Working and Playing for Beauty & Truth & Justice

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE

with my MID-YEAR AUDIO PREVIEW of YOUR DESTINY
for the REST of 2024 and beyond.

This week my Expanded Audio Horoscopes explore themes that I suspect will be important for you during the coming months.

What areas of your life are likely to receive unexpected assistance and divine inspiration?

Where are you likely to find most success?

How can you best cooperate with the cosmic rhythms?

What questions should you be asking?

To listen to my IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECAST for YOUR LIFE during the next six months, go here, then register and/or sign in.

After you log in through the main page, click on the link "Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2024."

You can also hear a short-term forecast for the week ahead by clicking on "This week (July 9, 2024)."

+

The Expanded Audio Horoscopes cost $7 apiece if you access them on the Web. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.





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.

Sign up here for your subscription.





My book
Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia is available at Amazon and Powells and Bookshop.org

Below are excerpts.


It's a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because you and I are waking up from our sleepwalking, thumb-sucking, dumb-clucking collusion with the masters of delusion and destruction.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Their wars and tortures,
their crimes against nature,
extinctions of species
their engineered diseases.

Their spying and lying
in the name of the father,
sterilizing seeds and
trademarking water.

Molestations of God,
celebrations of shame,
mangling our dreams and
defiling our names.

Their ruthless commercials
and blood-sucking hustles,
their endless rehearsals
for the end of the world.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Their painful blessings are cracking open more and more gashes in the sour and shrunken mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." And through the fractures, ripe eternity is flooding in; news of our souls' true home is pouring in; our allies from the other side of the veil are swarming in, inspiring us to become smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

We are waking up.

+

As heaven and earth come together, as the dreamtime and daytime merge, we register the jolting and exhilarating fact that we are in charge -- you and I are in charge -- of imagining and discovering and animating a brash new world. Not in some distant time or faraway place, but right here and right now.

As we stand on this brink, as we dance on this verge, we cannot let the ruling fools of the dying world consummate their curses. We've got to rise up and fight their deranged logic; defy, resist, and prevent their tragic magic; uncork our sacred rage and supercharge it.

But overthrowing the psychopathic leaders is not enough. Protesting the well-dressed planet-rapers is not enough. We cannot afford to be consumed with our anger; cannot be obsessed and possessed by their danger.

Our mysterious animal bodies crave delight and fertility. Our ancient imaginations demand ever-fresh tastes of infinity.

In the new culture we are hatching, we need lusty compassion and euphoric duty, lyrical logic and insurrectionary beauty. In the new alliance we are mobilizing, we need radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and altruistic banks.

+

In the new covenant that we are midwifing,
We will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom.
We will embrace the cause of zoom and bloom.
We will outfox the banality of evil and hate;
we will summon the chutzpah to praise and create.
No matter how upside-down it all may appear,
we will have no fear
because we know this big secret:

All of creation is conspiring to shower us with
catalytic blessings. Life is crazily in love with us
--brazenly and innocently in love with us.
Our destinies always bring us exactly what we need
to liberate us from our suffering.

+

The winds and the tides are on our side, forever and ever, amen. The birds and snakes are scheming to make us their sacred soul mates.

The sun and the moon and the stars remember our real names, and our ancestors pray for us while we're dreaming.

We have guardian angels and thousands of teachers
provocateurs with designs to unleash us
helpers and saviors we can't even imagine
brothers and sisters who want us to blossom

+

Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up.

The roads they pave us
the places they save us
the tomatoes they grow us
the rivers they flow us

Their mysterious stories
and morning glories
Their loaves and fishes
granting our wishes

The songs they sing us
The gifts they bring us
the secrets they show us
above and below us

Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up.

Breathe out the jive
Breathe in the love

Breathe out the history
Breathe in the mystery

Breathe out the grandiosity
Breathe in the generosity





SUBVERSIVE, TRANSFORMATIVE, LIBERATIONAL HOPE

In 2009, I wrote the expanded and revised edition of the book Pronoia Is the Antidote to Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It has 55% additional new material beyond the original edition, published in 2005.

But now I ask: Is PRONOIA still a philosophy worth wielding? Can we justify its continued viability in an age when bigoted authoritarianism has hijacked so many imaginations? When the viability of American democracy is threatened? When fundamental human rights are being stolen and women’s sovereignty over their own bodies has been decimated?

Does it make logical or soulful sense to embrace crafty optimism and radical hope now that the climate crisis has degenerated into the climate emergency?

Do we dare celebrate anything at all in the face of the teeming mobs that proudly proclaim their support for the ever-more bloated malfeasance of misogynistic patriarchy and plutocracy and militarism and racism and bigotry?

As I have contemplated these questions, my mission has been to embody humble objectivity. In the spirit of curiosity and discernment, which guide my practice of pronoia, I didn't want to automatically assume that my previous ideals should be my future ideals.

I have even considered the possibility that maybe I should abandon my ebullient quest to propagate beauty and truth and justice and love—and surrender to the seemingly reasonable mandate of cynicism.

After much meditation, here's what I concluded: No matter what the state of the world might be, it's my pragmatic job and my soul task to perpetrate regeneration and awakening and inspiration and liberation.

Borrowing from Charles Dickens, I proclaim it to be irrelevant whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, the season of light or the season of darkness, the spring of hope or the winter of despair. My goals are the same in all cases.
 




Now I'll bring in some helpers to elaborate and refine my thoughts.

First, here's one of my mentors, progressive historian Howard Zinn: "An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

"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."

+

Here's another one of my politically progressive mentors, Noam Chomsky: "Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. 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."

+

Another one of my heroes, author and activist 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."

+

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."

+

Author Rachel Pollack: "We cannot predict the results of healing, either our own or the world around us. We need to act for the sake of a redemption that will be a mystery until it unfolds before us."

+

Educator David L. Cooperrider: "Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing."

+

Sociologist Fred Polak: "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."

+

Author and activist Rebecca Solnit: "Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.

"Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.

"It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."




Image is by Shiloh McCloud, and appears on the cover of Alice Walker's book "Hard Times Require Furious Dancing"