Harbinger: Joy and Grief

— an excerpt from my new book, Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality

In 2005, I published the first edition of Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

Four years later came the expanded 400-page version, with 55% additional new material. Translated editions bloomed across the world: Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Turkish. I became the godfather prophet of pronoia.

The term itself was born in the 1970s from the mind of author John Perry Barlow, who envisioned it as paranoia’s radiant twin—“the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.”

But Barlow didn’t develop the notion beyond his brief definitions. That project became my calling, and I pursued it with the fervor of an archaeologist uncovering a lost civilization. I resolved to be relentless in naming and celebrating all that is beautiful and interesting and healing in our bewildering world.

My philosophy rests on three radical propositions: that the universe is a prodigious miracle created for our amusement and illumination; that all of creation conspires to liberate us from suffering while motivating us and educating us to love with precision, intelligence, and courage; and that life delivers exactly what we need—not what we want, but what our souls require—to fulfill our deepest purposes. (PS: These worthy goals may take more than one incarnation to accomplish!)

Core tenets:

· Evil is boring, sterile, and stupid.

· Cynicism is intellectual laziness masquerading as sophistication.

· Fear is a bad habit we can at least partially unlearn.

· Despair is an impotent luxury with no redemptive power.

· Joy is fascinating, revelatory, and necessary.

· Love is an act of heroic genius, requiring bold perseverance and cultivated skill.

· Pleasure is not an indulgence but a birthright.

· Receptivity is a superpower.

But now the plot thickens: I am not a saccharine optimist who ignores life’s brutal realities. At the core of my perspective on pronoia lies an intimate, unflinching relationship with darkness. I don’t ignore or transcend shadows; I engage and negotiate with them.

Here’s a key element of my formulation: Yes, life orchestrates a vast conspiracy to keep us supplied with blessings, but what constitutes blessings? Ten million dollars? A gorgeous body? A hassle-free marriage with a perfect soulmate? A mansion filled with lavish accessories?

Maybe. But more often, the blessings arrive as plot twists we didn’t anticipate. They may bring dizzying adventures that remake us, gifts so unexpected we hardly know what to do with them, challenges that invite us to become smarter and wilder and kinder, and conundrums that dare us to grow luminous and numinous.

LIsten free to the song about that:

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Among the conundrums that have dared me to grow more luminous and numinous is a tragicomic irony about my own soul’s assignment.

The realization slammed into me years ago. I was driving on Highway 1 north of Point Reyes, California after a rare argument with my beloved partner, determined to cool my troubled heart by staring at the white sky and grey ocean until they scoured me clean. A storm seemed imminent. The waves were bruised and restless.

Needing a break and wanting to write down a torrent of tormented thoughts in my notebook, I pulled over into a gravel turnout and parked. When I got out of the car, I had to concentrate on anchoring myself in the face of the steady gusts. Soon I noticed a shrine wedged down near the ground between two boulders. It was modest, but every object within it radiated stubborn endurance.

Wilted, mud-heavy lilies formed a roughly circular boundary around the ceremonial space. There were three candles in glass jars and three dead starfish. A child’s rubber boot, pink once, was now sun-blanched to a weary rose. A weather-beaten teddy bear with one eye missing, its remaining eye cloudy and scratched, gazed outward with a look of baffled tenderness.

There were messages, too: handwritten notes on thick index cards stuffed into rock crevices. Some were barely legible, half-erased by the elements:

We miss you.

Come visit us in dreams. Forgive us.

You changed us.

A few stones had been painted with spirals, hearts, and a stick-figure family holding hands beneath a wan sun. A single abalone seashell was positioned at the center like a small altar bowl, mottled with rainbow flashes whenever the clouds parted.

The whole shrine had the look of having been tended by many hands at various times, but also neglected for long stretches, as if grief came in unpredictable waves.

It was woebegone, unglamorous, and defiant in its shabbiness. I imagined it to be a shrine for a sorrow too enormous or complicated to fit into the easy categories of public mourning.

I stood before it too long. The wind moaned in strange harmonics around the rocks, like an animal circling me. The sky became a color I had never seen before, a blend of purple, silver, black and blue. A seagull’s cry cut through the wind and raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Instead of the usual squawk, I swear it shrieked my name three times: “Rob! Rob! Rob!”

Then a rupture rose up in me from solar plexus to throat: I felt an alien emotion that wasn’t mine blooming in my chest. It was a denser, older, more electric version of empathy.

The grief didn’t feel like it belonged to me, exactly, nor even to one family or one tragedy. It felt like a delta of losses converging from the whole wide world: every drowned wish, every vanished child, every unspoken apology, every hurt creature wailing in the great chain of being. I imagined it as a collective sorrow that had been temporarily stored in this heap of objects and that finally found me available and unguarded enough to hold it.

My knees buckled. I felt simultaneously enormous and hollow, as if I’d become a vessel whose only purpose was to contain this tsunami of loss. The sensation was both exquisitely precise and overwhelmingly diffuse. It was like being pierced by a thousand fine needles made of age-old sadness, each one carrying a story of irretrievable absence.

There was also a sweetness in the anguish, an alien honey-thick tenderness woven through the pain. I wasn’t drowning in it; I was being initiated by it. My chest expanded to accommodate a surge of anonymous agony I couldn’t name: the mother who never got to say goodbye, the lover who died mid-sentence, the child who vanished into an ocean, or the merciless machinery of human cruelty.

I wasn’t being punished or overwhelmed; I was being trusted. And that trust wrestled itself down into my bones like a hot coiling drill. I swore I felt it in my spine and pelvis and both femurs. It was as if I’d been chosen to receive this blessed curse because of my capacity to hold tremendous quantities of affliction that didn’t belong to me.

The sorrow carried intelligence. It had weight, temperature, and texture. It asked not for fixing or fleeing, but for presence without flinching. I felt like the grief was reorganizing me, enlarging my power to love without conditions or caveats.

As the rupture vibrated in my belly and chest, it unleashed a further breach. Mixed with the sorrow was a sense of an unmistakable assignment.

The grief didn’t merely want release. It wanted interpretation, reanimation, and alchemy. It bid me to carry it forward without corrupting it, so it would be neither sentimentalized nor weaponized. I swear I heard it speak to me: I chose you because you won’t collapse or perform martyrdom or pretend it’s not happening.

I whispered aloud, “Why me?”

The ocean answered with a rogue wave that slapped the cliffs with such force I lurched backward. In that sonic boom of saltwater and stone, I heard the unmistakable response:

Because you already praise holy beauty. Now learn to praise holy hurts.

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As vividly as if it were now, I remember standing at that woebegone shrine while the vast grey Pacific Ocean shoved a massive, unwieldy truth into my bloodstream. That was the moment I fully coalesced into the living container who praises the miraculous with fervor while metabolizing the unbearable.

I fully grasped my twin assignments: to celebrate the world audaciously and carry its grief tenderly.

Ever since, I understand that my drive to gather the world’s grief springs from love: profound, unreasonable adoration for our broken, magnificent world. To earn the right to ameliorate suffering, I must first feel it as deeply as it goes. To speak authentically about bliss and pleasure, I must be intimately familiar with sorrow.

Ever since, each praise-song I write has had to carry salty tears. Every gift I offer the world is seasoned by my willingness to sit with what can’t be fixed but only felt and witnessed.

This is the harbinger’s burden and privilege: to be a bridge between what breaks us and what makes us whole. It means I’m not numbed by contradiction but buoyed by completion.

I extol the world’s beauty with ferocity precisely because I know how fragile it is. I celebrate wonder with such abandon because I can hold horror without flinching.

My initiation at the windswept shrine became foundational to everything I now understand about Rebel Enlightenment.

The disembodied spiritual traditions I reject promise transcendence from suffering. Avoid suffering at all costs, they say. They exalt an escape velocity that launches us beyond the messy, mortal realm into a sterile, pristine elsewhere.

But the liberating illuminations that have remade me again and again arrive through my willingness to be a full-bodied vessel for both ecstasy and anguish.

When I expanded to hold that collective grief without numbing or fleeing, I didn’t fly away into heavenly consolation. I dived more deeply into my life’s mission. And that descent made me exquisitely available.

Every Ecstatic Healing Derangement and Friendly Shock Awakening I’ve experienced since then has confirmed this: The sacred doesn’t seek the sanitized or the safely detached.

It hunts for those of us who are brave and brazen enough to be vulnerable, rumpled, and shockingly alive. Can we hold grief in one hand and rapture in the other without needing to choose between them?

This is the paradox at the heart of Sacramental Incandescent Embodiment: Only by refusing to abandon our earthly selves can we become spacious enough for the healing elixir of inscrutable divinity to move through us without destroying us.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

If you’d like to buy my book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality:

It’s available at all online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: https://tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of September 17

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): If I were writing this horoscope for the Gun Lovers’ Gambling Porn website, I might counsel my Virgo readers to maintain strict control over their wickedness, debauchery, and decadence. Why? Because now is a time when vices and sins are even more likely than usual to sow chaos and spawn big messes. However, since you are reading my oracle in a more genteel publication and are almost certainly a refined person of high integrity, I’m confident there will be minimal uproar if I dare you to tap into your raw animal energy and unruly instinctual nature. I believe it’s time to at least experiment with wilder aspects of your deep self.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The Real You and the Semi-Real You have been embroiled in a showdown with the False You. This is as tough and heroic a struggle as you’ve had to deal with in quite some time, though it has often been subtle and partially cloaked. I am of course rooting for the Real You and the Semi-Real You to emerge victorious from the conflict, though I also hope you don’t feel the need to humiliate and crush the False You. That part of you has sometimes served a valuable purpose and doesn’t deserve to be trashed. And what will become of the Semi-Real You after this drama is finished? I suggest you give it a modest place in your repertoire. Like the False You, it sometimes proves to be useful.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Hummingbirds can fly backward. They’re the only birds capable of sustained reverse flight. This requires extraordinary wing flexibility and energy expenditure, but it gives them access to nectar that forward-only fliers have more difficulty sampling. Let’s treat this as a useful metaphor for you in the coming weeks, Scorpio. It may be that your progress and success won’t always come from advancing. Some rich resources may require the equivalent of reverse flight. Consider returning to conversations you thought were finished, revisiting places you’d mentally filed away as “done,” and extracting value from sources you’ve already passed by.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In chemistry, catalysts are substances that accelerate reactions without being consumed in the process. A tiny amount of catalyst can dramatically transform how quickly elements combine. An example is the enzyme catalase in our cells, which breaks down hydrogen peroxide (a byproduct of our metabolism) into water and oxygen millions of times faster than it would decompose on its own. I believe you are now in a phase when your catalytic powers are at a peak, Sagittarius. Be careful where you point that potency of yours! Make sure you really want to change what you’re capable of changing.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Every species adapts to its surroundings. Even harmful microbes evolve over time in order to survive. Syphilis, for instance, was once ferociously swift and deadly, but that intensity limited how far it could spread. So a gentler strain gradually evolved that allowed its hosts to live longer and pass it on more widely. Let this serve as a metaphor for how you handle your dark moods, odd compulsions, and brief bouts of craziness. Befriend the mild, manageable versions of these states and give them space to be felt and understood. Over time, the harsher, more destructive versions will lose ground and fade from power.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Paleontologists know that some dinosaurs traveled in herds with a specific formation: the most vulnerable members gathered in the center, protected by stronger individuals on the perimeter. It was a savvy way to run things, ensuring the group would thrive. I hope you’re willing to borrow some dinosaur wisdom, Aquarius. The coming weeks will be a good time to apply it to your own life. Who or what needs protection? What vulnerable projects or relationships deserve to be surrounded and shielded? Are you willing and able to use your strength to guard what’s tender and growing? Be a shepherd, a steward, a defender.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In ancient times, Hawaii’s Coconut Island was renowned for its healing powers—but on one condition. Those who sought its medicinal help couldn’t just expect the local spirits to do all the work, but had to take part in awakening the magic. Legend tells us that a seeker could be cured by swimming three times around the island. This participatory approach to healing mirrors your current situation, Pisces. You are close to a source of renewal, but if you hope to unlock its full strength, you must coax it out with your ingenuity.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Realities you’ve been oblivious to will soon pop into view. Hints and signals you’ve been unconsciously pushing away will start flocking toward you. A lingering emotional numbness will thaw, and surges of feelings will pour into your awareness. Warning! At first, it may feel like an overload: too much sopping wet data arriving too quickly for you to organize or interpret. If you’re willing to be patient and focus on slowly metabolizing the influx, though, the apparent chaos will ultimately weave itself into a luminous web of new understanding.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In Peru’s Andean mountains, Indigenous and smallholder farmers cultivate a rich diversity of potato varieties, continuing a farming tradition rooted in the crop’s domestication thousands of years ago. Each variety thrives in slightly different soil, altitude, and climate. By planting many types at once, the farmers ensure that at least some crops will flourish no matter what conditions arise. I suggest you apply this way of thinking to your own life in the coming weeks, Taurus. Diversify your efforts instead of depending on a single plan or expectation. Plan for multiple small initiatives that will evolve with unique growth patterns.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In biology, many organisms survive harsh or unpredictable conditions by entering dormancy. This is a reversible state of greatly reduced metabolism and development. Seeds, spores, and the dormant stages of some small animals can remain viable for years until cues such as water, temperature, light, or nutrients signal that conditions are favorable again. Then they can resume growth, development, or activity, often rapidly. I suspect you may experience a comparable upsurge in the coming weeks, Gemini. A project or aspiration that seemed inert may reawaken and reignite.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Novelist Kurt Vonnegut advised us to try some task that scares us every day of our lives. That may be a viable experiment for a Scorpio like him, but is it a wise prescription for us Cancerians, who like to feel secure and protected? Normally, I would say no. I’d recommend that you and I dare ourselves to wrestle with one of our fears no more than once per month. But the coming weeks may warrant a departure from our typical rhythms. I suspect we can fortify our long-term safety and peace through more frequent encounters with unpredictable episodes that rouse our hidden reserves of courage.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The ancient Greeks believed that the goddess Harmonia presided over the blending of opposites into balanced beauty. Her dad was the god of war and her mom the goddess of love, so she had a lot of practice. In her line of work, tension between different forces could produce elegant unity rather than conflict. In alignment with astrological omens, I’ve appointed Harmonia to be your guardian angel in the coming weeks, Leo. I urge you to call on her dynamically and frequently. Rifts and splits and divisions that have never before been possible to heal are now swayable by the collaborative efforts of you and the goddess.

