Life always delivers the creative energy you need

Life always delivers the creative energy you need to change into the new thing you must become.





FREE WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Here's a link to my free weekly email newsletter, featuring the Free Will Astrology horoscopes, plus a celebratory array of tender rants, lyrical excitements, poetic philosophy, and joyous adventures in consciousness. It arrives every Tuesday morning by 7:30 am.

Read past issues of the newsletter since May 12.

Read past issues of the newsletter from before May 12.

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ALL DESIRES HAVE A SACRED ORIGIN

Psychologist Carl Jung said all desires have a sacred origin, no matter how odd they seem. Frustration and ignorance may cause them to twist into distorted caricatures, but it's possible to locate the beautiful source from which they arose.

In describing an addictive patient, Jung said: "His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst for wholeness, or as expressed in medieval language: the union with God."

With this in mind, ruminate about this question: What are the glorious prototypes behind the longings that confuse you or drain you?





IF THERE IS ANY SUCH THING AS ENLIGHTENMENT . . .

If there is any such thing as enlightenment, it arises from empathy, sympathy, compassion, tenderness, and a quest to be in intimate connection with and in service to other beings.





YOU BELONG TO YOURSELF

While you commune with us here at the Conspiracy to Commit Insurrectionary Beauty and Smart Love:

Your favorite phrase might be "flux gusto"

The colors of your soul might be sable, vermilion, ivory, and jade

Your special emotion might be skeptical faith

Your magic talisman might be a thousand-year-old Joshua tree whose flowers blossom just one night each year and can only be pollinated by the yucca moth

The garage sale item you most resemble might be an old but beautiful and sonorous accordion with a broken key

Your magic verbs are dig, descend, and disclose

Your sweet spot might be in between the true believers and the scoffing skeptics

You have a secret name that will be revealed to you very soon

You have fire in your blood and sea salt in your tears

Your vision of power is the red-tailed hawk soaring over the shopping mall

Your sacred fungus might be yeast and your soil of destiny might be peat moss

Your lucky number might be 3.14159265

Your lucky phobia might be arachibutyrophobia, or the fear of peanut butter adhering to the roof of your mouth

Your holiest pain might come from your yearning to change yourself in the exact way you'd like the world around you to change





VOWS

I invite you to speak these 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."





LOVE DOESN'T HAVE TO MEAN LOSING FREEDOM

Love doesn't have to involve losing freedom. It could mean synergizing and deepening freedom with an ally who's as talented a liberationist as you.





HOLY PLAYFUL FUNNY BLISS

The German word "selig" can mean "ecstatic," "blessed," or "holy." It implies that profound bliss can be a divine gift; that deep pleasure may generate or come from spiritual inspiration.

The English language doesn't have a term comparable to "selig," maybe because our culture regards sacred ecstasy with suspicion.

Religious people tend to believe that the blessed are those who are good and kind, certainly not those who are skilled at cultivating rapturous states of union with all of creation.
Many people who worship rationality, on the other hand, think of holy ecstasy as at best an irrelevant state, and at worst a nonproductive or deluded indulgence.

What would you have to do to place yourself in intimate alignment with the values embodied by the word "selig"?

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"They say a thing is holy if it makes you hold your tongue," muses a character in John Crowley's fantasy novel "Engine Summer," speaking of the difference between his culture and another. "But we say a thing is holy if it makes you laugh."

Is your amused joy compatible with your yearning for the breakthroughs that make you feel at home in the world? Can your giddiness serve your reverence?

P.S. The English word "silly" comes from the German "selig."





ANNIE DILLARD JUBILEE

"Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe . . . No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe."'

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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"If the landscape reveals one certainty," wrote Annie Dillard, "it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor."

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Annie Dillard notes that there is only a tiny difference between the lifebloods of plants and animals. A molecule of chlorophyll contains 36 atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon arrayed around an atom of magnesium, while a molecule of hemoglobin is exactly the same except for an atom of iron instead of magnesium.

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"I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits," writes Annie Dillard, "but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air."

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In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard apologizes to God and Santa Claus and a nice but eccentric older woman named Miss White, whom she knew as a child. "I am sorry I ran from you," she writes to them. "I am still running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain."

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"There is always an enormous temptation in all of life," writes Annie Dillard, "to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end . . . I won't have it. The world is wider than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright."





REJOICING IN ORDINARY THINGS

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.

— Pema Chodron





YOU'RE A LUCKY, PLUCKY GENIUS

You are constitutionally incapable of adapting nicely to the sour and crippled mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." You're too amazingly, blazingly insane for that.

You're too crazy smart to lust after the stupidest secrets of the game of life. You're too seriously delirious to wander sobbing through the sterile, perfumed labyrinth looking in vain for the most ultra-perfect mirror. Thank the Goddess that you are a fiercely tender throb of sublimely berserk abracadabra.

You'll never get crammed in a neat little niche in the middle of the road at the end of a nightmare. You refuse to allow your soul's bones to get ground down into dust and used to fertilize the killing fields that proudly dot the ice cream empire of monumentally demeaning luxuries.

You're too brilliantly cracked for that. You're too ingeniously whacked. You're too ineffably godsmacked.

This is an excerpt from a longer piece. Read or listen to it here.





MY WRITING PROCESS, Part 7

For me, writing includes manual labor. Lots of paper has to be cut and pasted, sorted and resorted, rearranged and recombined. Standing up and walking around my tables is a good balance for all the sitting.

