I Love You

"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





FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

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Read past issues of the newsletter.

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ELATIONSHIP LOVE SPELLS FOR BEAUTY & TRUTH LAB ALLIES

The Beauty and Truth Lab's rapturists have formulated a batch of personal ads for you to borrow. If you're a Crafty Optimist or Mystical Activist or Ceremonial Teaser who aspires to put the elation back in relationship, check them out here:





HAVE YOU EVER BEEN LOVED?

Have you ever been loved? I bet you have been loved so much and so deeply that you have become nonchalant about the enormity of the grace it confers.

So let me remind you: To be loved is a privilege and prize equivalent to being born. If you're smart, you pause regularly to bask in the astonishing knowledge that there are many people out there who care for you and want you to thrive and hold you in their thoughts with fondness.

Animals, too: You have been the recipient of their boundless affection. The spirits of allies who've left this world continue to send their tender regards, as well.

Do you "believe" in angels and other divine beings? Whether or not you do, I can assure you that there are hordes of them beaming their uncanny consecrations your way. You are awash in torrents of love.

As tremendous a gift it is to get love, giving love is an equal boon. Many scientific studies demonstrate that whenever you bestow blessings on other people, you bless yourself. Expressing practical compassion not only strengthens your immune system and bolsters your health, but also promotes self-esteem, enhances longevity, and stimulates tranquility and even euphoria.

As the scientists say, we humans are hardwired to benefit from altruism.

What's your position on making love? Do you regard it as one of the nicer fringe benefits of being alive? Or are you more inclined to see it as a central proof of the primal magnanimity of the universe? I'm more aligned with the latter view.

Imagine yourself in the fluidic blaze of that intimate spectacle right now. Savor the fantasy of entwining bodies and hearts and minds with an appealing partner who has the power to enchant you.

What better way do you know of to dwell in sacred space while immersed in your body's delight? To commune with the Divine Wow while having fun? To tap into your own deeper knowing while at the same time gazing into the mysterious light of a fellow creature?




VOWS?

I invite you to speak the following 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.




ORIGIN STORY

I was not yet writing my astrology column when I looked like this — but I was studying astrology at Goddard College under the tutelage of Peter Kubaska, who later became the President of the Theosophical Society.

Peter's mentors were Alice Bailey, Dane Rudhyar, Isabel Hickey, and Helena Blavatsky, so those four also had a big influence on me in the early days.

Here's the story of how I got started writing the astrology column.







INDIGENOUS GOOD NEWS!

I'm always hungry for good news pertaining to Native Americans; always elated when I find some; always buoyed by any signs that their culture and power are ascending.

Here are eight joys:

Nez Perce Tribe reclaims 148 acres of ancestral land in Eastern Oregon.

Deb Haaland, member of the Laguna Pueblo, will soon be the first-ever Native American to run a Cabinet-level agency, as she takes on the job of Secretary of the Interior.

PBS News Hour interview with the US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a member of Oklahoma's Muscogee Creek Nation and the first Native American to serve in that role:

The Blackfeet Nation Won a Decades-Long Fight to Protect lands and waters sacred to the Blackfeet and critical for wildlife habitat.

New tiny home village in Tacoma to serve Puyallup Tribal members experiencing homelessness:

Joe Biden: Tribal sovereignty will be a cornerstone

Colleen Echohawk, Pawnee and Athabascan, is the current director of the Chief Seattle Club (a Native-led non-profit serving unhoused urban Natives in Seattle). She is running for Seattle's mayor

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes embrace return of National Bison Range amid national focus on tribal management.





Dear Progressive Radio Station KPFA:

I love you. You are an oasis, a reality check that keeps me sane, one of the media outlets that actually reflects some of my values. You're also the only radio station that has over the years given me airtime to spout my particular brand of the truth. Thank you for that.

But there is a sorrowful complaint I harbor against you: When you cover the news, you're just too damn angry all the time.

Don't misunderstand me. I respect the power of anger to rouse clarity. In the face of the demented pathology loose in our culture, compassionate people have a duty to wield wrath constructively.

We of the pinko persuasion *should* bitch and resist, dissent and howl, be appalled and righteously critical. We *should* name the liars and expose the lies.

But that just ain't enough. For you, KPFA, to be so droningly, chronically pissed off in your coverage of the global predicament is deathly boring.