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My new book is:

Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality

In this reverently rowdy text, I propose versions of enlightenment that don’t require an escape from our world’s gorgeous pandemonium, but thrive on a wildly disciplined engagement with it.

Through an unpredictable weave of unruly stories and genre-fluid texts, I cross-pollinate exuberant activist passions with drug-free explorations of altered states.

I invite readers to have maximum fun as they experiment and improvise with imaginative spiritual practices. How can we cultivate wisdom that’s both grounded and ecstatic?

The book is available at all online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

It’s also available here:

Bookshop: tinyurl.com/RebelEnlightenment

Barnes & Noble: tinyurl.com/JubilantDefiance

Amazon: tinyurl.com/EcstaticHealing

The ebook will be available in a few days.

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Grateful Immersion in the Glorious Human Mess: excerpt from the book

My family, allies, and I are allergic to spiritual teachers and teachings that coax people to disparage the core features that make us human. We’re not sure why their sprawling quagmire seems so tempting to multitudes of souls.

They claim that the body is a distraction and desire is an affliction? We say NOOOOOOO! They insist out feelings are traps, the ego is a dire hindrance, and our personal stories are obstructions to illumination? We say NEVER!!!!!

Sorrowful dismay wells up as we watch legions of tender aspirants guzzle this fake news as if it were sacrosanct wisdom.

Our love of life protests as our fellow wanderers try to extinguish their mortal magic in the name of escapist transcendence.

We are rattled as they neglect their own precious soul savvy and demean their majestic flesh. It’s tragic and heart-breaking!

Our alternatives are celebratory rhythms and rhymes that immerse us in the glories of flesh wisdom and creature consciousness.

Resolved: We crave and deserve spiritual approaches that honor all the magnificent human features named below.

• Feelings and physical sensations are sources of vigorous wisdom. They’re not erratic, banal burdens we must ignore and expunge to be free.

• Desires are holy fuel for our liberation and intelligence. They’re not toxic obstacles we need to abnegate and suppress.

• The ego is a crucial ally in our zeal to be vividly alive. It’s not an enemy to be demeaned and disowned, but a tool to be tuned and aligned with righteous purpose.

• Many (not all) of our stories and identities are essential to who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. They’re not merely illusions to vanquish and shed, but evocative texts to honor and integrate.

• Our bodies are sacred vessels and sources of sublime savvy. They’re not distracting burdens but miraculous masterpieces.

• Our relationships are potentially at the evocative heart of our spiritual practice, not intrusive diversions.

• Earth is our beloved home, not a limbo or prison where we suffer and grieve in temporary exile from some supposedly better place.

• Our incarnation on this planet is an exalted gift, not a punishment or ordeal.

• Movement and sound are equally valid paths to illumination as stillness and silence.

• Our everyday lives are sources of rich opportunities for delight and discovery. They’re not burdensome trials rife with irrelevant, boring, and oppressive hindrances.

• Connection is just as key to spiritual deepening as solitude; community is as important as self-sufficiency; cooperation and empathy are crucial for growing our glistening sagacity.

• Play, humor, and creative expression are divine gifts that belong at the heart of our spiritual practice. They’re not irrelevancies or optional extras.

• Sexuality can be a pathway to divinely inspired transmutation. It shouldn’t be compulsively dismissed as an inconvenient bedevilment or vulgar need.

• Work may be an aid to spiritual practice rather than an obstructive vexation that interferes with our focus on our highest and noblest aims.

• Grief, rage, envy, and the difficult emotions are worthy teachers rather than sheerly problematic digressions and detours to be overcome.

• The endless changes that life brings us can be sources of interesting challenges, not doleful emblems of constant loss.

• Nightly dreams may be treasured wellsprings of guidance, not indecipherable tangents.

• Our ancestors and lineages, both biological and chosen, are sources of power and wisdom worth consulting and honoring. They’re not to be confined to sentimental and nostalgic musings.

• Some experiences may be so marvelously intense, unique, and potent that they become permanently inscribed in eternity—imprinted on the undying record of all that has ever been felt, witnessed, and loved. They’re not necessarily subject to utter dissolution and disappearance, but are kept alive in the deep memory of existence.

The book’s cover art is by Olaf Hajek.

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To hear the song WORLD KISS, whose text appears in the book, click here:

Here’s another excerpt from the new book:

Pleasure, Bliss, Ecstasy, and Gleeful Zest as Spiritual Fuel

Many spiritual systems the world has inherited regard pleasure, bliss, rapture, ecstasy, elation, and related super treasures as troublemaking distractions. The so-called “lower self” is greedy for such wasteful irrelevance, the saintly authorities say. “Begone foul deceivers!” they imply or declare outright.

How many zillions of us have been taught, often with dire and threatening tones, that feeling really good leads us away from life’s essential goals? Holiness and sanctity are likely to accumulate in us only if we shun the supposedly inferior temptation to bask in delight.

Of all the idiocies foisted on humanity, this one is among the most egregious. We are in danger of veering into apoplexy as we contemplate such a criminal delusion. We’ll try to be civil.

In both our extensive mythic explorations of dreamy truth and our scientific investigations of hard-core reality, we have gathered incontrovertible evidence that pleasure is a central necessity for any spiritual quest that actually works.

It’s a sensory instrument. A tuning fork. A feedback system. A way the body says, Yes, this. More of this. Keep headed in this direction. You’re getting closer to home.

We’re not talking about the jittery sugar-high of addiction or the perverse, jangly thrills that sabotage health.

We mean the rich, ennobling euphoria and exhilaration that arise during encounters with smart fun: inspiring us to love ourselves more, expanding our capacity to love others, leading us in the direction of our shining dreams, and helping us solve our knotty problems.

The eruptions of these life-giving nourishments might come through the stimulation of our senses, emotions, mind, or imagination. They don’t yank us away from the sacred. They are among the sacred’s favorite ways of snagging our attention. Evolution didn’t give us many reliable compasses, but these are among them.

Our comprehensive research reveals that when we feel genuinely good—not inflated or superior, but resoundingly buoyant—our ethics improve. We’re more patient and curious. Less brittle and defensive.

When we’re swooning or even just shimmering with delectation, we see other people more clearly. They’re not obstacles or mirrors of our lack, but fellow creatures doing their best with the weather systems inside them.

By contrast, chronic deprivation, especially when dressed up as virtue, tends to make people tight and pinched and resentful of anyone who looks like they’re enjoying themselves.

Self-denial doesn’t reliably produce saints. Often it just produces people who are very good at pretending they don’t want what they want.

Those who know how to feed themselves often have a super-capacity to give without keeping score. Their generosity leaks out sideways. There’s surplus.

Here’s our very-well proven hypothesis: Compassion grows less from being twisted up about suffering and more from inhabiting joie de vivre so fully that we want others to feel it too.

To read the rest of this article, go here: tinyurl.com/BlissIsSpiritualFuel

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of September

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Master chefs say that diners first taste food with their eyes. The visual presentation is key to the whole experience. But the beauty must arise from craftsmanship rather than empty decoration. I believe you Virgos are in a phase when this is an important metaphor. Your outer style and inner substance are ready to become better collaborators. Some suggestions: Wear clothes that influence you to feel vividly alive. Relax your face and posture. Beautify your workspace. Polish your presentations. And please make sure the dazzling appearances reflect equally nourishing contents.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I just finished a delicate peace mission to the contested inner landscape where your nightmares have been causing a big ruckus. In response to my diplomacy, they have agreed to drop their weapons and release their captives. In exchange, they are asking you to sit with them for a while as they rant and sob, and maybe offer them a few kisses and affectionate embraces. Drawing on my long years of coaxing unruly spirits back into semi-sanity, I conclude that a key reason they turned so dramatic and extreme was that they have been starving for your attention. I am very sure that with just a little effort, you can tame their reckless restlessness.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You’re poised at a threshold between what’s comfortably familiar and excitingly possible. A certain reliable part of your life has served you well for a long time but is now ripe for evolution. The paradox is that letting go of a serviceable asset can feel more difficult than shedding what’s obviously harmful. So here’s the riddle I hope you will meditate on: What good old thing could you relinquish so as to attract and make room for a great new thing in your life?

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks with sketches of machines that would not become practical until centuries later. Examples are the parachute, a helicopter‑like “aerial screw,” and an armored tank. Many of his designs were simply too advanced for the materials and engineering of his era. I suspect you may experience comparable moments of visionary thinking in the coming weeks and months, Sagittarius. To some people and even to yourself, your ideas might seem overly ambitious or ahead of their time. But please don’t dismiss them. Write down your inklings and let them cavort around in your imagination.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Sofia Kovalevskaya was born under the sign of Capricorn in 1850. Early in her life, she displayed mathematical brilliance. She longed to develop her talent, but women weren’t allowed to attend college in her native Russia. So she devised a workaround: a marriage of convenience with a man who helped her leave the country and gain the freedom to study in Germany. There she eventually became the first woman to earn a doctorate. Inspired by her example, I encourage you to consider creative strategies for obstacles that seem immovable. What indirect routes might lead you to your goals better than frontal assaults? Be willing to zigzag toward your destination.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Most of us have been cursed. The sources of the bad mojo have rarely been evil sorcerers who cast literal spells. Rather, they were harsh pronouncements about our worth or our future, spoken by people we loved or trusted. For example, when I was 20, my astrology teacher dropped an alarming verdict on me: “You will never be seen and appreciated for who you truly are.” That ugly decree became a jinx I spent years struggling with before I finally banished it. Do you carry a comparable hex, Aquarius? Maybe mommy or daddy proclaimed you would never amount to anything. Maybe an ex declared that you would never again find real love. Whatever it might have been, here’s the good news: You now have the power to at least partially dissolve that old scourge and glide into the future less burdened by it.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Ravens often cache shiny objects and interesting novelties that seem to possess no immediate practical value. They apparently delight in collecting intriguing possibilities. I recommend you channel your inner raven in the coming weeks, Pisces. Assemble an array of quirky treasures and raw materials without immediately deciding whether or why they might be useful. Like what? Like fun ideas, memorable quotations, odd facts, provocative images, curious fragments, and fascinating stories. In ways you can’t imagine yet, your playful cluster will inspire imaginative innovations and delightful breakthroughs.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): Cheetahs are the fastest land animals, but they can maintain top tempo for only about 20-30 seconds before overheating. When they’re hunting, they usually get just one speedy dash to catch their prey. They must spend far more time stalking and positioning than running. The velocity is sensational, but their patient and prolonged strategy is even more essential. In the coming weeks, Aries, I urge you to be like the cheetah as you pursue want you need and want.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov said that true mastery means performing with complete intensity while making the movement appear effortless. Behind the grace lies years of disciplined practice. Is there an aptitude or practice you cultivate that fits this description, Taurus? I hope you’re ready to showcase it, flaunt it, and use it to your maximum benefit. It’s time to capitalize bountifully on skills at which you excel. Your well-deserved rewards are more likely to arrive than usual.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “Dear Oracle: I have contracted a severe case of too-many-tabs-open. My brain has 19 windows running at once, and it’s hard for me to determine which thoughts are the truly important ones. Everything seems equally urgent and equally trifling. Any tips on how I can better figure out what actually matters the most? —Overstimulated Gemini.” Dear Overstimulated: The secret to fixing this dilemma is to consult your body. Focus your attention on your gut and ask it to send you sweet clues about which yearnings it resonates with most. Check in with your feet and seek their wise counsel about which direction they want to lead you. Pat yourself lovingly on the butt a few times and request its loving guidance about what will make you feel most grounded.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): For some people, laughter is like a spiritual practice. A lot of them are Leos, Aquarians, and Sagittarians. They crack up more often and for longer stretches than most, and they tend to howl at ironies everyone else takes too seriously. I bring this to your attention, dear Cancerian, because you’re in a time when you could and should laugh often in wild, liberating ways. I invite you to explore the weirder areas of your sense of humor and work earnestly to expand what you find funny. PS: There’s credible evidence that laughter can reduce stress physiology, ease anxiety, lift mood, strengthen social connection, and even raise pain tolerance.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The astronomer Johannes Kepler spent years trying to prove that planetary orbits were perfect circles because he believed the universe should behave that way. Once he abandoned his cherished assumption, he discovered the truth: The planets travel in ellipses. That revision transformed astronomy forever. With this in mind, Leo, I will ask you: Is there an elegant belief you have outgrown? A theory that was once fun and interesting but now limits your vision? The coming weeks will favor corrections. Changing your mind will show you that reality is even more interesting than you previously understood.

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Dear Readers —

I have composed a Love Letter to Our Egos. It’s below. I invite you to create a ritual space and then read the message aloud to your own precious ego.

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Dear Beloved and Necessary Ego —

I apologize for the mistreatment you have endured from so many teachers who regard themselves as spiritual leaders.

They have turned you into a villain in the human story, blaming you for every excess and distortion, as if you were nothing more than a flaw to transcend rather than an instrument to refine.

I acknowledge that you have sometimes tweaked my destiny and sent me wandering down dead-end paths I wished later I hadn’t followed. You have periodically caused me problems—like everything else life brings us!

But the more important truth is this: You were the first architect of selfhood. You’re the brave little maker of continuity, stitching together memory, longing, wound, and wonder into a coherent somebody.

Thank you for caring how others perceive me. It has helped me learn the social art of being among others: how to listen for feedback and how to recognize that I am immersed in a web of mutual reflection.

Thank you for letting me believe I can make a difference in the world, whether that belief is objectively true or gloriously delusional. Without that presumption, I might never have risked making art, offering love, speaking truth, or attempting repair.

Thank you for not letting me disappear behind counterfeit humility.

Thank you for resisting the temptation to make myself small in order to seem agreeable or spiritually evolved.

Thank you for the self-promotion, for the sometimes awkward, sometimes necessary declaration: I am here. I made this. It matters to me. Maybe it will matter to you.

Thank you for pushing me to crave validation through my acts of service. Even if the motives are mixed, a lot of good things still gets done. Care still circulates and healing happens. Plus: Motives can be composted into cleaner motives over time.

