Finding Your Holy Joy

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE with my MID-YEAR AUDIO PREVIEW of YOUR DESTINY for the REST of 2020.

My Expanded Audio Horoscopes explore themes that I suspect will be important for you during the next six months.

What areas of your life are likely to receive assistance and inspiration?

Where are you likely to find most success?

How can you best cooperate with the cosmic rhythms?

What questions should you be asking so as to create the best possible future for yourself?

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, GO HERE. Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link "Long Term Forecast for Second Half of 2020."

You can also hear a short-term forecast for the week ahead by clicking on "This week (June 23, 2020)."

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The in-depth, long-range Expanded Audio horoscopes cost $6 apiece if you access them on the Web. (Discounts are available for multiple purchases.)

They're also available for $1.99 per minute if you want them over the phone. For phone access, call: 1-877-873-4888.





Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a bunch of other stuff. It arrives every Tuesday morning.

Read past issues of the newsletter.

Sign up here for your free subscription.





TRANSACTIONS WITH BEAUTY

Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.

Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.

Love says, There are.

— Rumi, from “Secret Places,” Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart — as rendered by Coleman Barks





THE RIGHT BLEND OF PRACTICAL LOVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE ANGER

How do we summon the right blend of practical love and constructive anger?

How do we refrain from hating the cruel haters even as we fight fiercely to diminish the hatred and danger they unleash?

How do we cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we neutralize the bigoted, autocratic poisons that are on the loose?

How can we be both exuberant lovers of life and wrathful insurrectionaries?

How can we stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality"?

In the face of the peril, how do we generate beauty and truth and justice and love? How do we keep our imaginations wild and free?

Can our struggle also be a form of play?





ANGER AS DEEP COMPASSION

David Whyte says: “ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt.

“Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care; the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.

“What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding.

“What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.”

- From David Whyte’s book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words





UPRISING AGAINST RACISM

If you'd like to read my commentary on the current uprisings against racism, I have posted frequently on the subject on my Facebook page. Go here: https://www.facebook.com/rob.brezsny

Sample posts:

Here

and

Here

and

Here





BLEND OF LIFE AND DEATH

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?





BEHIND EVERYTHING

Behind everything
I see, something I don't
Know how to look for.

- Forrest Gander





WOMEN LEADERS DURING THE PANDEMIC

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times: Here are the results of comparing death rates from the coronavirus for 21 countries around the world, 13 led by men and eight by women.

The male-led countries suffered an average of 214 coronavirus-related deaths per million inhabitants. Those led by women lost only one-fifth as many, 36 per million.

If the United States had the coronavirus death rate of the average female-led country, 102,000 American lives would have been saved out of the 114,000 lost.

Read the entire analysis





BELIEVE THERE IS GOOD IN THE WORLD

A reader who is upset about my ongoing outrage at racism scolded me, saying, "You should believe there is good in the world."

Here's my response: For more than a decade, I have been a tireless advocate for the importance of believing there is good in the world. But if we believers in the world's wonder and glory fail to identify and acknowledge the world's suffering, our advocacy is empty and feeble; our credibility is zero.

To celebrate the good -- indeed, to create and cultivate the good -- we must deal regularly with the darkness.





ESCAPE SONG
by me

There is no steady path,
no unwavering way forward,
no clear strong signal from the future
guiding us home.

Or is there?
And we just haven't learned yet
how to request new passwords
and decipher the trick questions?

Even the polestar is obscured by pretty clouds,
surplus eclipses,
flocks of night birds,
aurora borealis,
beloved and torturous memories
firing in our neurons.

Or maybe not:
if we could figure out
how to fool
the foolers.

What's the difference
between a maze and a labyrinth?
We can't tell.
We wander in the mess
of overlapping convolutions.
Forgetting to sing
the Escape Song.


—by me.





SATURN AND PLUTO CONJUNCT IN CAPRICORN

Saturn and Pluto have been conjunct in Capricorn from January to late March this year, and will be again from July to December. Their conjunction in Capricorn doesn't happen often. The last time was in 1518—when Spain's King Charles I opened the trans-Atlantic slave trade on a massive scale.

He authorized Spain to ship enslaved people directly from Africa to the Americas, marking a new phase in the transatlantic slave trade in which the numbers of enslaved people brought directly to the Americas rose dramatically.

Clearly, the Pluto-Saturn conjunction in Capricorn in 2020 is an opportunity to reverse and remedy one of civilization's greatest calamities.

More info here.





PEOPLE WHO ARE VOID OF EMPATHY

If you’re feeling impatient or weary about your conversations and arguments with people who are void of empathy, you have life's permission to let them go.





HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

—anthropologist Margaret mead

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Nonviolent protests informed by civil disobedience are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts. Those that engage a threshold of 3.5 percent of the population are usually successful.

—political scientist Erica Chenoweth
More info


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There are moments in life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.

—journalist Oriana Fallaci





WE HAVE THE POWER

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be changed by humans.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

We live in a racist society. Its power seems inescapable. But like the divine right of kings, it's not. We will dismantle it. Any human power can be changed by humans.

—Us

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We really can overthrow racism.





MORE PRONOIA RESOURCES:

Millions of COVID Cases and Deaths Averted Thanks to Lockdowns — One of Humanity’s Greatest Achievements

Minneapolis has banned the use of chokeholds by police.

Dallas adopted a "duty to intervene" rule that requires officers to stop other cops who are engaging in inappropriate use of force.

New Jersey’s attorney general said the state will update its use-of-force guidelines for the first time in two decades.

In Maryland, a bipartisan work group of state lawmakers announced a police reform work group.

Los Angeles City Council introduced motion to reduce LAPD’s $1.8 billion operating budget.

MBTA in Boston agreed to stop using public buses to transport police officers to protests.

Police brutality captured on cameras led to near-immediate suspensions and firings of officers in several cities.

Street in front of the White House is renamed "Black Lives Matter Plaza.”

Statues honoring Confederate soldiers and politicians, most built during the heinous "Jim Crow" era, have been removed in Birmingham and Montgomery and Mobile, Ala.; Louisville, Ky.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Nashville, TN, and Alexandria, Va. Activists in many other cities are petitioning for their statues to be removed. More info.





I hereby renounce and dissolve any denunciations that I may have inadvertently or carelessly hurled toward this Beautiful World when I was under the sway of bad ideas, delusional attitudes, or unloving influences.






PRONOIA FOR EVERYONE

By aligning my passion with the protests, I'm expressing rage and grief about decades of police brutality toward African Americans—as well as White America's centuries-long harm against black lives and black culture.

What also animates me is my love for African Americans and my longing for them to be free to live their lives in peace, prosperity, and grace. I am inspired by joyous gratitude and celebration for their gifts and the blessings they offer.