Creativity requires heroic levels of organization! Inspiration flows when dogged discipline has prepared the way!

Here's a photo of me in my office.

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It's not good enough, at least for me, to see the texts on computer monitors. I can edit my writing with more clarity if I see it on paper. I seem to see the words more deeply and truly.

Also, when I'm working on the memoirs/novels, I need to view the order of the chapters lined up on the tables. I get a better feel for the lyrical logic of how they should proceed.

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Here's the current tally:
Number of books published: 9
Number of columns published: 2,236
Number of new books currently being worked on: 14





HOW TO BE RICH

John Waters said in a speech to a graduating class: "I’m rich! I don’t mean money-wise. I mean that I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my personal and professional life. That’s rich. And not being around assholes should be the goal of every graduate here today.

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Anthony Bourdain also had a “No Asshole” rule: "It is truly a privilege to live by what I call the ‘no asshole’ rule. I don’t do business with assholes. I don’t care how much money they are offering me, or what project. Life is too short. Quality of life is important. I’m fortunate to collaborate with a lot of people who I respect and like, and I’d like to keep it that way."

In an earlier interview, Anthony Bourdain said it even more succinctly: "I want to keep the assholes in my life to an absolute minimum, if not zero. That’s worth real, real money — to not have assholes in your life."





WHERE THE SPIRITUAL MEETS THE PRACTICAL

"How does my spiritual practice and daily life serve the earth? How does my spiritual practice and daily life affect the poorest third of humanity? How will my spiritual practice and daily life affect the generations to come in the future?"

—Starhawk





THE 80% RULE

Readers of my horoscope column "Free Will Astrology" are sometimes surprised when I say I only believe in astrology about 80 percent. "You're a quack?!" they cry.

Not at all, I explain. I've been a passionate student of the ancient art for decades. About the time my over-educated young brain was on the verge of desertification, crazy wisdom showed up in the guise of astrology, lyricizing my soul just in time to save it.

"But what about the other 20 percent?" they press on. "Are you saying your horoscopes are only partially true?"

I assure them that my doubt proves my love. By cultivating a tender, cheerful skepticism, I inoculate myself against the virus of fanaticism. This ensures that astrology will be a supple tool in my hands, an adaptable art form, and not a rigid, explain-it-all dogma that over-literalizes and distorts the mysteries it seeks to illuminate.

P.S.: I use the same 80-20 approach with every belief system I love and benefit from: science, psychology, feminism, and various spiritual traditions like Qabalah, Buddhism, paganism, and magick.

I take what's useful from each, but am not so deluded as to think that any single system is the holy grail that the physicists call the "Theory of Everything."

Unconditional, unskeptical faith is the path of the fanatic and fundamentalist, and I aspire to be a rowdy philosophical anarchist, aflame with objectivity and committed to the truth that the truth is always evolving.





NO, LIFE ISN'T SUFFERING

Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes: "You've probably heard the rumor that 'Life is suffering' is Buddhism's first principle, the Buddha's first noble truth. It's a rumor with good credentials, spread by well-respected academics and Dharma teachers alike, but a rumor nonetheless.

"The truth about the noble truths is far more interesting. The Buddha taught four truths — not one — about life: 1. There is suffering. 2. There is a cause for suffering. 3. There is an end of suffering. 4. There is a path of practice that puts an end to suffering.

"These truths, taken as a whole, are far from pessimistic. They're a practical, problem-solving approach — the way a doctor approaches an illness, or a mechanic a faulty engine. You identify a problem and look for its cause. You then put an end to the problem by eliminating the cause."

Read more.





YOUR ILLUSIONS

Some of your illusions seeped into you before you learned to talk. Others sneaked into you later, while you were busy figuring out how to become yourself. Eventually, you even made conscious choices to adopt certain illusions because they provided you with comfort and consolation.

There's no need to be ashamed of this. It's a natural part of being a human being.

Now here's the good news: You have the power to shed at least some of your illusions in ways that don't shatter your foundations.

To begin the process, declare this intention at noon every Sunday for the next six months: "I am calling on all the power I have at my disposal, both conscious and unconscious, to dissolve my illusions."





ONE OF MY GREAT JOYS

One of my great joys in life is to watch White people and Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color gather together to sing joyfully about the Divine Intelligence.

Here's an example.





FEMINIZATION

These are some of the practical ways I champion and embody the Divine Feminine:

I regard relationship as a crucible for spiritual work.

I think of the practical expression of kindness and compassion and ethical behavior as an essential spiritual practice.

I assume that a crucial element of spiritual practice is the consciousness and compassion and empathy we bring to the sometimes chaotic and messy details of being human beings.

I proceed as if loving and caring for animals and plants and the Earth is the test of our spiritual intentions.

I regard play and fun and humor as not diversions from "serious" spiritual work, but rather being at the center of it.

I aspire to cultivate receptivity, listen well, and regard everyone as potentially one of my teachers.

What about you? What are practical ways you carry on the work of loving Goddess?




My first invitation: Weed out the wishy-washy wishes and lukewarm longings that keep you distracted from your burning desires.

My second invitation: Refuse to think that anyone else knows better than you what dreams will keep your life energy humming with maximum efficiency and grace.

Third invitation: Say this out loud to see how it feels: "I know exactly what I want. I know exactly what I don't want. I know exactly what I kind of want but I won't waste my time on it because it sidetracks me from working on what I really want."