Thank you for helping me to be singular. I love being one peculiar, unrepeatable human being with preferences, hungers, aversions, and passions.

Thank you for reminding me that self-interest may be the sacred instinct of preservation.

Thank you for delightfully reminding me I have a story during the good times and the bad. A narrative, however imperfect and fragmentary, gives shape to chaos. It helps me locate myself in the vast glorious turmoil of life.

Thank you for my drive to be “successful,” and for allowing that marker to evolve. What once meant applause may now mean integrity. What once meant achievement may now mean depth.

Thank you for pushing me to take myself seriously enough to cultivate my gifts with devotion. Not because I am more important than others, but because my particular offering is mine to tend.

Thank you for helping guide my decisions and reveal my fears. Your defensiveness and ambitions are often diagnostic. They show me where I’m attached and unfinished.

Thank you for questioning the collective trance around me. You encourage me to refuse to dissolve into the herd. You help me cultivate discernment when consensus becomes conformity.

Thank you for letting me be human and messy. For letting me contradict myself, embarrass myself, overreach, recover, and try again.

And thank you for carrying the impossible burden of being the temporary steward of a mortal life.

You’re not the whole of me, but you’re an essential part of me. You’re a companion to educate and a wild animal to befriend.

With gratitude,

Your Soul

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In composing this Love Letter to Our Egos, I was inspired by Dawn Robertson. Thanks, Dawn!

THE SHINING TEMPLE OF THE ANNIHILATED EGO

In my dream, I am riding in the back seat of a souped-up tour bus in southern France. The name of this fancy vehicle is the World Riddle.

I’m traveling along a road known as L’Autoroute du Soleil, the Motor-way of the Sun. Our destination is a tourist trap called Le temple resplendissant de l’ego anéanti, translated as the Shining Temple of the Annihilated Ego. It’s a shrine that the tour advertisements tout as being devoted to “le culte de l’individualité éteinte,” or “the worship of extinguished selfhood.”

What the hell does that mean? I’m not sure. I’m thinking it may have to do with the Sanskrit word “nirvana,” whose literal definition is “the blowing out of a flame.”

Many of our fellow travelers on the bus are religious disciples dressed in robes and sackcloth. I see Buddhist monks and nuns, Christian monastics, Hindu mendicants, and turban-wearing Sikh Brahmgianis.

In contrast, I’m dressed in red leather pants, an orange silk shirt, a sparkly gold vest studded with opalescent beads, and a black ankle-length cashmere coat. I’m also wearing rings on all my fingers.

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I recognize the person sitting to my right. He’s Shunryu Suzuki, the well-known Zen master whose books helped popularize Zen Buddhism in America. Years ago, I read every word the man published.

In person, he looks conventional. He’s wearing a dull brown suit and narrow striped blue tie that make him look like a business executive from the 1950s.

This is a welcome opportunity for me. For years, I have had a bone to pick with him. In one of his books, he told a story about the importance of keeping one’s ego under strict control. A student had asked him, “How much ego do you need?” Suzuki’s austere reply was, “Just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.”

I felt reverence for that hard-ass attitude years ago when I first came upon it as a young spiritual punk. But later, I came to regard it as puritanical, pretentious, and retrograde. At this moment, piqued by his presence, I feel peeved about it.

It takes a while to work up the nerve, but I finally initiate a conversation with Mr. Zen.

“Long-time listener, first-time caller,” I say to him, copping the approach of a person who has reached a radio talk show host on the phone. “Loved Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Made it my bible for a while.” That was Suzuki’s first book.

“Probably better not to make any book your bible,” he replies, in a tone that is neither friendly nor dismissive.

“Don’t worry. I’ll always love you, but I’ll never worship you.”

“There’s nothing here to worship, anyway,” he says, gesturing toward his torso. “I don’t even exist.”

“Good. I will keep that in mind if I feel any pangs of desire to turn you into a holy icon.”

“Have you ever tried it?” he asks. “Not existing?”

“Well, that idea is a pet peeve of mine,” I say. “As it turns out, I eventually discovered that I preferred existing to not existing. That’s when I had to burn your books down at the beach and take your photo down from my altar.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “I mean the part about you preferring to exist. Burning my books and banishing my image were not unwise.”

“I’ve always wanted to ask you a question,” I say. “Do you mind?”

“I’m not sufficiently here right now to say yes or no. You are free to proceed.”

“Remember how you said that no one needs much of an ego; that the best ego size is just big enough to keep one from getting hit by a bus, but no bigger?”

“I recall that a mirage resembling me once said something like that.”

“I wonder if you would consider the possibility that maybe your old advice could benefit from revision. I mean, yes, I acknowledge that the ego is the root of much sour mischief. Maybe as much evil as the craving for wealth and control.”

“In Christian terms,” Suzuki interrupts, “it’s the original sin.”

“Yeah. Even for me, some of the stupidest and cruelest things I’ve done could be blamed on my infected and inflamed ego.”

“Which is why it’s better to live without it,” he says. “Purge that nasty pest completely.”

“I don’t agree,” I say. “I think the ego has crucial redemptive uses. And besides, just because it’s potentially dangerous doesn’t mean that spiritual seekers like us should nuke it.”

“Redemptive uses? Like providing you with the fuel to become an all-knowing rich and famous and powerful sex god?”

“No. Like providing me with the fuel to become a compassionate and creative and curious devotee of the Great Mystery.”

Suzuki makes a sound that might be mistaken for a chortle. “The ego appropriates those noble aspirations and turns them into disguised versions of being an all-knowing rich and famous and powerful sex god.”

“Well, sorry to be so blunt, but that’s how a fundamentalist thinks,” I press. “It would be like me practicing abstinence because I’m afraid of the chaos I might stir up by risking the gifts that sex affords me.”

Suzuki chuckles derisively, but I am unflustered. I’ve argued with famous people before. David Bowie didn’t take it personally when I questioned his feminism. Playwright David Mamet was annoyed when I asked him what specific events had turned him into a rightwing jerk, but he didn’t punch me.

“Instead of repressing the ego,” I say, “we should sublimate its brute force. Use all our best psychological tricks to transform its greed into generosity. And turn it into a beautiful work of art.”

“Good luck with that delusional fantasy,” Suzuki says.

“How about this?” I say. “Let’s be spiritual artisans who devote ourselves to crafting exquisite egos. And let’s do it with the same rigor and panache as a great actor who’s preparing to play the role of Buddha or Joan of Arc. Let’s add ‘egos’ to the list of beautiful artifacts that talented creators produce, along with songs, books, films, sculptures, paintings, electronic games, and dances.”

“What you propose,” he replies, “is like putting lipstick and mascara on a donkey. Or worse yet: on a lipsticked and mascara’d donkey that has explosives strapped to its body like a suicide bomber.”

I don’t feel defensive in the least. On the contrary, I’m delighted he’s fighting back.

“You’re on the wrong side of history,” I tell him cheerfully. “Like the reactionary traditionalists who are quite sure that all humans are one of only two genders.”

“So what do we have here?” Suzuki snorts. He’s getting emotional! “A staunch advocate for the rights of the ego! Good for you, you brazen rebel. The ego has been the victim of appalling oppression over the centuries. I am glad someone is defending its honor.”

“I’m not defending the honor of all the arrogant assholes who have mangled history with their megalomaniacal cruelty,” I say, as serene and amused as a meditator in a mountaintop sanctuary. “I’m proposing a crucified and resurrected ego, a gorgeous and lyrical and empathetic ego that’s a gift to humanity.”

“I’m guessing,” Suzuki sneers, “that someone with your views must have a deep attachment to the phantasms we Zen Buddhists refer to as ‘self ’ and ‘individuality.’ Am I right?”

“I’m more aligned with Gurdjieff ’s position,” I reply. “While it’s possible to create an electric, enduring, beauty-drunk individuality, many people don’t want to work that hard.”

“And am I right to assume you regard that electric, enduring beauty-drunk individuality as permanent and immortal? Going to live forever, are you, my young friend?”

“Yes, I am, thank you. And so you are, too.”

“No, thanks,” he scoffs. “My laughable hallucination of unique selfness has a future appointment with the worm-rich dirt. Good riddance.”

“I’ll bet you a trillion nirvanas that you and I meet again at the end of time.”

“You don’t have a trillion nirvanas to bet.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Suzuki shouts, “Immortality sucks!”, grabs my face with his hands, and smacks his skull into mine, knocking me backward and propelling me out of sleep.

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Dear Readers —

I am dazzled by and grateful for how you responded last week to my request for financial support. (Read it here: https://tinyurl.com/GentleJolt). I feel an infusion of renewed vigor as I rumble into the future, fueled with renewed ambition to provide words that contribute to your inspiration and liberation.

For those of us born under the sign of Cancer the Crab, like me, it can sometimes be difficult to ask for what we need. Many of us are better at nurturing than at receiving nurturing. But emboldened by your generosity, I’m going to dare to be greedy and ask you for one further favor:

If you like what you read in my newsletter, either the horoscopes and essays or both, please consider suggesting to your friends and allies that they sign up for a subscription. Doesn’t have to be a paid subscription. I love it when my offerings are useful, whether or not they earn me money.

I’ve trained my whole life to do this work!

With Love and Appreciation,

Rob

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of September 3

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): You’ve been extra reasonable lately. How do you manage to be so responsible, measured, and composed? I’m not complaining. I admire your integrity. But now the cosmic omens are clear that’s it’s time to address your soul’s needs for more wonder and awe and reverence. So I will slip you a tantalizing prod: What’s the best, most healing trouble you could provoke right now? I’m not referring to recklessness and chaos, of course. I mean twists and tweaks that stir up inspiration and liberate creativity. Are you bold enough to follow the truth and beauty that thrills and intrigues you?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I am asking you to give yourself slack in situations where you sometimes treat yourself carelessly or unkindly. Instead of tightening, loosen. Instead of cornering yourself, offer an escape hatch. Ask: “What if I give myself 20% more mercy, 20% more time, or 20% less pressure?” Maybe you’ll get an extension on a deadline or allow yourself to be a learner instead of an expert. Rather than calling yourself a failure because you’re less than perfect, you’ll decide, “It’s good enough for now.” As you slip away from the traps you set for yourself, you’ll teach your nervous system a fresh truth: You can be gentle with yourself but still be responsible.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Scorpio, you rarely need to be lighter and breezier. Your assignment is almost always to delve deeper and explore further. This is true now even more than usual. Other people might shiver and cower in the face of your intensity, but I celebrate it because it drives you to excavate the rich, messy truths and complicated feelings that really shouldn’t stay hidden. Regard this horoscope as your authorization to wield your emotional X-ray vision with precision, and to trust that the treasures you seek are often buried in places that scare others away.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In classical music, composers often develop a simple motif into a complex symphony. A short sequence of notes becomes the foundation for an entire composition. A key passage gets rearranged and elaborated in multiple ways. You will have a comparable opportunity in the coming weeks, Sagittarius: a seed of potential that seems modest at first could expand into more substantial riches if you cultivate it patiently. Your visionary aplomb and optimism can transform a core cell into a full orchestration.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You seem to be wandering in a frontier for which there are no maps. You’re hovering in liminal zones, between worlds. So for now, I guess you will have to steer without your usual guidance. That’s a good thing! What I can do is name the gifts that are likely to come your way as you explore the unknown: 1) turbo-charged intuitions about your best possible future; 2) a talent for spotting surprising connections you didn’t even know you were looking for; and 3) a provocative unpredictability that magnetizes allies who can help tease out and illuminate your hidden and buried desires.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The placebo effect has a lesser-known counterpart called the nocebo effect: Negative expectations can create negative outcomes. If you’re told a harmless pill might cause headaches, you’re more likely to develop them. Your belief in harm creates actual harm. I bring this up, Aquarius, because I’m worried you may be nocebo-ing yourself right now. Your conviction that certain outcomes are inevitable is encouraging them to manifest. So here’s my counsel: Which negative expectations or predictions are you treating as facts? Consider the possibility that the problems you’re so skilled at identifying are being called into existence by your identification of them. And if you find that’s happening, STOP! Formulate some healing alternatives.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

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and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “Dear Rob: Your horoscopes delight me in a spooky way. They make me feel as if you’re watching me from afar, not like a stalker, but like an eccentric guardian angel who gives me a heads-up before I do something foolish, tells me about opportunities I haven’t noticed, and shakes awake the part of me that’s inclined to quit. Thanks a million times! —Deep Pisces.” Dear Deep: You have exquisite timing, because now is an ideal moment to pour out gratitude for the people who’ve lifted you up and helped you. Offering appreciation now will function as a potent prayer that will be far more effective than pleading for what you don’t have. It will set in motion an irresistible magic that draws even more blessings in your direction.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Most of us are surprisingly clueless about the inner workings of our own bodies. Do you know where your gallbladder and spleen actually live or what jobs they perform on your behalf? Can you trace the journey your breath takes after it slips into your lungs? Have you ever experimented to discover in detail which foods best suit your one‑of‑a‑kind system? Do you know, from experience rather than guesswork, how much sleep you require to stay vividly awake and emotionally balanced? The current astrological climate favors you becoming a curious apprentice of your body’s gorgeous mysteries.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The English idiom “cut to the chase” comes from the silent films of the early 20th century. When the plot dragged, directors would literally switch to a chase scene to restore audience interest. Other languages have other ways to say “get to the point” or “skip to the crux.” Spanish: ir al grano. French: aller droit au but. Italian: venire al dunque. Japanese: hondai ni hairu. In accordance with astrological omens, Taurus, I suggest you do that in the coming days. Skip the boring parts. Jump to the action scenes. You can return later and fill in the story details, but for now you’re best served by moving toward the exciting essence or the crucial core of things.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): This is one of those unusual times when laziness and apathy work in your favor. Life is organizing a relaxing renewal on your behalf, and your main job is to not interfere. So I advise you to skip the hustle and enjoy the thrill of being still. Put a pause on doing and indulge in the fine art of simply being. Please, Gemini? Set aside your ambitions for now. Hide your to-do list. Inform your chattering monkey mind that it’s on temporary leave from its usual jumping and squawking. Feel guilt-free as you immerse yourself in the most relaxed versions of feeling good and welcome whatever fresh vitality wants to flow in.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the 17th century, Dutch inventor Christiaan Huygens discovered that two pendulum clocks hanging on the same wall gradually synchronized their swings. Why? He eventually realized that tiny vibrations traveled through the wall and made the clocks influence each other. Scientists call this “entrainment.” Now is prime time for you to capitalize on this phenomenon, Cancerian. I urge you to be extra alert for how your moods, rhythms, and intentions subtly affect the people around you, and vice versa. If you cultivate qualities you’d like to predominate in your relationships, you will find others unconsciously aligning with your rhythm.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Now is an ideal time to have fun cultivating the art of receptivity. Have fun being as open to influence as you can imagine. Be innocent! Be amenable! Be willing and eager to be surprised! It doesn’t mean surrendering your drive or drifting aimlessly while life happens around you. I’m talking about an active, alert sensitivity that invites wonder and transformation. You think boldly, act with purpose, and radiate what’s uniquely yours, and yet you also remain humbly aware that learning never ends and that wisdom can arrive from unpredictable directions.

