We Have to Create

We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction.

—Andrea Gibson





FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

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FREE YOUR BODY

Free your body. Don't ruminate and agonize about it. Do it simply and easily. LOVE YOUR BODY!

Be brave and forceful, gentle and graceful. Free your sublimely imperfect, riotously intelligent body. Allow it to be itself in all of its mysterious glory. Love your body exactly as it is.

Praise your body. Thank your body. Tell it you adore its uncanny majesty . . . you yearn to learn more of its secrets ... you promise to treat it as your beloved ally.

Be in love with your body—no shame, no apology. Be in awe of your body's unfathomable power to endlessly carry out the millions of chemical reactions that keep you alive and thriving.

How can you not be overwhelmed with reverence for your hungry, curious, resourceful, unpredictable body?

Study your body's magic. Exult in the blessings it bestows on you. Celebrate and beautify its fierce animal elegance.





SIMPLE GOALS

What are the qualities of a person who embodies sublime feminine intelligence, as I personally aspire to do?

* They are progressive: committed to social and economic justice; lovers of equality; in service to all those people who are under-served; in service to the health of the natural world; in service to diminishing the power of militarism, plutocracy, bigotry, misogyny, and racism

* They have a Bodhisattva's orientation: that none of us is really free unless we all are free; that the supreme goal, above all others, is to reduce the suffering in the world

* They have a holistic understanding of the interconnectedness of all things

* They listen well to others who act respectfully

* They are willing to expand and adjust their understandings of the world if they encounter new information that renders their previous beliefs as being too narrow or obsolete

* They are inclusive: willing to consider the needs of as many people as possible, not just those of their own tribe

* They are emotionally intelligent; they understand that it is as crucial to develop a mature relationship with our feeling nature as it is to be intellectually smart

* They are not fundamentalists and authoritarians who believe that only their truths are true; are rather willing to consider additional points of view as having value; are willing to consider the perspective that "everyone has a piece of the truth, but no one has the entire truth"

* They are storytellers who understand, as the poet Muriel Rukeyser said, that "the world is made of stories, not atoms"

* They understand that to accomplish practical changes that serve the greatest good requires hard work in the trenches of political struggle, often having to deal with people who have different beliefs

* They are nuanced, not simplistic; respect dialog, not pronouncements from on high; seek consensus, not doctrinaire obeisance; understand that perfectionism is the enemy of the good; radiate kindness and avoid polarization

* Love is their primary motivation





WHAT LIFE STORY WILL YOU CREATE FOR YOURSELF
IN THE COMING MONTHS?

Get inspired by listening to my 3-part EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES about Your Long-Term Destiny in the coming months

These forecasts will be available for just one more week.

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.





FULFILL YOUR SOUL'S CODE

The real alchemists (not the materialists trying to turn lead into gold) said the magic formula for enlightenment was "Seek out the lower reaches of the earth, perfect them, and you will find the hidden stone"—the treasured philosopher's stone.

My translation: Engage in a relationship with the ignorant and unripe parts of yourself, refine them and love them, and you will awaken your hidden divinity; you will fulfill your soul's code.





35 PRACTICAL STEPS MEN CAN TAKE
TO SUPPORT FEMINISM
by Pamela Clark

1. Do 50% (or more) of housework.

2. Do 50% (or more) of emotional support work in your intimate relationships and friendships.

3. Consume cultural products produced by women.

4. Give women space.

5. … but insert yourself into spaces where you can use your maleness to interrupt sexism.

6. When a woman tells you something is sexist, believe her.

7. Educate yourself about sexual consent and make sure there is clear, unambiguous communication of consent in all your sexual relationships.

8. Be responsible for contraception.

10. Have progressive name politics.

11. If you have children, be an equal parent.

12. Pay attention to and challenge informal instances of gender role enforcement.

13. Be mindful of implicit and explicit gendered power differentials in your intimate/domestic relationships with women…whether a partner or family members or roommates.