But more importantly: To dwell exclusively on fear and loathing threatens to paralyze the hearts of us listeners; it wounds our ability to be uproarious, imaginative, infectiously effective revolutionaries.

We can't afford to be motivated primarily by outrage. We've got to cultivate ingenious joy and celebratory fervor as we create and define the beautiful culture we want to inhabit.

Dear KPFA, it wouldn't take much to fix the gross imbalance. I'm not asking you to even come halfway over to my view. Just a nod in the direction of PRONOIA would make a huge difference.

What if your hard-working news program "Flashpoints" could devote, say, 80 percent of its material to protesting the ugliness and ignorance, and 20 percent to conjuring visions of beauty, truth, justice, poetry, love, goodness, and soulfulness? I would take even 10%.

I'm not talking about New Age BS or the sentimental hallucinations of Pollyannas. I mean deep thinkers who have spiritual and psychological perspectives to blend with their political savvy. I mean poets and visionaries and prophets who leaven their critiques of the empire with the language of the soul.

Which leads me to my next point. If we're sincere in our devotion to the business of creating a better world, then we cannot afford to imitate (and therefore reproduce) the one-dimensional, literalist, fanatical, party-line, scapegoat-creating modes of thought that the patriarchy has specialized in.

What that means is:

1) We have to be in ongoing conversation with our own personal shadows; in other words, we have to apply the same revolutionary zeal to dissolving our own internal fixations as we do to toppling the ignorance we see in the world around us.

2) We have to be humble about how complicated the world is, and therefore we have to be less than arrogantly certain in claiming we always know what's best in every situation; we have to be subtle, multi-leveled, and willing to acknowledge the ambiguity inherent in real life.

3) We have to understand that political struggle is half-baked unless it's anchored in soul work. What's soul work?

a. A ruthless, ongoing self-examination that continually regenerates our shadows.

b. The cultivation of less literal modes of knowing the world.

c. A desire to translate our high ideals into the marrow of our everyday interactions.

d. A determination to keep from becoming predictable rhetoricians forever hammering home our pet theories even as the world is recreating itself right in front of our blind eyes.

4) Our political work proceeds with far more efficacy and grace if it's mixed with at least some amount of poetry and myth and magic and ritual and soul.

Since you, KPFA, are one of the best practitioners of the political work I believe in, I would love to see you integrate these principles.

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PS: I'm assuming that readers know I am not singling out KPFA. Much of the progressive news media has this same failing, imo.

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PS: Dear KPFA: Thank you for hosting Caroline Casey's "Visionary Activist" show for the last 24 years. It is an oasis of soulful beauty. However, it constitutes just 0.6% of your weekly programming. If we could get Casey on for 15 more hours per week, we'd have a chance at getting up to the bare minimum 10% of soulful beauty programming.

Info about Caroline's show is HERE and HERE

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The only famous journalist who has featured poets on nightly TV newscasts (that I know of) is my old friend Jeffrey Brown on the PBS News Hour. Here is his interview with the US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, a member of Oklahoma's Muscogee Creek Nation and the first Native American to serve in that role:





KINDNESS

Kindness — by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.





TREAT YOURSELF WITH KINDNESS
Meditation by Jennifer Weinberg

With your eyes closed, place your hands over your heart. Take a few deep breaths and relax any tension you are holding in your body.

As you exhale, feel that stress dispersing and leaving your body. Feel the gentle touch and warmth of your hands resting on your chest. Feel a warm, comforting, kind light building in your hands and spreading to your heart.

Give this healing to yourself. Allow this gentle, healing energy to flow from you and to you, spreading to your whole body and bringing calm and healing where it is needed.

Ask yourself what you need to hear and feel right now to give kindness to yourself. Say the following:

"May I be kind to myself."

"May I forgive myself."

"May I be strong."

"May I be compassionate to myself."

"May I learn from my experiences."

"May I accept myself as I am in this moment."

"May I be patient."

"May I give myself the kindness and compassion that I need."

—Jennifer Weinberg





GOOD VACCINE NEWS

The vaccine news continues to be better than many people realize.

All five vaccines with public results have eliminated Covid-19 deaths. They have also drastically reduced hospitalizations.

Don’t confuse uncertainty with bad news. The available vaccine evidence is nearly as positive as it could conceivably be. And our overly negative interpretation of it is causing real problems.

Read more.





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.





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."