARFUL FANTASIES AND YOUR ACCURATE INTUITIONS

Knowing the difference between your fearful fantasies and your authentic, accurate intuitions is one of the greatest spiritual powers you can possible have.

Let's explore what it means: discerning between the frightening, alienating pictures that sometimes pop into your imagination, as opposed the simple, warm, clear direction that is always available from the deepest source within you.

Read or hear the rest.





THIS WORLD IS ASTONISHING

When poet Wislawa Szymborska delivered her speech for winning the Nobel Prize, she said that "whatever else we might think of this world—it is astonishing." She added that for a poet, there really is no such thing as the "ordinary world," "ordinary life," and "the ordinary course of events."

.
In fact, "Nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world."





BEAUTY AND TRUTH LAB
(Listen to this as a song)

Welcome to the Beauty and Truth Lab.

We're coming to you live from your repressed memories of paradise, reminding you that you can have anything you need if you will just ask for it in an unselfish way.

Welcome to the end of your nightmares, beauty and truth fans!

The world is young, your soul is free, and a naked celebrity is dying to talk to you about your most intimate secrets right now.

Just kidding.

In fact, the world is young, your soul is free, and at any moment you will feel a flood of ecstatic compassion for salamanders, oak trees, clouds, toasters, convenience store clerks, and even the ocean itself.

I'm your host. My name is the Sacred Janitor at the Edge of Time, and I'm proud to announce that this is a perfect moment.

It's a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because you are on the verge of finally figuring out exactly what it is you really want more than anything else.

Bravo! Viva! Whoopee! Oooo Eureka! Hallelujah! Abracadabra!
Bravo! Viva! Whoopee! Oooo Eureka! Hallelujah! Abracadabra!

The Beauty and Truth Lab's experiments are brought to you by the pine trees whose seeds are so tightly compacted within their protective covering that only the intense heat of a forest fire can free them and allow them to sprout.

Listen to this as a song.

Listen and download (free) lots more of my music and spoken word.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:


More of what has been going right in the world:

Fresh evidence pointed to continuing recovery of the ozone layer

Colombia created the world's largest tropical rainforest national park

The Virginia legislature voted to expand Medicaid, as did voters in Idaho, Utah and Nebraska.

Floridians voted overwhelmingly (64 percent) to restore voting rights to felons once they have completed their sentences.

Voters in Utah, Missouri, Colorado and Michigan approved redistricting reforms. That means less gerrymandering and fairer elections.

The impunity of powerful men to harass and assault women continued to be challenged by the #MeToo movement

The EU voted for a total ban on bee-harming insecticides
In April, the EU agreed to ban a group of insecticides that have been linked to a dramatic reduction in bee numbers.

Pakistan pledged to plant ten billion trees.





BE ASTONISHED

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.





SAVING NATURE

How can we influence people to stop their desecration and extermination of nature? How can we motivate people to stop committing genocide against animal species? My suggestions:

1. Show people scientific data that shocks them into acknowledging how much harm human activity is inflicting.

2. Speak to people about the sin of bequeathing their descendants a damaged, impoverished planet.

3. Ask people to dissolve the unethical greed that leads them to consume so many of the earth's resources and produce too much waste.

4. Cultivate and express smart love for the interconnected web of life. Feel it deeply.

5. Celebrate the fact that there are other forms of consciousness and intelligence besides just the human kind. Cultivate loving relationships with them.

6. Embody the hypothesis that spending time in wild places enhances one's mental hygiene and physical health.

7. Value the feminine as much as the masculine.

8. Cultivate the art of empathy, and demonstrate how to make it flourish in everything you do.

9. Show what it means to think with your heart and feel with your head.

10. Stay in close touch with the Mysterium, the other real world that is the root of the material world.

11. Vow to bring the I-Thou dynamic to bear on all your relationships.

12. Be as curious about intimacy as you are about power.





I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE SOIL

Poet Gary Snyder wrote:
"I pledge allegiance to the soil
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
with joyful interpenetration for all."

Environmentalist Edward Abbey said, "My loyalties will not be bound by national borders . . . or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language or culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time."

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville suggested that ideally a person should be a "patriot to heaven."