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LUNAR ECLIPSE ALERT!

A deep partial lunar eclipse happens this week on August 27–28. It will cover up to 96% of the Moon’s surface in Earth’s dark shadow and give it a rust-red “blood moon” look.

Peak eclipse in the Pacific Time Zone occurs at 9:12 p.m. PDT on Thursday, August 27, 2026.

Compulsive hyper-rationalists assert there’s no meaning to this or any other lunar eclipse. But then they also say there’s no meaning to mysterious, synchronistic, and uncanny phenomena of all kinds.

Those self-appointed debunkers of wonder and enchantment have dismissed countless amazements I’ve been blessed with, including the following:

a heron flying into my view, carrying a flounder in its beak, as I gazed at the setting sun on my birthday (the exact minute I was born, 7:05!) and sang the old gospel hymn “Amazing Grace” . . .

13 swans swimming along the creek that adjoins my house exactly on the winter solstice, a creek where no swans had appeared in the 13 years I’ve been observing it . . .

a narrow shaft of rain falling only on my father’s grave and nowhere else, as I visited the grave on the anniversary of his death.

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But what kind of person wants to live life without riffing on the symbolic power of unusual synchronicities like these? Not me.

So in defiance of the compulsive hyper-rationalists, I will provide my thoughts on the possible symbolic meanings of a lunar eclipse.

During the day of the eclipse, as well as two days before and two days after, I propose that you have extra power to gently or roughly wake yourself up out of any trance you might be in. You have an enhanced ability to shock and liberate any part of your psyche that might be acting like an automaton.

This lunar eclipse may be a favorable time to launch a playful or very serious campaign to break free of a bad habit. You could attract help from both expected and unexpected sources if you focus on deprogramming a negative behavior pattern and substituting it with a positive one.

As nourishing and consoling as memories can be, they sometimes act like heavy anchors that prevent you from sailing on toward the future. They may keep you trapped in old grooves that are better escaped.

A lunar eclipse may signify you now have the power to love the past as you leave it behind and glide or rumble toward a new chapter that awaits you.

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Omens to Be Alert For During the Blood Moon of August 27–28, as well as two days before and two days after.

In the spirit of the liberated imagination and playful enchantment, I offer a few examples of the kinds of amazements you could be scanning for:

• A stranger asks you for directions to an address you used to live at. They won’t know why they picked you.

• Something breaks that you were sick of: like a zipper on a jacket you’ve been meaning to donate since 2023. (The eclipse has generously arrived with a small demolition crew and is doing the part you kept postponing.)

• The insects stop all at once, and then start again. The whole ambient sizzle will cut out as if someone unplugged it. Ten seconds, maybe twenty. Then it resumes.

• You wake at 3 a.m. from a dream with a hole in it. There’s a missing scene, and you can feel its exact shape. That absence is the message.

• You mishear a sentence and the misheard version is better. Someone says “we’re closing at nine” and you hear “you’re chosen at nine.”

• You find something intact that should have come apart, like a snakeskin shed whole, right down to the transparent scales that covered the eyes. Or maybe a cicada husk still gripping the bark with all six legs. These are the leavings of creatures who managed a complete exit, who got entirely out of the old body without tearing it or themselves.

• A message arrives that was meant for someone else and is nevertheless meant for you, like a wrong number or a group text you were accidentally included in. (Read it as though it were addressed to you personally, because at the level where eclipses operate, it was.)

• The lunar eclipse’s rust-red hue migrates into your daylight hours: a fox at the edge of the road; a woman’s coat two shades past burgundy; a stain on a ceiling; a dog whose name turns out to be Ruby.

• Something falls at your feet from directly above. An acorn, fig, wind-loosened branch, or feather that takes its time getting down.

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Read more about my understanding of both lunar and solar eclipses: tinyurl.com/EclipsesAreInvitations . As you recall, there was a solar eclipse on August 12. Its impact is still in play.

Read about the Effects of the Moon on Earth: tinyurl.com/MoonEffects

WE NEED MAGIC

Every day, we have to wade through relentless swarms of soul-less information. The experience tends to shut down our sense of wonder.

Every day, we are over-exposed to narratives that are drained of delight and mystery. We must make strenuous and ingenious efforts to ensure our world is enchanted.

I aspire to contribute to the sacred cause of feeding our sense of wonder and enchantment. That’s one of my prime motivations for offering you (and me!) my creative work

PS: Factual information and reasonable thinking alone are not sufficient to guide us through life’s labyrinthine tests. We need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation.

One of our inalienable rights as human beings should be to receive mysteriously useful omens on a regular basis.

Dear Readers –

I’ve long been a big fan of friendly shocks that stimulate my awakening and insight. When I’m blessed with a gently unexpected prod that heightens my lust for life and makes me wiser, I feel I’ve been given a gift—even if the initial adjustment to the change is strenuous.

Recent example? Realizing with a jolt that a health care regimen I had been following wasn’t actually healthy for me, and that I needed to correct my mistaken ideas. I was grateful for the revelation, even as I scrambled to adjust.

I much prefer the friendly shocks to the unfriendly ones, of course, even if the unfriendly ones ultimately prove helpful and educational, too.

This past week I absorbed a shock that so far seems more unfriendly than friendly, though I’ll reserve judgment for now. A whole slew of paying subscribers to my newsletter suddenly unsubscribed. I felt my essay last week was one of my best ever, so the spectacle of a mass exit was extra perplexing.

Should I take it personally? Maybe not. I know money is tight and many of you subscribe to all sorts of things. I’m not naive about the subscription fatigue that has happened in 2026, or the economic pressures so many people face.

I understand you may already be supporting podcasters, journalists, artists, and creators doing important work. Every dollar matters, and choosing where to direct your support is a big decision.

In any case, I’ll accept the verdict if I must, but I will also go down fighting. Here’s my appeal: If you find my writing encouraging or inspiring, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It makes a huge difference in my ability to relax into doing what I love, which is offering you what I hope are liberating inspirations.

Have my words ever opened a door you didn’t know was there or given language to what you felt but couldn’t articulate?

Writing is my life’s work. It didn’t support me financially for many years, and as a result, I was a pauper, the poorest person I knew. Eventually, though, my writing skills improved and my ability to reach readers grew, meaning that I could finally earn a living from doing what I love.

For years, my bread-and-butter livelihood came from syndicating my astrology column to alternative newsweeklies, and that’s still a factor. But when the pandemic struck in 2020 and 2021, it knocked a lot of those papers out of business forever. Now this newsletter is an important source of income for me, along with my audio horoscopes and daily text message horoscopes.

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I make a lot of my content available for free for those who want it free: this newsletter, my horoscopes, plus all my my music, extensive excerpts from my books, a big YouTube page, and extensive posting on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. To access all my free stuff, go here: tinyurl.com/FreeStuffFromMeToYou

In the future, no matter what, I will continue to offer a massive amount of stuff at no cost. And yes, I will also let you know about the things I create that earn me money, like my books, audio horoscopes, and daily horoscopes.

I believe consciousness-expanding ideas should be accessible, and transformative perspectives shouldn’t be locked behind paywalls that only the privileged can afford. I give away so much stuff freely because I want it to reach whoever needs it, regardless of economic circumstance.

But paid subscriptions to my Substack newsletter are key to making everything I do possible. They’re what enable me to continue this work instead of having to monetize my attention in ways that would compromise the message. They fund the time it takes to distill complex philosophical and poetic insights into readable prose and craft horoscopes that are cosmic and grounded.

Your paid subscription funds a life dedicated to challenging spiritual bypassing, celebrating embodied existence, and offering an alternative to the consciousness-numbing messages that dominate our culture.

It supports a creative soul-worker who has spent decades refusing to water down my weirdness as I stay true to a trickster vision that values sacred activism and healing imagination over algorithm-driven propaganda and sales pitches.

When you become a paid subscriber, you’re participating in an ecosystem of gleeful resistance. You’re voting with your resources for the kind of world you want to see: where artists and philosophers and consciousness rebels can do their work without having to compromise their vision.

If you have chosen or will choose to become a paid subscriber, you have my gratitude. If you don’t become a paid subscriber, you also have my gratitude, because I’m honored that you devote a bit of your precious time and energy to tuning into my thoughts and feelings.

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How Might I Improve?

A reader recently wrote to me: “Seriously, and I say this with love, but lately your writings have not been as great as they were in the past. I just can’t relate to them as much.” She stopped there. No more words followed.

In response to her, here’s what I wrote:

“I welcome any specific critique that might help me improve the service I aspire to offer. A generalized ‘I don’t like what you’re doing anymore’ isn’t a constructive critique I can benefit from. To aid my growth as a writer and a person, please be specific about what you think has changed and how I could improve.”

I extend the same invitation to anyone reading this. Let me know how I can upgrade, refine, deepen, or polish the playful work and workful play I offer you.

I don’t ask this defensively. After so many years of composing my astrology column and newsletter and books, I’ve made my peace with the truth that not everything I express will land for every reader.

I also know that my work is alive. It keeps mutating, because I’m always mutating. And a living thing can be pruned and fed and trained toward greater usefulness, but only if someone tells me precisely where the wild growth is going astray.

In my world, you’re collaborators in an ongoing experiment. You are my co-conspirators in the long game of helping each other become more free, curious, and alive. That makes your honest, specific reflections a gift.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 27

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The coming months could be a legendary turning point you will celebrate in the future: a pivotal time when you finally outsmart an old adversary and untangle a knotted inheritance, clearing the way to pursue your true calling with undiluted devotion. Or, on the other hand, the days ahead could be another round in the long saga of “almost”: a decisive phase when you avoid a challenge that has been begging for your full brilliance, leaving your future without shining clues for how to further decode the ancient riddle. Which destiny will you accomplish, dear Virgo? Will you answer the call to adventure? Or ignore it until it fades away?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Some of my most useful revelations arrive in the dark. Once, while hiking in a wooded canyon at dusk, I lost the trail and had to feel my way forward by the sound of the creek. In that blind descent, an insight about a personal riddle I’d been pondering for months appeared unbidden, as if it had been waiting in the shadows for me. As I followed the stream bank to safety, I celebrated by singing Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” The moral of the story is that some lessons can be best learned by going down: into the body, into confusing feelings, into the rich compost of mysteries we may be hesitant to explore. How about you, Libra? In my professional opinion, your next pivotal breakthroughs are lurking in the fertile darkness rather than the brilliant heights. I hope you’re brave enough to descend. The treasure is buried, as treasure often is.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In 1912, Scorpio meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift. It’s the idea that Earth’s continents were once joined in a single supercontinent and have gradually drifted apart to their present positions over millions of years. Most scientists initially rejected his hypothesis because he couldn’t explain how the movement occurred. He didn’t live long enough to receive vindication, but decades later, his novel hypothesis was fully accepted. I’m pleased to report that your wait will be far shorter, Scorpio. Please keep your faith in the novel ideas and perceptions that others don’t understand yet. The world’s almost ready for your innovations.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): There is a kind of lightning called a “sprite.” It’s a ghostly red discharge that blossoms high above thunderstorms. I suspect you may soon experience your own personal versions of this wonder. Fleeting insights may appear in unexpected places. Emotionally rich revelations could arrive out of nowhere. Because the moments could pass quickly, it will be crucial to notice them when they arrive. They could stimulate major shifts in your understanding. Keep your perceptive powers highly attuned.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Fertility clinics store frozen human embryos. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they are suspended in a long, chilly pause, awaiting instructions from the people who created them. This accumulation of potential life on hold makes me think of you. If you would thaw and reclaim the neglected, untouched regions of your own imagination, you would become an even more formidable generator of focused creative power. The encouraging news is that the coming weeks will be an unusually favorable phase to expedite this process.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Some earthquakes unleash energy in violent bursts, but others are incremental commotions that unfold gradually over days or even weeks. The way they reorganize the Earth’s crust is kinder and gentler. Let’s regard these slow quakes as an apt metaphor for the initially disruptive but ultimately constructive transformations underway in your beautiful life, Aquarius. You may not see spectacular evidence that change is percolating, but I guarantee that it is. Old structures are in a transitional phase of subtle disarray, creating conditions for new dispensations you can’t imagine yet. My prediction: The rearrangement of your landscape will be healing.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

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and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The Sargasso Sea is the only sea on Earth without a land boundary. It’s defined entirely by four strong Atlantic Ocean currents that circle it. Its edges aren’t solid walls but slowly shifting rivers of water. I think this anomalous body of water is always a vivid symbol of your world, Pisces, and even more so these days. Your boundaries are currents, not coastlines. You hold your shape through movement, not through rigid definition. This is more challenging to maintain than solid borders, but it’s also a great potential strength. Use it with aplomb!

