Making Things Sacred

When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.

—Allen Ginsberg





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COMPLIMENTS

Sara Kuburic writes: Here are some compliments you can bestow that don't refer to physical characteristics:

"I constantly learn from you"

"The way you treat people is beautiful"

"Your character is strong"

"You are such a good listener. I always feel heard"

"I appreciate how authentically you show up"

"Your confidence is something I aspire to"

"You make me feel like I belong"

"Your resilience is inspiring"

"I love that you don't hesitate to apologize when you're wrong"

"I really admire your passion for self-exploration"

"I love how transparent you are"

"You bring out the best in me"

"You're dependable. I always feel safe around you"

"Your passion is contagious"

These are were written by Sara Kuburic, CCC





A THOUSAND YEARS FROM TODAY

A thousand years from today, everyone you know will be long dead and forgotten. There'll be nothing left of the life you love, no evidence that you ever walked this planet. That, at least, is what the fundamentalist materialists would have you believe.

But suppose the truth is very different? What if in fact every little thing you do subtly alters the course of world history? What if your day-to-day decisions will actually help determine how the human species navigates its way through the epic turning point we're living through?

And finally, what if you will be alive in a thousand years, reincarnated into a fresh body and in possession of the memories of the person you were back in this era?

These are my hypotheses. These are my prophecies. That's why I say: Live as if your soul is eternal.

—from my book The Televisionary Oracle





MARKS OF WILDNESS

Here are some marks of wildness:

a passion to find where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet;

a determination to serve your highest purpose as you give the world your finest gifts;

a commitment to doing what you love as you express your love for all those who have given so much to you.





YOUR TRUE HOME

I invite you to dream and muse about your true home; your sweet, energizing, love-strong home, the haven where you can freely be high and deep, robust and tender, flexible and rigorous; the oasis where you are the person you promised yourself you could be.

To stimulate and enhance your thoughtful feelings about your true home, experiment with the following activities.

• Feed your roots.

• Visualize the memories that empower you.

• Celebrate and honor the experiences that imbue you with confidence and self-possession.

• Keep reinventing and reinvigorating your vital traditions.

• Cherish and foster your reliable sources of energy and inspiration.

* Refine the magic that liberates you.

• Identify all the influences that nurture you, and treasure your relationship with them.

Can you handle one more set of tasks designed to enhance your serene authority and relaxed aplomb?

• Tend to your web of close allies.

• Take care of what takes care of you.

• Cultivate the arts of adoration and reverence and awe.





MY FUTURE BOOKS

After many years of work, I have finished writing my new novel as well as a book of experimental prose and poetry. Now I must decide whether to publish and promote these two beautiful things myself or else seek a publisher to do that work.

The advantage of the first option is that I maintain full ownership of my writing and don't have to deal with the sometimes sticky aspects of the book business.

The advantage of the second option is that the books would potentially reach more readers and be more likely to be reviewed.

My question for you is: Do you know a literary agent or publisher that you think would feel a connection with my writing? If so, who?

If you have any leads, send them to me at Truthrooster@gmail.com

Here's the image of the working cover for the novel





TENDER RIDDLES

1. What is the most important thing you have never done?

2. How could you play a joke on your fears?

3. Identify the people in your life who have made you real to yourself.

4. Name a good old thing you would have to give up in order to get a great new thing.

5. What's the one feeling you want to feel more than any other during the next three years?

6. What inspires you to love?





PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO YOURSELF

I invite you to say this, or something like this: "I pledge to wake myself up, never hold back, have nothing to lose, go all the way, kiss the stormy sky, be the hero of my own story, ask for everything I need and give everything I have, take myself to the river when it's time to go to the river, and take myself to the mountaintop when it's time to go to the mountaintop."





Your Five Best Memories

I invite you to write down brief descriptions of the five most pleasurable moments you've ever experienced in your life. Let your imagination dwell lovingly on these memories for, say, 20 minutes. And keep them close to the surface of your awareness in the next six hours.

If you ever catch yourself slipping into a negative train of thought, interrupt it immediately and compel yourself to fantasize about those Big Five Ecstatic Moments.





CUES AND CLUES FOR BETTER INTIMACY

• Purge yourself of an impossible longing for a person you can or should never be intimately connected with.

• Forgive and say goodbye to anyone whose influence on you isn’t healthy for you.

• Write a wild but kind letter that expresses feelings you haven’t yet found a way to reveal in person to an ally.

• Heal the effects that a past trauma or disappointment has had on your capacity to be ingeniously intimate.

• Decide what a “sacred desire” means to you. Then acquire a symbolic object that will arouse and foster sacred desire.