14. Make sure that honesty and respect guide your romantic and sexual relationships with women.

15. Don’t be an online bystander in the face of sexism.

16. Be responsible with money in domestic/romantic relationships.

17. Be responsible for your own health.

18. Don’t ogle or make comments about women. (i.e., Keep your tongue in your mouth and comments to yourself.)

19. Pay attention to the sex of experts and key figures presenting information to you in the media.

20. Ensure that some of your heroes and role models are women.

21. Praise the virtues and accomplishments of women in your life to others.

22. Have integrity with your male friends. (i.e., Don’t be a “bro.”)

23. Don’t treat your spouse like a “nag.” If she is “nagging,” you are probably lagging.

24. Know that acknowledging your own sexist opinions and stereotypes you hold is not enough. Do something about them.

25. Befriend women.

26. Find female mentors/leaders. (i.e., Be subordinate to women.)

27. When in a romantic relationship, be responsible for events and special dates associated with your side of the family.

28. Don’t police women’s appearance.

29. Offer to accompany female friends if they have to walk home alone at night…or in a public space where they may be likely to feel unsafe.

30. Inject feminism into your daily conversations with other men.

31. If you have a tendency to behave inappropriately toward women when you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, do not consume drugs or alcohol.

32. Be aware of the physical and emotional space you occupy, and don’t take up more space than you need.

33. Walk the walk about income inequality.

34. Get in the habit of treating your maleness as an unearned privilege that you have to actively work to cede rather than femaleness being an unearned disadvantage that women have to work to overcome.

35. Self-identify as a feminist.


Here's Pamela Clark's original article on the 35 Steps.

Pamela Clark's follow up to her original article.





GOOD NEWS !

There was much good news last week! Like these stories:

* $1.9 Trillion Virus Relief Plan Will Vastly Expand the U.S. Safety Net

* The new bill cements one of the largest injections of federal aid since the Great Depression. The plan provides more direct payments, extends federal jobless benefits and gives billions of dollars to distribute vaccines, among other relief.

* Obamacare is about to get a lot more affordable.

* Polls show the new law has widespread support among Americans.

* The bill makes student debt forgiveness tax-free.

Plus:

* Marcia Fudge Becomes First Black Female Housing Secretary

* Michael Regan becomes the first Black man to run the EPA. He intends to act aggressively in carrying out President Biden’s climate change agenda.

* Biden orders 100 million more vaccine shots from Johnson & Johnson

* Biden said the United States will have enough vaccine to administer to all American adults by the end of May.

* Merrick Garland Confirmed as Attorney General

* Passage of the Biden plan reflects the triumph of precisely the view that only active and competent government can get us out of the mess we’re in now. The willingness of Democrats to speed through a program of this size reflects the final shrugging off of Reagan-era constraints that made even liberal politicians gun-shy about government activism.





Tell jokes to clowns.
Cook gourmet meals for chefs.
Show babies how to crawl.
Sing to the birds.

Play a joke on your fear.
Honor your anger.
Capitalize on your guilt.
Kill your own death.





CAN YOUR RELATIONSHIP HEAL THE WORLD?

Andrew Harvey writes: The crisis we are facing is a crisis in which the sacred powers of love in the human soul are being diverted by distraction, by greed, by ignorance, by the pursuit of power, so that they never irrigate the world and transform it.

There are seven requirements necessary for a vision of evolutionary love to emerge into the world.

1. Both beings need to be plunged individually into a deep and passionate devotion of the Beloved, by whatever name they know the Beloved, because without both beings centering their life in God, the relationship will never be able to escape the private circle.

2. Both beings must develop a mastery of solitude.

3. There is an equality of power, and that equality is born out of a profound experience of the sacredness and dignity of the other person’s soul.

4. If you are going to have a beloved-beloved relationship, you have to center your whole being and work and evolution in God. You must also bring the sacred practice of prayer and meditation into the very core of your life, so that the whole relationship can be enfolded in a mutually shared sacred enterprise.

5. Both lovers completely abandon any Hollywood sentimentality about what relationships actually are. Each person is the safe-guarder of the other’s shadow—not the judge of the other’s shadow, not the denier of the other’s shadow, but someone who recognizes where the other has been wounded, and safeguards and protects them with unconditional compassion without allowing themselves to be mauled or manipulated by the other.

6. If you are going to enter into the evolutionary process, you have to accept that it never ends, never stops unfolding.