ARIES (March 21-April 19): On the sci‑fi TV show Stargate SG‑1, benevolent aliens known as the Asgard visit Earth to seek assistance from a secret US government team. The ultra-advanced, hyper-intelligent Asgard have been unable to defeat their great nemesis, another alien species called the Replicators. Their hope is that their primitive partners, the humans, might stumble onto some basic, straightforward answer that their own sophisticated minds can’t see. The gamble pays off. One of Earth’s leading physicists, who’s a naive amateur by Asgard standards, devises a rough, unsophisticated strategy that works wonderfully. Treat this as your parable, Aries: Put your faith in simple, uncluttered approaches, and don’t underestimate “beginner-level” fixes.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): During one of my visits to the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, I encountered a prankster named Mother Very Superior. This nonbinary performer was dressed like a nun and wore a prominent chastity belt. Wielding a toy whip, they gently lashed me on my shoulders and prayed over me, saying, “I absolve you of all your sins. Therefore, you are now free to commit a raucous slew of new sins.” I hope you get a similar dispensation, Taurus. To be fully available for the rollicking delights you’re eligible for, it would be wise to reduce your karmic debt.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Archaeologists studying ancient Roman shipwrecks found that sailors deliberately made their vessels heavier by stowing rocks in the hull. This reduced the profitability of their voyages, since it reduced their cargo capacity. On the other hand, it meant they wouldn’t capsize during storms. An excellent trade-off! Let’s use this scenario as a metaphor for your life right now, Gemini. I’m going to suggest that you will benefit from adding more ballast. Seemingly burdensome elements could keep you steady if conditions become unruly. Consider this: Not everything heavy is holding you back. Some of it’s keeping you strong and stable.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): During the Baroque era, Cancerian artist Artemisia Gentileschi painted powerful biblical and historical women who killed tyrants and delivered their people from violent domination. By channeling her creative passion into figures of righteous fury, she transformed her personal trauma into psychological power. I invite you to be inspired by Gentileschi as you reconfigure your own story in the coming weeks, Cancerian. Wouldn’t it be fun and potent to transform the way you imagine both the past and future plot threads of your destiny?

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In traditional sourdough baking, a small portion of fermented dough called a starter is saved and refreshed regularly. Some bakeries maintain the same lineage for years. The starter is a living culture of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that feed on flour and water, producing acids and gases that leaven the dough and create bread with complex flavor, aroma, and texture. Let’s use this as a metaphor for your life, Leo. What long-running resource can you use to help create situations that will empower you to thrive in interesting ways during the coming months?

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My rage against the machine began early. I joined my first protest march when I was a sophomore in high school and led a student walkout against racism when I was a senior. Before I was 20, I was tear-gassed by cops at a demonstration condemning America’s relentless interference in the affairs of sovereign nations.

Since then, my anger at injustice has broadened and deepened. I’ve lent my rebel yells and constructive action and poetic expression to many righteous political and environmental causes. I’m not going to stop. The theory that people grow more conservative as they age doesn’t apply to me.

But eventually I decided that instead of fighting every abuse that incited my ire, I would concentrate on a few.

It became clear to me how important it is to pick my battles and not spend time and energy on issues that aren’t my passion or areas of expertise, and where other people I respect are fighting a good fight on their behalf.

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A “hill to die on” is an idiom that refers to a principle that a person will defend even if doing so has personal, relational, professional, or political cost. Its imagery comes from warfare, where holding or taking strategic high ground could demand a big sacrifice.

“What hill will you die on?” asks: “Which commitments are so crucial that you will accept the consequences of defending them?”

During the rest of this essay, I’ll talk about which hills I choose to climb so as to wage holy battle, and which hills I won’t.

And to be clear: I won’t die on any of them. I will brawl and spar and wrestle as hard and as wild and as ingeniously as I know how. But I won’t fight to the death. I want to keep living so I can continue to fight the good fights.

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Some hills I cede to comrades who hold them better than I ever could. Some hills I leave alone because I don’t know enough about the issues and stakes to grapple with them intelligently.

There are other hills I refuse because the main combatants engaged in the struggle deploy odious methods that I can’t in good conscience join.

I won’t fight on a hill whose defenders act as if nuance is treason or that ambivalence is cowardice. I stay away from self-sabotaging warriors who have decided that an ally who agrees with them only 95% of the time is a more urgent enemy than the tyrant who agrees with them about nothing.

I won’t enlist in the cannibal feast where movements devour their own for the sin of imperfection. I avoid spectacles where one’s own purity is prized above the actual survival of the vulnerable people that purity claims to protect.

I won’t let the perfect strangle the good. I won’t prefer a noble loss to an unglamorous, partial victory that actually saves lives and helps real people live better. I won’t mistake the performance of righteousness for the achievement of it.

The cost of these mistakes always comes due in the lives of those who can least afford it: people who don’t have the same privileges and resources as those who are comfortable and entitled.

I have watched this temptation help hand power to the cruelest among us while its practitioners congratulated themselves on the immaculate condition of their hands. I want no part of that purity. I would rather be useful than spotless.

The eight hills I describe below are mine. I hold them with compassionate zeal, in a manner worthy of the causes I’m fighting for, because how we fight is the first draft of what we’re building.

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Hill 1 — Enchanted, Sane Progressive Politics

I am committed to a version of democratic socialism and progressive politics that’s spiritually literate, empirically grounded, and allergic to fascism and authoritarianism in all its forms. I defend multiracial and multicultural democracy. I oppose oligarchy and minority rule.

I insist that the work of liberation be infused with imagination, eros, humor, and supple moral reasoning rather than rigid dogma.

A politics that can’t laugh or bear complexity is half-dead. At best, it will build a marginally bigger version of the cage it claims to be breaking. I want justice and delight. I want moral fervor and flexibility. I refuse to believe we must amputate the soul to win the world.

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Hill 2 — Protecting Imagination Against Cynicism

I defend the conviction that imagination, mythic thinking, wonder, and play are essential instruments for surviving and transforming a collapsing world.

Cynicism is the cheapest sophistication there is. I despise the flattening, literalist, nothing-really-matters posture that flatters itself as realism while surrendering the future.

I push back against it without inhibition. I want to show anyone who listens to me that enchantment can coexist with harsh realism about suffering and loss. Reverence, curiosity, amazement, and awe are medicines that keep us thriving in the fight.

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Hill 3 — Spiritual Freedom Beyond Dogma

I‘m devoted to spiritual and mystical exploration that’s captured by no single tradition. I am an eager syncretist who borrows from Western Hermeticism, Qabalah, astrology, paganism, Indigenous teachings, esoteric Christianity, Hinduism, tantra, Sufism, and Vajrayana Buddhism. In me, all of it cross-pollinates and evolves

I challenge fundamentalist religion and hyper-rationalist contempt for the spiritual life with equal energy, because both are forms of foreclosure. One locks the mystery in a single creed and the other denies that the mystery exists at all.

Soul work and ritual belong in public culture. I share religious scholar Huston Smith’s perspective: “Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.”

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Hill 4 — Astrology as Art and Wisdom

I defend astrology as a language of psychological and spiritual understanding. I reject delusional concepts of it as being deterministic fortune-telling and fear-based superstition. What I practice is poetry and oracle rather than prediction. It’s not a science, but a mythic container for self-knowledge and ethical reflection.

For more of my thoughts on this subject, go here: https://tinyurl.com/MythoPoeticAstrology . . . and here: https://tinyurl.com/AstrologyIsVeryReal . . . and here: https://tinyurl.com/AstrologyForTheSoul

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Hill 5 — Ecological Tenderness and Responsibility

My life is devoted to cultivating veneration and care for the more-than-human world: the plants, animals, watersheds, and nature spirits. My intention is to invoke our love for the natural world as a primary way of motivating our response to the ecological crisis. Facts and figures are crucial as we find our way out of the climate emergency, but we also need to to feel deep adoration for what we seek to save.

I resist techno-utopian fantasy and fatalistic collapse-narrative, because both are ways of refusing the actual, unglamorous work in front of us.

Our grief is sacred, as are our practical responsibility and creative adaptation.

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Hill 6 — Defense of Nuance, Complexity, and Ambivalence

I protect nuance in an age addicted to absolutes: the right to hold conflicting truths and to see shadow in everything. This means critiquing my own side and myself.

I’m willing to risk being misunderstood in order to model non-binary thinking. I refuse the easy all-good / all-bad story, and I invite my readers into a subtler, braver moral and emotional terrain.

The capacity to hold contradiction without flinching is a marvelous expression of intelligence.

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Hill 7 — Ending Toxic Patriarchy and Defending Women and LGBTQ+ Lives

Hill 7 and Hill 8 are foundational for all the others.

I give my life-energy to opposing toxic patriarchy in all its forms: authoritarian masculinity, gendered violence, compulsory heterosexuality, and every cultural script that erases or belittles women, queer, and trans people.

I stand for a world where women’s agency, queer and trans embodiment, and the full spectrum of gender expression are treated as sacred and politically non-negotiable. They’re never “issues” to be debated for sport by people whose own lives aren’t on the line.

Eros, care, freedom, and pleasure are central to justice, and an attack on them is an attack on democracy.

I expose fascist and religious movements wherever they dress misogyny and queerphobia in lofty language. I answer them with better myths and truer stories in which liberated genders and erotic intelligences are the heroes.

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Hill 8 — Ending White Supremacy and Repairing the Theft of Land and Lives

This Hill, #8, and Hill 7 are the bedrock. Everything else I’ve named rests on them.

The United States was assembled out of two ongoing crimes: the seizure of a continent from the nations who had tended it for thousands of years, and the enslavement of kidnapped Africans to make that seized ground profitable. Neither crime is finished. They have continued in different forms under different names.

To read about the Black experience after the Civil War until now, study this essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates: tinyurl.com/WhyBlackReparations or tinyurl.com/WhyWeNeedReparations

Another great resource is the book The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones: 1619books.com

To read about the invading European and American assault on the Indigenous experience, study the book American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, by David E. Stannard: tinyurl.com/TheAmericanHolocaust or tinyurl.com/AnAmericanHolocaust

I won’t list all the ways white American culture has continued its harm against Black and Indigenous cultures to the present day, but here’s a bare glimpse:

The United States signed 370 treaties with Native nations and violated nearly all of them. Confinement on reservations wasn’t enough, so the government rampaged even further. In boarding schools where Indigenous children were forced to attend, they had their languages and traditions beaten out of them.

Slave patrols hunting Blacks who escaped servitude in plantations evolved into police departments. Emancipation didn’t interrupt the arrangement so much as rename it. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, and then white Southern legislatures created racialized criminal offenses and criminalized conditions of Black freedom. Convict leasing filled the coal mines and turpentine camps with men arrested for being unemployed. That machinery evolved into mass incarceration.

I say all this plainly because the current authoritarian project, which I call the Trumpocalypse, desperately wants us not to say it. White supremacy mixed with fundamentalist Christianity is a putrid religion decimating and harming the world NOW. It has a creation myth, a priesthood, sacraments of violence, and a promise of salvation to poor white people who are offered a superiority they can swallow in place of a life they can live.

This is why data alone will never dislodge white supremacy. It has to be met on the level where it actually lives, which is the level of story and soul. So I aspire to answer it with better myths and with oracular sagas in which Black and Indigenous genius is the engine of the future rather than a footnote to the crime.

I live and write on land that was stolen from the Coastal Miwok people who had lived there for at least 200 generations. My spiritual syncretism (see Hill 3) draws from traditions whose keepers were sometimes jailed and hurt for practicing them.

Neither fact is a confession I get to make once and then retire. They are standing obligations: to credit my sources, to ask, to pay, and to follow instead of lead.

And I refuse to confuse the feeling with the transfer. A land acknowledgment that moves no land is a séance. Reparations and Land Back are material propositions, and I passionately support them as material propositions: deeds, dollars, water rights, and jurisdiction. I want the descendants of the stolen and the dispossessed to inherit acreage, capital, sovereignty, and the unbothered freedom to be themselves.

Image by Rob McInnis

Image at top of the newsletter by Rosie Menthos

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The Vows

Eight hills:

I — Enchanted, sane progressive politics

I vow to carry out a politics both intensely progressive and lyrically soulful.

I resist fascism and oligarchy without surrendering to dogma or dehumanization.

I keep imagination, humor, wildness, and eros percolating in my work, even when the world feels brutal.

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II — Protecting imagination against cynicism

I vow to defend imagination from the deadening force of cynicism.

I treat play as necessary medicine, not frivolous decoration.

I insist that wonder is compatible with clear-eyed realism.

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III — Spiritual freedom beyond dogma

I vow to honor spiritual freedom beyond the borders of any single tradition.

I explore and celebrate the occult and mystical currents without letting any of them be a prison.

I speak of soulful mysteries in language that’s intelligent and inclusive.

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IV — Astrology as art and wisdom

I vow to practice and portray astrology as a poetic and ethical art of timing and meaning.

I refuse deterministic, fear-based uses of the craft.

I offer it as a language to cultivate our self-knowledge and our responsibility to the interconnected web of life.

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V — Ecological tenderness and responsibility

I vow to live in reverence for the more-than-human world.

I name ecological grief and danger honestly, without numbing people or collapsing into despair.

I encourage practical, loving responses to Earth’s suffering, grounded in kinship with plants, animals, waters, winds, and the nature spirits.

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VI — Defense of complexity and paradox

I vow to protect nuance in an age addicted to absolutes.

I defend the right to hold conflicting truths and to critique myself and my own side. I am open to seeing shadow everywhere even as I celebrate the world’s gorgeousness..

I model thinking and feeling that resist the easy all-good / all-bad story.

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VII — Ending toxic patriarchy, defending women and LGBTQ+ lives

I vow to oppose toxic patriarchy wherever it harms women, queer, trans people, and the world.

I treat women’s agency, queer and trans embodiment, and diverse gender expressions as sacred and non-negotiable.

I bless the bodies and desires that patriarchy curses, and I expose the spiritual, political, and cultural disguises of misogyny, queerphobia, and transphobia.

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VIII — Ending white supremacy and repairing the theft of land and lives

I vow to oppose white supremacy in its laws, its economics, its myths, and its manners, including any versions of it that live in me.

I support the material repair of what was stolen, including land, wealth, sovereignty, jurisdiction, and I refuse to accept the mere ceremony of regret as a substitute.

I amplify Black and Indigenous voices and keep this work alive when it’s inconvenient and when no one is watching.

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These are my hills. I won’t waste my sacred struggles on lesser ground, nor squander my life pretending every battle is mine to win.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Here’s the FREE STUFF I offer: tinyurl.com/FreeStuffFromMeToYou

ASTROLOGY BOOKS I’ve written for you: tinyurl.com/BrezsnyAstrologyBooks

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 20

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I am nursing a hopeful dream that you will give yourself a fun surprise or two in the coming days—maybe even more than two. Not necessarily the most expensive delights, but those that would inspire your nervous system to relax and your spirit to celebrate. Possible options: a few hours of free time with no obligations, a hike where you adore and praise the sky, a conversation you’ve been craving, a daring yes, or a long-overdue no. Or how about finally starting a fun project you keep postponing, or setting down a burden you’ve been carrying for too long? You might ask yourself: “If someone who loved me dearly were in charge of my rhythm, what would they arrange for me?”

