The Bright Future Is Here

A PREVIEW OF YOUR DESTINY IN 2020

Want to get a head start on your future? This week my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES offer you a sneak-peek at some major themes you'll be working and playing with in 2020.

You can access these inspirational clues here. Register and/or log in through this page , and then click on the link "This week (Dec. 24, 2019)."

Start dreaming and scheming about who you're going to be in the new year! Enlist my help as you energize your quest to become your best self!

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The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $6 per sign. (You can get discounts for multiple purchases.)

You can also listen over the phone by calling 1-877-873-4888.
The cost is $1.99 per minute.

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Beginning with next week's EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, I will devote three consecutive weeks to an in-depth discussion of your long-range outlook for the coming year.

Part One of my BIG-PICTURE FORECASTS FOR 2020 will be available beginning Tuesday, December 31.

Part Two will be available on Tuesday, January 7

Part Three will be available on Tuesday, January 14.





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.

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SURROUND YOURSELF

Surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you and who have no agenda for your reform.

—Jess Lair and Kirsten Lauzon





INVITATIONS

Change yourself in the way you want everyone else to change
Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be jerks
Brainwash yourself before someone nasty beats you to it
Write a love letter to your evil twin during a lunar eclipse
Fool the tricky red beasts guarding the Wheels of Time
Locate the master codex and add erudite graffiti to it
Dream up wilder, wetter, more interesting problems
Change your name every day for a thousand days
Exaggerate your flaws till they turn into virtues
Kill the apocalypse and annihilate Armageddon
Brag about what you can't do and don't have
Get a vanity license plate that reads KZMYAZ
Bow down to the greatest mystery you know
Make fun of people who make fun of people
See how far you can spit a mouthful of beer
Scare yourself with how beautiful you are
Stage a slow-motion water balloon fight
Pretend your wounds are exotic tattoos
Sing anarchist lullabies to lesbian trees
Commit a crime that breaks no laws
Sip the tears of someone you love
Build a plush orphanage in Minsk
Feel sorry for a devious lawyer
Rebel against your horoscope
Give yourself another chance
Write your autohagiography
Play games with no rules
Relax and go deeper
Dream like stones
Mock your fears
Drink the sun





In 2020, I wish you captivating adventures that help weave together diverse threads of your experience, inspiring you to feel at home in the world and fall in love with life again and again.





OPTIMISM FOSTERS PROGRESS

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual.

Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.

—Helen Keller





HISTORY IS WILDER THAN OUR IMAGINATIONS

The grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.

—Rebecca Solnit





OUR GREAT RESPONSIBILITIES

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
—Jonas Salk


Another one of our great responsibilities is to be ancestors who experimented with the compassionate truth our entire lives.
—me





CONSULTING OUR ANCESTORS

At a family planning conference in Beijing, a researcher from Ghana presented testimony about tribal issues that he had in part gleaned through interviews with dead ancestors. He said that spirit mediums had acted as his "translators."

When he was met with skepticism from colleagues, he was defensive. "If I only heard from the living," he explained, "I wouldn't get a very good balance."

His perspective would be smart for all of us to consider as we contemplate how we can prevent the ongoing ecocide that's ravaging our planet.

It's crucial to work hard on practical and political shifts that will alleviate the stress we're putting on our shared environment. But it's also important to be in intimate touch with the influences of past humans who cared for the earth better than we are doing—and who might motivate us to be more tender and thoughtful as we contemplate the legacies we will leave for our descendants.





OPTIMISM IS A SOUND STRATEGY

"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope."

—Noam Chomsky





CRAFTY OPTIMISM

Howard Zinn wrote: An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.





RE-DREAMING CHRIST

Some Christians might be shocked to learn that Jesus Christ is one of the Main High Magicians in the Beauty and Truth Lab's pantheon of deities and avatars.

They may believe that people like us -- Goddess-worshiping tantric Sufi Qabalist pagans who hang around with Zen trickster witches and espouse a socialist libertarian political philosophy -- couldn't possibly have an intimate and vivid relationship with the cosmic hero they claim to own. They act as if they have commandeered the trademark of one of the smartest wild men in history.

Christ was a champion of women's rights, an antidote to the established and corrupt political order, and a radical spiritual activist who worked outside religious institutions.

He was a passionate advocate for the poor and underprivileged. He owned nothing and had no use for the idea of "private property." He was uncompromisingly opposed to violence and war. Besides that, he was a master of love and he devoted his life to serving the Divine Intelligence. He even went so far as to say, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you, and give away all your possessions."

I want to be like Jesus Christ when I grow up!

(But it's quite OK with us if you don't want to be like him. The good thing about adoring Christ's pronoiac glory but not being a Christian is that we don't have any investment in wanting you to do as we do. We want you to do as you do!)

Is there any hijacked hero you'd like to liberate? Any spoiled treasure you hope to redeem? Any detoured savior you want to get back on track?




BECOMING OURSELVES

The whole point of Jesus's life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.

—psychologist Carl Jung





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





I INVITE YOU

In 2020, I invite you to have an improbable quest playing at the edge of your imagination: a heroic task that provokes deep thoughts and noble passions even if it incites smoldering torment . . . an extravagant dream that's a bit farfetched but not entirely insane . . . a goal that stretches your possibilities and opens your mind . . . a wild hope whose pursuit makes you smarter and stronger even if you never fully accomplish it.





SO MUCH TO LOVE

There was so much to love, I could not love it all; I could not love it enough.

—Louise Biogan





THE HEROIC TRICK OF DISPERSING FEAR

What is the Alchemical Secret of Secrets? The Great Work? The fulfillment of the Quest for the Grail? The possession of the Pearl of Great Price? It may be the heroic trick of dispersing fear: to be clear to experience life without the rumbling subtext of anxiety.

The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that’s at the core of EVERYONE’s struggle.

In my personal story, the cure is most possible as I approach having a relaxed capacity to viscerally perceive the presence of the Universal Consciousness at work in every action everywhere.

Not there yet, but making some progress!

And you? I'm genuinely curious about how you attend to this holy task. Let me know at Truthrooster@gmail.com





HOWLING TENDERNESS

What use is this howling tenderness?
—eighth-century Tamil poet Andal

Howling tenderness is useful because it has the power to shatter mysterious barriers that have been preventing us from exploring the frontiers of sacred intimacy.
—me





DEAR BEAUTY AND TRUTH LAB: The chemo treatments burned out all the math skills in my brain, which were already pretty meager. On the other hand, they awakened my ability to feel perfectly at ease while in the midst of paradoxical situations that everyone else finds maddening and uncomfortable.

The chemo also made me ridiculously tolerant of people's contradictions, sometimes even their hypocrisies, and freed me to enjoy life as an entertaining movie with lots of interesting plot twists rather than as a pitched battle between everything I like and everything I don't like. I guess I could say that my cancer helped turn me into a pronoiac!

- The Chaos Artist Formerly Known as Risa Kline





ADVICE TO MYSELF by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic—decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don't sort the paper clips
from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don't read it,
don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

- "Advice to Myself" by Louise Erdrich