7. You must make the commitment for your relationship not to be just a cultivation of an oasis of private pleasure. You must engage consciously in this relationship to serve the planet, to recognize that it is a relationship not only grounded in God, not only infused by sacred practice, but it is from the very beginning dedicated to making both people more powerful, more reflective, more passionately engaged with the only serious truth of our time: The world is dying, and we need a major revolution of the heart to empower everyone to do the work of reconstruction and re-creation that is desperately needed.

All the words in this section were written by Andrew Harvey

Read the entire essay by Andrew Harvey.

It's an excerpt from Andrew Harvey's book Evolutionary Love Relationships: Passion, Authenticity, and Activism

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The kind of passion, the kind of emotion and connection, that Westerners look for from a romantic relationship. village people look for from spirit.

—Burkinabe author and teacher Sobonfu Somé

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An atheist reader writes: What about atheists? I think they can and do often love each other as much as people who believe in and/or have a relationship with the Divine.

My reply: I think Andrew's point could apply to atheists who are interested in dedicating their relationship to the service of a higher good, whether that's fighting to undo White Supremacy, reversing ecocide, or making great art that inspires people.

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PS: I love it when atheists find something inspirational or useful in my expressions! And / but everything I express is rooted in my relationship with the Divine Intelligence. If I offer anything of worth, it's because the Goddess has created it.





EFFECTIVE ACTIVISM NEEDS POSITIVE VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.

We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

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The rise and fall of images of the future precede or accompany the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, the culture does not long survive.

—Fred Polak

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Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing.

—David L. Cooperrider

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You gotta remember, and I’m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter the hammerlock on the human imagination. There are trillions of dollars out there demotivating people from imagining that a better tomorrow is possible.

Utopian impulses and utopian horizons have been completely disfigured and everybody now is fluent in dystopia. My young people’s vocabulary . . . their fluency is in dystopic futures. When young people think about the future, they don’t think about a better tomorrow, they think about horrors and end of the worlds and things or worse.

Do you really think the lack of utopic imagination doesn’t play into demotivating people from imagining a transformation in the society?"

—J. Díaz

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What some call my 'blasphemous cheerfulness" or my "cockeyed optimism" just depends on my basic agnosticism. We don't know the outcome of the current worldwide transformation, so it seems sick and decadent (in the Nietzschean sense) when fashionable opinion harps on all the gloomy alternatives and resolutely ignores the utopian possibilities that seem equally likely (and, on the basis of past evolution, perhaps a little more likely).

—Robert Anton Wilson

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I invite you to see the image I chose to illustrate this group of thoughts:

It's from the cover of Jerome Rothenberg's book Technicians of the Sacred, which offers a range of poetry from the indigenous people of Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

I chose it to illustrate these ideas because I suspect, more and more, that indigenous people's strategies for cultivating and engaging with the sacred should be a key factor in our efforts to reclaim the word from its profane decimators.

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Some activists don't want to register evidence that contradicts their foregone conclusions about humans' cancerous presence on the planet. It's dangerous to do so, they feel, because it threatens to make us complacent and fall under the delusion that our work as freedom fighters is done.

Cultivating hope and celebrating progress are foolish indulgences that would sap our motivation to keep agitating for even greater justice. Focusing on the good stuff tempts us to ignore the continuing bad stuff.

I understand that position. It's the stance of many devoted activists who have a ferocious devotion to the extinction of suffering. I respect their work and am rooting them on. But I'd also like to suggest that there are additional ways to wage the war on stupidity, violence, and tyranny—as we build a new world.

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When I call attention to the value of hope, and when I report good news about the world that invigorates our hope, I of course don't mean to imply that paradise is at hand. My recognition of under-reported progress and miracles is not equivalent to an endorsement of evil-doers. And I trust that after reading these words you won't go numb to the suffering of others and stop agitating on their behalf.

Just the opposite: I hope that you will be energized. I hope you'll be motivated to give yourself with confidence to the specific role you can play in manifesting the ultimate goal: to create a heaven on earth in which everyone alive is a healthy, free, self-actualized, spiritually enlightened millionaire dedicated to living sustainably.