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The first maps of Antarctica contained blank spaces labeled simply “unexplored.” Cartographers didn’t pretend to know what wasn’t yet revealed. This was a gift to future trailblazers, who didn’t have to overcome the confusion of false certainties. You could benefit from adopting a similar practice. Instead of explaining every mystery with confident opinions, designate a few regions of your inner world as magnificently unexplored. Your willingness to say “I don’t know yet” will be a fertile form of wisdom. The unanswered questions will be better allies than premature conclusions.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In architecture, the keystone is the central, wedge-shaped stone positioned at the top of an arch. It’s often the last piece placed, and it’s what holds everything together. If it’s removed, the entire structure collapses. But the keystone itself is held in place by the pressure of the other stones. I love the fact that it’s both the most crucial piece and yet totally dependent on everything else. This is an excellent metaphor for you right now. You’re like a keystone: holding everything together and also being held by everything. Please accept my personal thanks for accomplishing the amazing feat of being both powerful and vulnerable! The structure needs you, and you need the structure. PS: Don’t overestimate your independence or underestimate your importance.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Don’t reorganize your junk drawers anytime soon, Sagittarius. Please? Refrain from scrubbing the oven, organizing your kitchen cupboards, and untangling old extension cords. I’m begging you to believe me when I urge to allocate your energy toward the most interesting and important matters. The cosmic indicators are unambiguous. You will be happiest and most successful if you: 1. dare to access secret wisdom you’ve been hiding from yourself; 2. immerse yourself in almost too much beauty and truth; 3. let your imagination run wild as you visualize future scenarios that thrill you even if they’re also a bit unnerving.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The Grand Canyon in Arizona is 277 miles long, as wide as 18 miles, and a mile deep in some places. Through persistent erosion for millions of years, the Colorado River carved it. This massive creative project happened entirely through subtraction, not addition. I suggest you regard it as one of your role models in the coming months, Capricorn. Your goal is to wear away resistance and eliminate what’s unnecessary. The magnificence you produce will be very gradual and incremental.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In engineering, redundancy refers to the practice of building multiple layers of support into a system so that if one part falters, others keep functioning. Airplanes and spacecraft rely on this principle for safety. I urge you to adopt a similar strategy in the coming weeks. By creating backup plans or additional reinforcement, you can move forward with more daring and flair, which I highly recommend. Artful preparation will strengthen your ability to experiment and improvise.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio. Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The ocean has different layers. Each has its own temperature, pressure, and ecosystem. Many sea creatures are adapted to one specific stratum and don’t wander far from their chosen realm. But there are transition zones where the layers meet, and they’re often rich in biodiversity. I propose that we use these areas as metaphors for your power spots, Pisces. You tend to thrive in thresholds and boundaries, where edges meet and overlap. That will be especially true in the coming weeks. To court good fortune and sweet delight, you should hang out at the borders where diverse influences mingle.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Consider this your official alert that you’re close to getting too much of a good thing. To safeguard the lovely momentum you’ve built lately, be vigilant that genuine abundance doesn’t bloat into plain old overload. Say no to becoming indentured to your own brilliant ideas. Don’t let your victories drag you into depletion. Steer clear of grand gestures of generosity that are driven mostly by the urge to dazzle onlookers. You really can keep every delicious reward you’ve earned, dear Aries, as long as you begin installing some graceful new boundaries right now.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In 1925, Taurus astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979) discovered that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. Famous astrophysicists of that era rejected her conclusions because she contradicted the prevailing theories. Nevertheless, she persisted in her claims and was eventually proved correct by other experts. Sound familiar, Taurus? If it doesn’t yet, I expect it will soon. Naysayers may insist you’re wrong when you know and I know you’re right. My advice: Be faithful to the truths you’ve directly observed even if they don’t match consensus reality. Your understandings are valid even if they’re inconvenient.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You’re ready and able to commune intimately with the hidden source of power that fuels your life. Hallelujah! But first, acknowledge a humbling truth: You’re not entirely sure what that source is. You’ve made assumptions, of course. You’ve told yourself stories about where your vitality comes from: your work, your relationships, your creative projects, your spiritual practices. And while these channels do transmit energy, they’re tributaries of the ultimate spring. In the coming weeks, you’ll have exciting opportunities to trace these streams back to their headwaters. Start this way: Be alert for mini-breakthroughs when you feel unexpectedly energized or mysteriously restored.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): The GPS system requires Einstein’s theory of relativity to work correctly. Satellites in orbit experience time slightly differently than we do on Earth’s surface. Without accounting for that time dilation, your phone would be off by 6.8 miles every day. Moral of the story: The practical requires the theoretical and the mundane needs the cosmic. I bring this to your attention as a useful metaphor, Cancerian. I suspect you’ve been trying to solve ground-level problems with ground-level thinking. But your current challenges require you to factor in some relativity: to recognize that different parts of your life are operating in different timeframes, under different rules. What works in one context doesn’t necessarily work in another. In the coming weeks, refrain from trying to apply universal solutions. Calibrate for context.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In traditional textile making, the selvage is the strong edge that holds the fabric together and keeps it from unraveling. It’s braided more tightly than the rest so it can do its guarding work. I think that’s a helpful metaphor for your life in the coming weeks, Leo. Your main weave is pretty gorgeous, but the edges aren’t sufficiently taut. What should you do, practically speaking? For starters, create firm boundaries around your work time, your rest, and your availability to others’ demands.

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Bless the Gates and Portals and Thresholds, Whether They’re “Real” or Imaginal

My writing below was sparked by, indebted to, and in conspiracy with Sarah West, who said it brightly and clearly. A link to her original essay appears after mine, and I hope you read it.

I’ve been loving astrology and writing horoscopes for many years, which obligates me to file the following report: The Lion’s Gate Portal that allegedly opens every year on August 8 isn’t in my ephemeris. There’s no particular recurring aspect.

The star Sirius performs its heliacal rising around that time, and eight is a handsome fat number that resembles the infinity sign. Somewhere in the last decade, the internet committed an act of spontaneous folk mythology and built a door in that day.

Here’s my testimony about that as a dues-paying member of the astrologers’ guild: I loved it, and I don’t care if it wasn’t grounded in actual astrological data.

The compulsive skeptics and scoffers were out in droves, of course, doing what they do best and worst, which is to mistake their own lack of enchantment for a rigorous epistemology. They imagine they’re defending reality. What they’re actually defending is the small studio apartment they rent inside of reality with the blinds drawn and one light bulb glaring, no visitors.

I could hand them a more robust debunking if they would be open to it, which they aren’t. I know that my own beloved craft is a system of poetic metaphors and evocative symbols, and not a set of meticulous instructions about how to run our lives.

I say this in print regularly. Along with my beloved, now deceased astrological colleague Antero Alli, I am the most cheerfully agnostic astrologer you will ever meet.

Here’s what actually occurred on August 8th, whatever the sky was or wasn’t doing: Millions of human beings decided the day was porous and generative and full of possibility, and then behaved as though it were. And behavior is the most concrete substance in the cosmos.

Somebody who hasn’t asked the universe for anything in years finally asked on August 8, the Lion’s Gate Portal. Out loud in a voice that cracked while they drove to the grocery store.

Somebody wrote the thing they really, really wanted on a napkin at work and put the napkin in their shoe and walked around on their own longing all afternoon.

Somebody lit a ritual candle on a stove burner because they couldn’t find the matches, and then did a sacred ceremony unlike any they had ever done. Somebody whispered a stirring vow about their future intentions into a glass of lemonade and then drank it. Somebody stood in a laundromat at 9 pm under the worst lighting God ever permitted, spoke their dead mother’s name aloud, and knew at last what they needed to whisper to her spirit on the other side of the veil..

Note the addresses on these holy moments: kitchens, laundromats, parked cars, bathtubs. The Lion’s Gate, if it opened at all, opened at ground level, in bodies, using lungs. This is the kind of magic I love best.

Our imagination is the single most valuable asset we own. It’s the engine room. Everything humans have ever built, including cathedrals, vaccines, labor unions, and escape routes out of a bad marriage, was envisioned by somebody before it was real.

To let that faculty atrophy, to sand it down into content consumption and irony, is a mutilation, and we modern humans are doing that to ourselves at a rapid rate. The people snickering hardest are frequently the ones furthest along in the debilitating procedure. How dare the scoffers ridicule the Lion’s Gate Portal even if it’s “just” a product of our imagination?

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Did unseen intelligences lean in and listen on August 8 during the Lion’s Gate Portal? I would testify yes under oath.

I’ve spent decades in the company of dream-beings and tulpa companions and unseen forces that have mystified me nonstop. And my field notes say the universe is far weirder and more responsive than the fundamentalist materialists have budgeted for.

But here’s what’s most important to me: Whether the answer comes from a listening, sentient cosmos or from the ferocious reorganization that happens inside a person who finally says the true thing out loud, prompted by playful magic, either way there is dramatic movement.

The sincerity is a catalytic ingredient. Any being worth praying to is going to lean toward the prayer that has actual blood in it and away from the one mumbled out of obligation.

I’ll make one distinction, because I refuse to be conscripted into the flabby wing of this movement. I’m not talking about the version where you visualize a Mercedes-Benz and wait for the universe to make it appear in your driveway. That’s the imagination declawed and put on a leash and sent out to fetch merchandise.

Real imaginative work is closer to labor than to lounging. It’s daily and disciplined. It might ask you to keep faith with invisible beauty for years while nobody confirms it, and then it asks you to go do the dishes and make the phone calls and show up.

So was the Lion’s Gate Portal real?

Wrong question.

The right question is whether anybody got closer to their own longing. Whether the fear loosened or whether a disempowered soul felt for a while like a participant in the world rather than a spectator being marketed to.

If yes, then magic opened itself up, and I don’t need it to have a street address in the heavens.

The gate was in our bodies.

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Sacred Advertisement: This dispatch has been brought to you by every wish ever spoken out loud with a shaking voice, and by Sarah West, who articulated what I believed in her stirring words.

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Addendum

While the narrow-minded debunkers were busy congratulating themselves for knowing that the August 8th Lion’s Gate was “only” imaginary, the sky was loading a big portal for August 12th and 13th. And every bit of this one is in the ephemeris:

• total solar eclipse

• new moon

• Perseids meteor shower

• Six planets strung pretty closely across the heavens in the hours before dawn: Mars and Saturn should be the most conspicuous; Mercury and Jupiter will be very low in the twilight. Uranus needs binoculars, and Neptune a telescope.

Can I tell you, with rationally consecrated logic, what it means that the moon blots out the sun in some parts of the world while six wanderers line up at dawn and the sky rains the crumbs of a comet all night?

I can’t. Nobody can. The instruments measure the phenomena beautifully but are struck dumb at the threshold of significance, as always.

So I hand this overflow show over to your imagination with a formal directive: Have fun with it. Speculate wildly and with abandon

You could also try on the following ideas, or discard them and dream up others: It’s a favorable time to break and escape our harmful habits and the fixations that sap our life force. My muses tell me it’s a reset time extraordinaire.

Feed your imagination this code: DESTINY WORMHOLE.

The brilliant witch Amanda Yates Garcia recommends we do a ritual to shift our focus from what we want to get rid of, to what we want to create.

She says: Start by filling in the blanks in this declaration:

Instead of _______________________

I choose to ______________________

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Read Sarah West’s original essay, which inspired mine:

tinyurl.com/SarahWestImagination

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YOU ARE A PROPHET

One of my beloved tasks as an astrologer of the soul is to help readers learn to distinguish between the wasteful, demoralizing use of the imagination and the uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination.

A good way for me to earn the right to discourse on this subject is to keep learning more about how to distinguish between my own wasteful, demoralizing uses of the imagination and my uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination. I was not adept at this early in my adult life. My skill has improved, but is still far less than expert.

Here’s the foundation of our meditations: Our imagination is the most important asset we possess. It’s our power to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that we want to bring into being. It’s like the magic wand we use to shape our future.

We are all prophets. Our imaginations tirelessly churn out images of what we will be doing later. The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of ourselves eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of building our dream home.

Our imagination is a treasure when it generates scenarios aligned with our deep desires. In fact, it’s an indispensable tool in creating the life we want. We call on it to formulate images of the conditions we’d like to inhabit and the objects we hope to wield.

But for many of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We may use it conjure up fearful or distasteful premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values.

That’s in part the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and influential people.

Chaotic, disturbing, and even sickening fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. These disheartening fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end ruminations.

Every time we entertain at length a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we blast ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren’t healthy for us and that we don’t need.

Whenever we surrender to the allure of false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imaginations are practicing putrid magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that Buddhists dub the “monkey mind.” It’s the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly exudes pictures in the manner of an agitated critter. The teacher Jeff Brown adds a crucial nuance. He says our “monkey hearts” are forever churning up forlorn, fractious, frightful feelings that are at the roots of the monkey mind’s disquiet.

Is there an antidote? Maybe. If we stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind’s and monkey heart’s slapdash chatter, we may become more gracefully attuned to the life that’s right in front of us.

Whether our imagination is in service to our righteous desires or in thrall to our compulsive commotion, there is one constant: Its prophecies play a prominent role in shaping what happens to us. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are often reflected back to us as actual events that confirm our expectations.

The well-documented placebo effect in drug research, for which there is plentiful evidence, has broader implications. So much (not all!) of what unfolds in our lives, for good and for ill, is shaped by what we believe will happen.

Does that mean our mental and emotional projections help create the future? Let’s consider that possibility. What if it’s at least partially true that what we presume will happen does tend to materialize?

Here’s the logical conclusion: It’s downright self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible and practical approach is to expect blessings.