• Make a pact with a dear accomplice that the two of you will meditate on how you could help decipher and activate each other’s soul’s codes.

• While making love, ask a partner to sync up your breathing and join you in visualizing the same sublime image.





DEFINITION OF REAL MAGICK

Magick: training your imagination to work in behalf of your highest purposes rather than allowing it to be a reckless conjurer of fear and illusions that leak your psychic energy.

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In response to this definition of magick, one reader asked me, "Is this done with retraining of negative thoughts to positive thoughts?"

I replied to this reader: That's complicated! It's important to acknowledge negative thoughts when they come up and see if you can trace them back to their source; see if you can discern whether they're based on objective truth. Once you do that, you might have earned the power to substitute positive thoughts for them.

The reader responded: "That’s much easier said than done. I am flooded with negative thoughts that have a hint of truth to them, but at the same time I am too hard on myself. They are exaggerated. And I can see where the truth lies in them, but I can’t seem to reclaim my power over them. It’s like knowing the truth isn’t enough. I am at odds with myself."

I replied: "Well, the retraining takes practice and diligence and commitment. Can't happen overnight. Write out a vow that you'll work on it steadily for a year and a day.





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SPIRIT IS EVERYWHERE, THANK GODDESS!

Amanda Yates Garcia writes:

In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, ecological philosopher David Abram talks about how Western anthropologists misunderstood what indigenous oral cultures meant by “spirits.”

In the West, we have this idea that spirit is somehow separate from nature and the material world. Spirit shines in heaven or is tortured in hell, our spirit is something separate from our body.

But in indigenous/oral cultures, spirit is in everything, it is not, and can never be, disembodied.

Stones, mountains, trees and oceans have spirits.

And spirits are people, more-than-human people, and people have will and agency. People can speak and listen and are always in relationship.

This ocean speaks, its voice is the wave, the clicking of the sand and the singing of the whales.

It sees with a thousand eyes, hermit crabs and surfers and sharks. It welcomes, it casts out, it is sanguine and attacks.

We are not alone. We are surrounded by spirits that we are already in relation with, if we can get out of our own heads and show up enough to notice.

—Amanda Yates Garcia

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Here are my thoughts in response: I am amazed at how many progressive people are adamantly materialist — rigidly and belligerently opposed to spirituality— even in the face of the fact that relationship with spirit has been a key element in virtually all indigenous cultures.

I'm especially puzzled by the narrow materialism of some environmentalists, and their apparent inability to understand that indigenous peoples' love of and relationship with the earth is inherently spiritual.

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"There is a Thai saying: Because we were never colonized, we never lost our animism, our sense that everything is alive if we have manners to collaborate. Animism is the antidote to colonialism."

—Caroline Casey, Coyote Network News


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Animism is Normative Consciousnes‪s‬. Far from being an abstract "belief system," animism is the default way that human beings experience reality. More about this in a podcast by Josh Schrei.

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"Animism is a way of approaching life that emphasizes relationships. Animists see the world as full of persons, both human and other-than-human, and prioritize living in respectful ways with these others. Animism is largely about ethics or core values that get expressed through practices, rituals, and traditions."

MORE.

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"Indigenous and ancestral shamans know that we are all connected to the world of the animal powers, and that by recognizing and nurturing our relation with animal spirits, we find and follow the natural path of our energies.

"Yet many of us have lost this primal connection, or know it only as a superficial wannabe symbolic thing that we look up in books and medicine cards without feeding and living every day."

—Robert Moss

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More by Amanda Yates Garcia:

Yesterday, one of my “followers,” mentioned that they’d always wondered what we meant when we called in the spirits during a ceremony.

This past Full Moon for instance, we called in the Spirits of the Air, the Spirits of Spring, and the Spirits of the East - all of which are bound together in an interdependent web. They are subjectivities - beings with awareness and agency.

The Spirit of the Air moves, it thinks and speaks and watches and decides. The Crows are its eyes. The Bees are its hands. All winged creatures are Guardians of the Air; they are part of the air and not separate from it.

Because these Spirits are webs of interconnected subjectivities (just like we are – I am just as much the bacteria in my guts as I am Amanda Yates Garcia) they have agency. If we exploit them, we are harming more-than-human people.

I can imprison a bird, I can poison bees, I can spew toxins into the air, but I am doing that to a person, and that action has a cost FOR BOTH OF US.

In the colonialist West, the cost of “GETTING THINGS” is alienation and aloneness. Taking without reciprocity means a severing of relationship, but because we are all interconnected, it means that we sever ourselves from the very things that give us life.

