Your Joy Flows

Somewhere in the world there is a treasure that has no value to anyone but you;

and a shimmering secret that is meaningless to everyone except you;

and a frontier that harbors a marvelous revelation only you know how to understand and make use of.





WHAT WILL YOUR STORY BE IN 2021?

I've gathered together all of the Long-Range, Big-Picture Horoscopes I wrote for you in the past few weeks, and bundled them in one place. Go here to read a compendium of your forecasts for 2021.

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In addition to these, I've created EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES that go even further in Exploring Your Long-Term Destiny in 2021.

Who do you want to become in the coming months? 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?

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.

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.





FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

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.





MY STORY

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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But I wrote my 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 when I was young.

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 broccoli on a hot plate in my one-room shack.

Having graduated to more decent digs and a more varied diet, I've acquired the wisdom to know that my beloved slogan was incomplete. It should read, "Follow your bliss and the money will come—although it might take 17 years."

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PS: I also followed my bliss as a musician in the music business for 20 years. And though my band was managed by rock impresario Bill Graham until he died, and produced by the same producer who worked with the Clash and Blue Oyster Cult, and signed to a contract with a major recording company, I never made much money. So alas, following my bliss in that case didn't work to earn me a living wage.

PS: I've continued to make music since I left the rock and roll business, and plan to keep at it.

Thankfully all my music lives on:

Listen to and download my music for free

Listen to and download more of my music for free





GOOD, HOLY DESIRES

Some religious and spiritual traditions preach the value of banishing or renouncing your desires. I do not subscribe to those traditions, so I will never urge you to banish or renounce your desires. I prefer to encourage you to cultivate excellent desires. Here are a few I highly recommend:

* a desire for interesting riddles and fascinating challenges that excite both your mind and your heart;

* a desire for comrades who enjoy your specific idiosyncrasies and eccentricities;

* a desire to attract ongoing encounters with nonstandard beauty so as to always ensure a part of you remains untamed;

* a desire to help create a world in which everyone gets the food, housing, and health care they need;

* a desire for good surprises and unpredictable fun;

* a desire for group collaborations that enhance the intelligence of everyone in the group;

* a desire to keep outgrowing what worked for you in the past and a desire to ceaselessly explore and invent new approaches to being yourself;

* a desire to be playful and creative with your libidinous energy;

* a desire to help cultivate the health and beauty of the natural world;

* a desire for revelations and experiences that steer you away from thinking and acting like the machines you interact with so much;

* a desire to keep reinventing and reinvigorating your relationships with those you love;

* a desire to keep refining and expanding your ability to learn from non-human intelligences;

* a desire to keep refreshing your quest for freedom and deepening your capacity to be free;

* a desire to move your body in ways that delight your soul;

* a desire to help eliminate bigotry, misogyny, plutocracy, racism, and militarism.

Any others you'd like to add?





TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF LOVE

The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our "natural" condition.

—author and activist bell hooks, who writes about the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender

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The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.

—author and activist bell hooks





WEAR GOOD MASKS, PRACTICE SOCIAL-DISTANCING, MINIMIZE YOUR TIME INSIDE PLACES WHERE THERE ARE PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW

Get vaccinated, please!

Some people still downplay the danger of the coronavirus. "It doesn't kill a high percentage of the people it infects," they say. "Most people who get it don't have bad symptoms," they say.

But here are the facts the deniers ignore:

1. As more people contract COVID-19, the virus has more and more chances to mutate into versions that are more contagious, possibly resistant to vaccines, and more dangerous. That is exactly what has been happening.

2. In the US, COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer.

3. Many people who "recover" from COVID-19 continue to have debilitating symptoms for months, and may suffer permanent damage to their hearts, lungs, and brains.

4. If hospitals are overwhelmed, which they have been for a couple of months, then people with COVID-19 are in danger of not getting sufficient care. In addition, people with other immediate health problems, like heart attacks, injuries, drug overdoses, and premature labor are at risk for not getting thw care they need.

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PS: Early on, some misinformed people claimed that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu.

In fact, the deadliest flu season of the last decade, 2017-2018, had a death toll of 61,000 people. Usually it's less than that. In 2015-2016, for instance, 23,000 people died of the flu in the US.

In the 10 months since coronavirus started killing Americans, more than 441,000 have died. Projections are that by March 15, 536,000 will have died from the virus. That's 700% more than the number flu has killed in its

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So how do we fight the virus's mutations? The best way is to suppress replication—and that means stopping infections. The more replications that occur, the greater the number of mutations.

Occasionally, a slight error in replicating the genetic code creates a mutant variant that spreads more successfully and, when that happens, evolution takes over. Stopping transmission blocks the opportunity for viral mutation; it’s the only thing that does.

More.

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Why Aren’t We Wearing Better Masks? Cloth masks are better than nothing, but they were supposed to be a stopgap measure.

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Double-masking is even better.

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Harvard Medical School's Dr. Abraar Karan says the US can end the Covid-19 pandemic in four weeks if everyone wears N95 masks. He also says cloth masks may be as low as 26% effective, compared to the N95’s 95% effective.