That’s one reason why I’m reverent in composing my oracles for you, dear readers. If I’m to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy and pleasure.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 13

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Given how extra vibrant and refreshed you have been feeling, I would understand if you had zero interest in confronting The Dilemma That Refuses to Fade. Why deliberately tangle with that stale, long‑term energy drain when your spirits are so high? Here’s why: At this moment, you possess a new and unprecedented advantage over The Dilemma That Refuses to Fade. You may not manage to completely vanquish it once and for all. But then again, you just might. At the very least, you can now sharply curtail its ability to siphon your energy and meddle with your life.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was known as a “human computer” who specialized in carrying out large volumes of intricate calculations. She also had an uncanny ability to translate complex problems into elegant equations, which was why NASA called on her help to guide its early space missions. She said she simply asked the right questions until the numbers disclosed their hidden patterns. Be like her in the coming weeks, Virgo. Instead of forcing quick and simple answers, focus on dreaming up the smartest questions. Well-crafted inquiries will unlock sweet insights that brute effort can’t.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the art of mosaic-making, tiny fragments of stone or glass are fitted together into intricate patterns. Each piece is insignificant and meaningless on its own, but together they compose luminous images. Let’s deploy the mosaic as a metaphor for your life, Libra. I invite you to consider the possibility that you are assembling minor details and small clues into a big, beautiful masterpiece. You may not even be fully aware of how exactly you’re doing it or what it will ultimately look like and do. That’s fine. Your higher self is in charge of accomplishing this minor miracle.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Before launching spacecraft, engineers perform countless simulations of situations they hope will never happen. They repeatedly practice failures so that success becomes more likely. This is a different version of your current assignment, Scorpio. Your task is not to worry about disaster but to rehearse courage. So I encourage you to use your imagination to strengthen your resilience. Visualize yourself responding with creativity, grace, and humor whenever life springs surprises and unexpected blessings. Your confidence will thrive because you will have lots of inner practice in collaborating adeptly with uncertainty.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The horizon line is always the same distance away from you, about three miles at sea level. If you walk toward it, you will never reach it because it moves with you. Now I’d like to propose that some of your personal goals work like horizons. They are orientations, not actual destinations. You’re supposed to move toward them indefinitely, never arriving. In the coming weeks, I invite you to distinguish between your horizon goals and your destination goals. Some aims are meant to be reached, while others basically guide your direction without ever needing to be attained.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Here’s my normally $600-per-hour advice, provided at a very low cost to you: Don’t get back to where you once belonged. Instead, go toward where you must belong in the future. Maybe the old place feels cozier because it’s familiar, even if it no longer fits the person you are now. But I recommend that you heed the subtle pull of the life that’s calling you from ahead. Who exactly is the even more beautiful self you’re on your way to becoming? Visualize in detail the situation where that sovereign majesty will thrive.

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): If you’re single, the coming weeks will be one of the most auspicious periods in ages for cultivating your own fan club of admirers. Your allure is turned up higher than usual, and the universe seems to have decided that what once might have counted as excessive is now perfectly appropriate. If, however, you’re happily ensconced in a lively monogamous bond, don’t sabotage it with daydreams of juggling multiple lovers. Instead, conspire with your partner to expand the range of flavors inside the relationship. Try stepping into different personas together: Adopt new names, experiment with strange accents, and imagine you’re living in 1453 Italy, or 1506 Spain, or 1685 Japan, or 1721 France.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The speed of thought can zip along at over 200 miles per hour. That’s the rate at which signals travel through neurons. Electrical impulses in computers, on the other hand, may travel much faster, at half the speed of light. So your thoughts are very leisurely compared to machines. But they do what computers can’t. They’re creating meaning, not just moving data. Their slowness is where the richest reality unfolds. Remember that well in the coming weeks, Pisces. It’s extra important for your mental and physical health that you not imitate machines and algorithms. You need to ruminate and meditate and muse as gently and unhurriedly as you dare.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): At the post office, I mischievously plucked a crumpled piece of red paper out of the trash can. I don’t usually do such things, but I sensed some horoscope material was lurking there. It turned out to be a handwritten love note addressed to “My Lush and Luminous Aries Laugh-Lover” and signed, “Your Flawed but Fiery and Funny Provocateur.” The Provocateur had written, “Let’s be rowdy investigators of wonders and miracles. Let’s hack our way through the frontiers to discover the wildest beauty and truth ever.” I was shocked that anyone would have discarded such a tempting proposal—especially an Aries. Please avoid making comparable errors in the near future, my dear.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The ancient Romans could be obsessive perfectionists in their approach to building stuff. They were extra thorough and scrupulous. That’s why some of the roads they constructed are still usable today, 2,000 years later. Workers dug deep foundations, then layered stones, gravel, and sand before placing the final surface. In the coming weeks, Taurus, I recommend that you, too, carry out meticulous groundwork as you upgrade your foundations and optimize your stability. Don’t you dare be lazy or hurried in doing this grunt work. Your dogged and ingenious attention to detail will make your future safety zone shatterproof and shockproof.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I appoint you to be the Chief Role Model in charge of showing everyone how to be a smart lover in all situations. Yes, all situations, not only those involving romance. In addition, I bestow on you the title of Chief Administrator of Amazing Grace, hoping this will inspire you to make elegant interventions in every situation where you have influence. Finally, Gemini, I exhort you to be devoted to seeing the beauty in everyone you encounter, even if you must work hard to find it. In asking you to carry out these humongous responsibilities, I’m interpreting the clues offered by the astrological omens. They have revealed to me that cultivating a generous spirit is crucial to you attracting what you want most.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): I confess I have succumbed to a very modern misdemeanor: tossing the word “sacred” around more often than it deserves. To be fair, I haven’t stooped to the tacky depths of New Age hustlers hawking “sacred e‑mail marketing” or “sacred dog-walking.” But still, I would prefer to invoke the word more sparingly, so that on the rare occasions I do, you will feel a genuine shiver of awe. Like now. I predict you will soon be stirred by marvelous encounters and realizations that flood you with reverent feelings and turn your inner life deliciously upside down.

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More and more creative people find they do their best work when they’re feeling healthy and secure. We know writers who no longer need to be drunk or in agony to shed the numbness of their daily routine and tap into the full powers of their imagination.

They have discovered, to their initial embarrassment, that the muses aren’t vampires who feed on suffering. They are co-conspirators who enjoy working with collaborators who are well-rested, well-fed, and well-loved.

We have filmmaker friends whose best work flows not from the depths of alienated self-doubt but rather from the heights of well-earned bliss. They have noticed that despair is monotonous. It tends to produce art about despair on the subject of despair. Joy, on the other hand, is promiscuously curious and will follow a thread of inquiry anywhere it leads.

Musician P. J. Harvey is the patron saint of this new breed. “When I’m contented, I’m more open to receiving a lot of inspiration,” she testified. “I’m most creative when I feel safe and happy.”

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But wait. We already hear the objection rising up, and we’ve even arranged for it to be delivered by Eckhart Tolle, who has been quoted on a thousand inspirational memes as saying, “I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone.”

There’s a kernel of hard truth buried in his tidy formulation. Few of us wake up by burrowing deeper into our nest of pillows. Comfort, in the sense of the cushioned avoidance of all friction, can be a soporific. On that narrow point, Tolle and I agree.

Here’s where we part ways, though. Comfort is different from safety and security, even quite different from happiness. To conflate them is the central error of the entire tormented-genius mythology, and it’s the reason so many gifted people sabotage their own well-being in the superstitious belief that misery is the price of admission to the visionary state.

Child psychologists have a term for the truth that Tolle’s aphorism misses: the secure base. When a toddler is in a strange room and her caregiver is present and attentive, she will venture farther from that caregiver and take more bold experimental risks than a child who feels abandoned. She feels safe.

The scared child clings, while the secure child explores. Safety nurtures the urge to wander into the unknown.

So when we hear that no one awakens in their comfort zone, we counter with a more accurate and more generous proposition: Many of us awaken from a secure base.

The diver who plumbs the abyss is roped to a boat full of friends, and the pilgrim who sets out for the world’s end packs a knapsack and trusts she has a home to return to. The artist who descends into the underworld of the imagination does her bravest work because an animal part of her knows she is held.

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we have retired the archetype of the tormented genius. We have zero attraction to books and movies and songs by depressed jerks whose work is celebrated but whose lives are a mess.

Stories about supposedly interesting creeps don’t rouse our perverse fascination, because we’ve broken our addiction to perverse fascination. We kicked the habit the way one kicks any habit: slowly, with relapses, and with a great deal of help from people who had already gotten clean.

When hearing about illustrious creators who brag that they feel most stimulated when they’re angry or miserable, we unleash the Official Beauty and Truth Lab Histrionic Yawn.

We have learned to recognize the boast for what it is: not a report from the frontier of consciousness but a recruitment poster for a cult whose chief sacrament is self-harm.

We decline the invitation, having other plans for our one wild and precious nervous system.

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Sadly, many storytellers and artists are still addicted to the old delusions about the risks of good mental health. Even those who don’t view peace of mind as a threat to their creative power often believe that it’s a rare commodity attainable only through dumb luck.

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness,” said novelist Willa Cather. “One only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere.”

We generally love Cather’s writing, but we hereby register our respectful dissent to this formulation of hers.

Happiness isn’t a meteorite that may or may not happen to strike you. It’s a garden. It’s the consequence of attention paid daily over seasons, of weeding and watering and the patient observation of which plants thrive in your particular soil.

To say happiness comes only by luck is to confess that you have never tried to grow any.

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There is another obstacle to overthrowing the status quo. Oppressively nice, indiscriminately optimistic, sentimental comfort-hoarders give happiness a bad name. They seem to justify the novelist Flaubert’s mean-spirited observation that “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

But the happiness we champion isn’t stupid and selfish. It’s not the bovine contentment of a creature that has never had a difficult thought. It’s fierce, hard-won, clear-eyed, and fully aware of every horror the world contains. It just refuses to let those horrors have the last word.

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Here’s a third blotch on the reputation of happiness: that it’s mostly an absence of pain. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche frames the issue well: “Would you prefer the happiness of scratching a mosquito bite over the happiness of not having a mosquito bite in the first place?”

The tormented genius is forever scratching. He has mistaken the temporary relief of his self-inflicted itch for joy, and he can’t imagine a life in which the bite was never administered.

We are interested in the other kind of happiness, the unscratched kind that doesn’t require a wound to authenticate itself.

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It’s possible to define a more supple variety of happiness that doesn’t paralyze the will or sap ambition.

For the first clue about how to proceed, we turn to researchers Rick Foster and Greg Hicks. In their book How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People, they reveal that the number one trait of happy people is . . . can you guess? . . . a serious determination to be happy.

This shocking, iconoclastic assertion overturns everything the romance of suffering would have you believe. The happiest people aren’t the luckiest people. They are the most committed people, who treat their own well-being as a discipline worth practicing rather than a windfall worth awaiting.

Bliss is a habit we can cultivate, in other words, not an accident that we stumble upon by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere.

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News flash: In a culture that profits from our dissatisfaction and markets to our wounds and aches, choosing happiness on purpose is an act of rebellion.

The cynic imagines he is the brave one, the realistic adult. But we have come to suspect the opposite. Cynicism is the path of least resistance. It costs nothing and risks nothing and protects its owner from ever being caught caring.

The truly daring move, the genuinely dangerous and against-the-grain move, is to remain tender and hopeful and creatively alive in full view of everything that argues against it.

There’s a body of research that backs this up, too. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory tells us that joy, interest, and contentment feel good and also broaden the mind. They expand the range of thoughts and actions a person can call upon, widening the field of the possible.

Fear and despair narrow us to a single grim corridor of fight-or-flight. Delight throws open every door and invites us to explore the rooms we didn’t know were there. The muse, it turns out, has been telling P. J. Harvey the truth all along.

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For the final clue about how to conjure up a kind of happiness that doesn’t anesthetize the soul, we call on poet Kenneth Koch. Here’s what he wrote about Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse: “So many poets have the courage to look into the abyss. But Perse had the courage to look into happiness.”

Here is the answer to Eckhart Tolle and to every gospel that equates awakening with anguish. Looking into the abyss is the easy assignment. It has been done a trillion times. It’s the safe, expected, well-rewarded gesture. Ironically, it’s the true comfort zone of the modern artist, where applause is guaranteed and no one will ever accuse them of being naive. Any sad clever person can stare into the void and report back that it’s really fucking dark.

On the other hand, to look into happiness is bold and rebellious. It’s the work that few of us have the nerve for. How crazy demanding is it for any of us to gaze steadily at joy without flinching, without being ironic or sarcastic, without rushing to undercut it with a caveat, to take it as seriously and render it as precisely as other artists render their suffering.

That’s genuinely uncharted territory. We awaken outside our comfort zone not by courting the misery everyone expects of us. We dare the harder, stranger, more exposing thing: to be fully, bravely, creatively well.

But How Dare You, Now?

Some of you may already be drafting an indignant letter. How dare I counsel the cultivation of joy during the Trumpocalypse, with cruelty enthroned, with the sick and the poor and the hunted informed daily that their misery is the policy working exactly as intended.

To prescribe happiness now can sound not just unreasonable but obscene. I hear and honor that complaint. But here’s the precision: The happiness I champion isn’t the placid, passive contentment of the comfort-hoarder. It’s fierce, hard-won, clear-eyed, and fully aware of every horror the world contains.

If we announce we’re too heartsick for joy while the regime does its cruel work, then we perform the exact comfort-zone flinch we warned against, and feel righteous while performing it.

Those of us in pure, inconsolable despair keep missing the truth that demoralization is the evil regime’s intention. A machine built on cruelty requires your exhaustion. It manufactures the 3 a.m. dread and the slow leak of your ability to imagine anything better, because people too depressed to picture a livable future won’t lift a finger to build one. In the end, our uncompromising despair is compliance.

So I double the prescription, for me and everyone who considers this a worthy antidote. Get well-rested, well-loved, as happy as you can, and dangerous, too, because that’s how we will survive the fight for as long as it may take.