And the worst part about it is that as we do this, as we sever all these threads of connection, we are no longer able to recognize the subjectivities around us — we can no longer see them or hear them for the people that they are. They become mute objects to us.

For every cord of relationship that we sever, we become more and more alone in the sea of trash that we create for ourselves.

Magic is important to me because it is the process by which we re-enchant the world. We shape-shift into spiders re-spinning the connections between things.

Reciprocity IS life. And I know for myself personally that I need to constantly be practicing this re-enchantment magic or I sink back into the self-serving delusion and aloneness that were made default mode for me by my culture.

Hail and welcome, Spirits of Air! Come let us honor and adore you!

(Calling in the Spirits of Air is an HONOR and a GIFT).

—Amanda Yates Garcia





I LOVE YOU

I love you.

You may be thinking, "You don't even know me. How can you live me?"

But if people can hate for no reason, I can LOVE.

See the meme.





PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE BIRDS

I pledge allegiance to the birds of the United States of America. And to the skies through which they fly.

See the meme.





SHOUTING COMPLIMENTS

"My daughter and her neighbor friend spend a lot of the day sitting 6 feet away from the sidewalk, shouting compliments out at strangers who walk by. It's the right mood for these times.

"Just overheard: 'YOUR SHIRT MATCHES YOUR DOG AND I LIKE THAT ABOUT YOU!'"

—Bret Turner

See the meme.





Your Joy Is My Joy

firgun (n.) the act of sharing in or contributing to someone else's pleasure or fortune, with a purely generous heart and without jealousy; or of sharing credit fairly. (From the Hebrew.)

mudita (n.) sympathetic, vicarious joy; happiness rather than resentment at someone else's well-being or good fortune; the opposite of schadenfreude. (From the Sanskrit.)

unne (adj.) to be happy on someone else’s behalf. (From the Norwegian.)

compersion (n.) an empathetic state of happiness and joy experienced when another individual experiences happiness and joy. (From the English.)





BE LIKE YOUR BEST SELF

Someone paid me the highest compliment. She said, “I want to make sure I tell you how often your process of being you has helped me in my process of being me.”

One essential element of my teachings is that I don't want you to be like me; I want you to be like you—to the fullest, deepest, most glorious and sacred and eccentric extent possible.





FOR ANOTHER 60 YEARS

I’m probably going to write my horoscopes for only another 60 years. My tentative plans are to retire in 2081.

Don’t worry about it, though. I’m sure that by then, I will have conspired with cyberhackers to create an ultimate Artificial Intelligence that will generate “Rob Brezsny”-style horoscopes until the sun explodes in about 7.5 billion years.





THE EVER-EVOLVING TRUTH

The ever-evolving truth is far too complicated and fluid and slippery and scrambled and gorgeously abundant for one human being to master—even for genius bodhisattva avatars (I’ve heard rumors that there have been a few of such characters), let alone me and you and virtually everyone else who has ever lived.

I'm lucky to have gotten my percentage of mastery up to about 3%. On a good day, that’s how much I understand of the Maddening and Delightful Mystery we are embedded in.

That means I don't know 97% about how the Great Mystery actually works. This is despite the fact that my heart and mind have always been greedily curious to learn and experience as much as I can.

Here’s the solution I’ve come up with: I employ an empirical approach to life. I formulate amusing, non-binding hypotheses about what the Great Mystery might be like, and then collect the experimental data that’s generated as I test my hypotheses. I observe and analyze the results to determine how well each hypothesis works the following magic:

1. Does it liberate me from suffering and does it inspire me to help liberate other creatures from their suffering?

2. Does it make me a smarter and kinder and trickier and humbler fool?

3. Does it motivate me to embrace what I call the FLUX MOJO? In other words, does it fuel me to overthrow my own fixations, cooperate enthusiastically with the never-ending change that life asks me to deal with, and continually reinvent my attitudes, perspectives, ideas, and feelings?

4. Does it engender in me a lust for life and a primal urge to respond creatively to the glory of being alive and conscious?

5. Does it fuel my longing to inspire and nurture and play with those who are interested in sharing space with me?





DAILY TEXT MESSAGE HOROSCOPES

I write daily horoscopes, available as text messages sent to your phone. They're shorter than the weekly Free Will Astrology 'scopes, but more frequent. They're called SUNBURSTS.

You can get these regular bursts of inspiration for 67 cents a day if you sign up for a subscription.

RealAstrology.com. Register or log in. On the new page, click on "Subscribe / Renew" under "Daily Text Message Horoscopes" in the right-hand column.