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From The New York Times: The United States has recorded 26 million coronavirus cases.

Experts say that as staggering as that figure is, it significantly understates the true number of people in the country who have been infected and the scope of the nation’s failure to contain the spread of the virus.

The official tally works out to about one in every 13 people in the country, or about 7.6 percent of the population.

“Twenty-six million cases is an incredible scale of tragedy,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who called the coronavirus pandemic one of the worst public health crises in history.

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One of the covid-deniers go-to "experts" is a guy named Zach Bush. I plucked this statement of his from his Facebook page: "Viruses do not take down healthy humans." I'm assuming he's actually referring to wealthy humans who can afford all the best health enhancements. As far as I know, he doesn't address the fact that People of Color are being taken down by the COVID-19 in disproportionate numbers.

From US News & World Report: "Coronavirus is disproportionately striking minority populations -- particularly urban blacks and Navajo Indians living on their reservation. Experts say social and economic factors that predate the COVID-19 crisis may help explain why.

"We found that there were large disparities in the proportion of people at risk of COVID-19 from minority and low-income populations," said study co-author Julia Raifman.

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Who Not To Trust: A List of 10 Covid-19 Charlatans and “Medical” Snake-Oil Salesmen





INACCESSIBLE TO THE POOR?

If it's inaccessible to the poor, it's neither radical nor revolutionary.

—Jonathan Herrera





ENCOURAGE OTHERS

A student asked Soen Nakagawa during a meditation retreat, "I am very discouraged. What should I do?"
Soen replied, "Encourage others."

—*Essential Zen* by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Tensho David Schneider





COMPASSIONATE RAGE

I want a heaven for my compassionate rage, a paradise to house my greed for justice.

I want a choir singing blasphemous hymns for every surge of affectionate lust,

a wrecked and brilliant hallelujah for my hilariously lunatic confusion,

a generous explosion of divine gratitude for all my wise mistakes, bumbling terrors, and manic hopes.

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The above was written by me in response to the following passage from Arthur Rimbaud:

"I should have a hell for my fury, a hell for my conceit—a hell for each fondle and embrace; a decent orchestra of hells."





WORKING WITH THE UNKNOWN

To work with the unknown, some combination of respect, ruthlessness, courage, and cuddling is necessary.

—Arnold Mindell





PICK YOUR BATTLES

Pick your battles.

Pick fewer battles than that.

Put some battles back.

That's still too many battles.





HOPE AND OPTIMISM

There's still a lot of bad stuff to contend with: racism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, climate catastrophe. rightwing terrorism, the assault on factualness, and much more. And Biden, as wonderful as his actions have been so far, won't be our perfect progressive president.

But now, when we once again have some power to make things right, we need the robust and crafty versions of hope and optimism more than ever. In that spirit, here's some inspiration from Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Naomi Klein.

"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future," says Noam Chomsky. "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."

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"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic," Howard Zinn wrote. "It gives us the energy to act.

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."

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In the late 1990s, environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill spent two years living in a redwood tree she named "Luna." Her goal was to save it from being cut down by a logging company. She succeeded both literally and mythically. Luna was spared from death, as was a surrounding three-acre swath of trees. Hill became an inspiring symbol of artful, compassionate protest.

Later she told Benjamin Tong in the DVD *The Taoist and the Activist*: "So often activism is based on what we are against, what we don't like, what we don't want. And yet we manifest what we focus on. And so we are manifesting yet ever more of what we don't want, what we don't like, what we want to change. So for me, activism is about a spiritual practice as a way of life.

"And I realized I didn't climb the tree because I was angry at the corporations and the government; I climbed the tree because when I fell in love with the redwoods, I fell in love with the world. So it is my feeling of 'connection' that drives me, instead of my anger and feelings of being disconnected."


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Activist and author Naomi Klein tells a story about the time she traveled to Australia at the request of Aboriginal elders. They wanted her to know about their struggle to prevent white people from dumping radioactive wastes on their land.

Her hosts brought her to their beloved wilderness, where they camped under the stars. They showed her "secret sources of fresh water, plants used for bush medicines, hidden eucalyptus-lined rivers where the kangaroos come to drink."

After three days, Klein grew restless. When were they going to get down to business? "Before you can fight," she was told, "you have to know what you are fighting for."





These Progressives Helped Keep Hope Alive in 2020—and Prepare Us for 2021.





RELATIONSHIP AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

Relationship is a crucible for spiritual work.

The practical expression of kindness and compassion and ethical behavior is an essential spiritual practice.

A crucial element of spiritual practice is the empathetic intelligence we bring to the sometimes chaotic and messy details of being human beings in our daily lives.

Taking responsibility for and working to transform our own darkness is a prerequisite for all spiritual work.

Loving and caring for animals and plants and the Earth is a centerpiece of our spiritual practice.

Play and fun and humor are not diversions from "serious" spiritual work, but are at the center of it.