The bullies in power would love to see us too sad to build. Let’s refuse them that reflex.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of August 6

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Within most galaxies are dense clouds of gas and dust that astronomers call “star factories.” Here and there, the magic of gravity gradually gathers together diffuse material into concentrated clusters until nuclear fusion ignites, creating brilliant new suns. I suspect you will be operating a metaphorical star factory in the coming weeks and months, Leo. Small ideas, fragments of plans, or tentative experiments could coalesce in productive ways. Through your patient attention and care, luminous concentrations of useful beauty will emerge.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that evolution isn’t a ladder of progress but a branching bush of experimentation. Most species that ever existed are extinct, but they weren’t failures. For a very long time, they were successful experiments in being alive, well adapted to their environment. When conditions changed, they ended. That’s how evolution works. Let’s apply this lesson to your life, Virgo. If a part of your world is concluding, celebrate and thank it, then bid it a fond farewell. Feel grateful that it succeeded completely at what it was meant to do and gave you all it had to give.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Your sense of purpose is intensifying. Your people need you more than ever, and your gifts are ripening just as they are most valuable to your community. But I must add that the road ahead will not be frictionless. You will have to outmaneuver diversionary tactics and dispel pockets of confusion. To serve as a shimmering catalyst of beauty and truth for your allies—and a shrewd strategist in the presence of deflections—lean into the paradoxical counsel attributed to Jesus: Be gentle and pure like a dove, yet keenly perceptive and discerning like a serpent.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Concrete continues to cure beyond the time when it’s first poured. After seven days, it has 70 percent of its ultimate strength, and after 14 days, 90 percent. It usually keeps getting sturdier for a few months, even years. I propose that we use this as a metaphor for what you’re working on, Scorpio. The foundations you established a while back are still solidifying. Projects that are working pretty well are still developing potency. This is a good thing! Everything is slowly improving through processes you’re not actively managing.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Here’s your assignment: Find yourself a pair of enchanted pants that will bring you good luck and stir up fun. How will you know that they’re authentically charmed? Because when you put them on, you will instinctively wander toward adventures that expand your understandings about life. They may also lead you to explore places and situations that aren’t truly forbidden or taboo, but which you have oddly avoided as if they were forbidden or taboo. Finally, your enchanted pants are likely to inspire you to dream up a few crazy good ideas that will turn out not to be mostly good and not at all crazy.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In classical music, a “fermata” is a symbol on the sheet music that instructs the instrumentalist to hold a note longer than its written duration. How long? It’s unpredictable. The musician decides. I think your life would benefit from a metaphorical fermata or two, Capricorn—maybe even more. You won’t come to a protracted pause, but you will engage in strategic prolonging, extending certain notes beyond their expected duration. Examples? Lingering longer in a conversation from which you’re inclined to exit early; staying with an ambiguous emotion rather than rushing to resolution; allowing a project to develop more leisurely than you might if you were simply pushing for sheer efficiency. Opt for what’s soulful instead of what’s crisp and neat.

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Fate is subtly but insistently pressuring you to stop squandering energy on half-hearted, hand-me-down desires. Why? So your real, holy obsessions can move to the center of your attention. The tepid wishes and lukewarm yearnings are being exposed for what they are: distractions that nibble away at your time and passion without fully feeding your soul. As these mediocre drives fade in importance, you’ll be exultant to see how much more fire, clarity, and juice you have available for the few burning, churning yearnings that truly belong to you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is so deep that if Mount Everest were located at the bottom, its peak would be over a mile underwater. The deepest point in the ocean could swallow the highest point on land with room to spare. The world holds more below than above. Please meditate on this fun fact, Pisces. I hope it inspires you to understand that your most interesting power often lies in the depths, not the peaks. While others are summiting, you’re descending into the mysterious, fathomless interiors. Your explorations may not photograph well because they happen in darkness. But they are the source of your strength.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the early days of aviation, navigation instruments were rudimentary, and the skies were often a blur of clouds, darkness, or featureless horizons. Pilots sometimes relied on a technique called “dead reckoning”: good instinct bolstered by simple instruments like compasses and stopwatches. I suspect you will benefit from practicing a metaphorical version of dead reckoning in the coming weeks. You may not have all the data you would like, and the path ahead might be less than clear. But you already possess enough hints and inklings to make thoughtful approximations. If you’re alert and flexible, listening to subtle signals within you and around you, your evolving estimates will guide you uncannily close to the right destination.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson rarely left her comfortable home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her favorite activity was to sit in her bedroom and compose her odd, unique, brilliant poems. Eventually, she wrote 1,800 of them, though few were published during her lifetime. Today she is renowned as one of America’s great literary geniuses. Her story reminds us that magnificent growth may emerge from simple and humble circumstances. I suspect you will thrive if you borrow her strategy during the coming weeks. You don’t need a hubbub of flashy events to evoke your beauty. A period of creative stillness could amplify your imagination and inspire your dazzle.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In Renaissance workshops, apprentice painters learned their craft by assisting masters with small tasks. They mixed pigments, prepared canvases, and cleaned up. There was a valuable trade-off for this humble work. Being in proximity to mature brilliance often spurred the fledgling artists to harness their own creative powers. I suspect this dynamic is relevant for you, Gemini. Now is a favorable time to be alert for unexpected teachers and lessons. Be ready to apprentice yourself to captivating experiences where you might learn what you didn’t even realize you needed to know. Your willingness to be a curious, gracious student is your superpower.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): If you knew you were going to live to 95 in reasonably good health, what additional careers or adventures might you pursue? Visualize your lifespan stretching out before you like a wide winding road, where you will have plenty of time not just to survive, but to experiment, wander, and reinvent yourself. Would you train for a new craft or profession? Would you move to another country for a while and apprentice yourself to a language, landscape, or tradition that has always piqued your curiosity? I invite you to take a concrete step that moves you in the direction of interesting future fun.

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I protest and reject this quote, usually attributed to Rumi. The notion that silence represents pure, undiluted divine communication, while all other forms of expression constitute degraded approximations, strikes me as weird, wrong, and pretentious.

This quote proposes that the Divine Source, which I personally call the Goddess, speaks most authentically in the void between sounds.

Everything else is somehow inferior, a corruption of the original silent message: the cry of a newborn, the song of a mockingbird at dawn, the crash of waves against rocks, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “I love you” between partners.

I reject this mystical elitism.

The ranking of silence over sound rests on a dualism I distrust, in which spirit is purer than matter and the ineffable outranks the effable.

Nope. This is the old transcendence trap, the notion that we must escape the messy, noisy realm of embodied existence to access authentic spirituality.

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The opposite is true. The language of Goddess is the entire spectacular, multitudinous symphony of life.

When have I felt most connected to the life that’s larger than myself, most touched by the sacred? Sometimes this miracle has happened during silent meditation, but on other occasions, it has arisen when I’ve heard music that made me sob with reverent joy.

The sound of rain falling or my partner laughing can give me the same startled gratitude for being alive that may arrive when I’m floating in a sensory deprivation tank.

The natural world, recipient of so much of my worshipful adoration, doesn’t privilege silence. As I walk through a forest or stretch of wetland, I’m immersed in constant sound: wind through branches, insects humming, birds calling, streams gurgling, and the rustle of small creatures in the underbrush. This is the Divine language made manifest.

I don’t believe that the Goddess is trying to say something really important in the silence between bird songs, but the stupid birds keep interrupting.

Human language is our amazing capacity to transform interior experience into communicable form. The irony is that mystics who praise silence typically do so using words, often carefully chosen words arranged in precise patterns. If silence is the only authentic divine language, why bother?

Words create worlds and forge connections. They wound and heal. They make the invisible visible and the ineffable slightly less so.

Many religious traditions share the theme proclaimed in the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, Logos. The creative principle first itself expressed through articulation.

When Rumi (the actual Rumi, not the New Age ghost of him) wrote his ecstatic poetry, he was celebrating divine intoxication, exulting in the fecundity of a life that aches for expression. His poems are the universe speaking itself into being through a human throat.

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I’ll correct the record about who actually said the quote at the top.

The line is a paraphrase of Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk in Colorado who popularized a practice called Centering Prayer. In his book Invitation to Love he declared that silence is God’s first language and everything else a poor translation.

Keating was elaborating on St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish Carmelite friar, who taught that God the Father spoke one Word in eternity, spoke it in silence, and in silence we hear it.

So the meme’s genealogy runs like this: Spanish mystic to Trappist monk to New Age poster to the imaginary mouth of Rumi. The internet borrowed a glamorous Sufi to sell a piece of austere Christian metaphysics, because “silence is purest” plays better in an ecstatic desert than in a monastery down the road from the Aspen ski lifts.

The misattribution is a confession. People sense the doctrine needs a wilder, sexier sponsor than the one it actually has.

And it is a doctrine, not a mood. It belongs to what the contemplatives call the via negativa, the way of negation. This is the conviction that the Divine is the formless No-Thing hiding behind all the noisy somethings, and that we draw near to it only by stripping away every image, name, and sound, until nothing remains but a holy emptiness.

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You see the apostles of this doctrine everywhere, and they share a peculiar affliction. They can’t stop talking about how we ought to stop talking.

Ramana Maharshi, the renowned sage of Advaita Vedanta, taught that silence is the highest instruction, superior to any spoken teaching. He sometimes, not always, “taught” simply by sitting wordlessly in a room with his seekers.

We know this because those seekers wrote down every syllable he uttered and bound them into fat volumes of Talks. The wordless master survives entirely as words.

Meher Baba went further. In 1925 he took a vow of silence and kept it for 44 years, until his death, communicating first by pointing at letters on an alphabet board and later through an elaborate sign language. All the while, he promised that one day he would break his silence and speak the single Word that would transform the human race.

He never did. Yet during those four mute decades he produced books, God Speaks and the Discourses among them, dictated letter by laborious letter. Half a century of not-talking, and a small library to show for it.

Eckhart Tolle has built an empire on the gap between thoughts. The mind is the noise; the still space behind it is the real you, the doorway to Being. It takes him hundreds of pages and a permanent world tour to deliver this news.

Every apostle of wordlessness arrives lugging suitcases of words.

The performative contradiction is fun to point at. The metaphysics underneath is the harder problem.

When nondualists rank silence above sound, they state the entire architecture of their cosmos. Silence stands for the formless, changeless, unmanifest Absolute, the Real.

Sound stands for form, multiplicity, movement, matter, body: the realm of mere appearance, of maya, of the not-as-real and the not-as-pure.

The manifest world is a veil to be seen through, a degraded copy of a perfect, unsullied original.

All of this gets filed under static interfering with the silent signal: the cricket’s chirp, the lover’s laugh, the newborn’s first cry, and Beethoven’s Ninth.

In this curious philosophy, the bustling body is a problem. The restless Earth is a way station. The goal is to dissolve the noisy, particular, gorgeous, changing self back into the undifferentiated hush from which it supposedly leaked.

I want a different life. I experience our riotous, sound-drenched world as a beautiful treasure. The Goddess sings through creation, in the wind and the insects and the gurgling streams and the human throat raised in song. The Real True Actual Deep Reality doesn’t shut up.

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The elevation of silence as spiritually superior has caused a lot of trouble. Throughout history, the powerful have often told the powerless that their highest calling is to be quiet.

The New Testament’s First Letter to Timothy instructs women “to learn in silence with full submission.” America’s antebellum catechisms written for enslaved Africans made obedience without murmuring the road to heaven, while the white “masters” kept the franchise on speaking for God. In Canadian and American boarding schools, Indigenous children were not merely discouraged from speaking; they were often explicitly forbidden to speak their languages and punished for doing so.

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I’m not belittling silence. I treasure contemplative practice and the ability to still my mind’s constant chatter. I’ve spent my entire adult life cultivating the discipline of listening deeply rather than always broadcasting.

I love both silence and sound. Silence gives meaning to sound, and sound gives meaning to silence. They define each other.

I prefer to understand the language of Goddess as the dynamic interplay of expression and receptivity. In my celebration of life, the Divine is equally present in the cricket’s chirp and the pause between chirps.

As a lover of ineffable mystery and a celebrant of embodied life, I know that the sacred is right here, embedded in the gorgeous, terrible, beautiful mess of incarnate existence, including all the ways the world expresses itself through sound.

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I want a mysticism that doesn’t rank-order the modes of divine communication. Yes, there’s plenty of toxic talk, harmful language, and destructive sound. But the remedy is speech that celebrates connection rather than separation.

The universe isn’t trying to shut up and contemplate itself. It’s bursting at the seams, eager to communicate through every available channel.

Outside my window this morning, the mockingbird is running through his entire repertoire, car alarms included. Whatever the silence between his phrases is trying to tell me, I’d rather hear him.

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CODA: THE NOISE I’VE MADE

Most people who know my work know me as a person who arranges words on a page. But before I was a writer, and all through the years I was becoming one, I was a noisemaker.

I’ve been a musician, songwriter, and bandleader, most joyfully as the co-founder of World Entertainment War, whose fusion of rock, funk, punk, spoken word, and social commentary earned a devoted cult following, a contract with MCA Records, and management by Bill Graham.

I’ve also had another parallel career doing solo spoken-word shows with lots of music. My main contribution has been Sacred Uproar: A Pagan Revival Show, where poetry, storytelling, philosophy, music, humor, and ritual merge in a phenomenon that’s equal parts sermon, cabaret, and prankful spiritual insurrection.

I have six albums out in the world. They’re my exuberant personal evidence for the themes I’ve argued here.

Every live show I’ve done, well over a thousand, has been an experiment in these hypotheses: that the Divine can be summoned into a room by a holy racket; that hundreds of people dancing and breathing in the same rhythm at midnight are engaged in a liturgy as legitimate as any silent vigil.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of July 30

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Neurologists say that when you vividly imagine performing an action like shooting a basketball or playing piano, your brain activates many of the same networks it uses in real practice. In other words, mental rehearsal can measurably improve your actual performance. Many athletes use this trick. But here’s an interesting twist: Such visualizations work for emotional and social skills too. We can enhance our resilience and better regulate our moods if we practice doing so in the privacy of our imaginations. I bring this to your attention, Leo, because you’re in a period when your fantasy life has extra-robust practical power. I invite you to rehearse being who you want to be in the theater of your mind.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Your assignment: Compose a vigorous prayer in which you ask life for something you fear you don’t deserve or are not supposed to want. What is the blessing, healing, or freedom that feels “too much,” “too selfish,” “too late,” or “too impossible” for you to yearn for? Name this prize and how you imagine it might allow you to give more, love more, or live more honestly. You could begin your appeal with these words: “Dear Great Mystery, I’m nervous about asking for this, but I will ask anyway,” and then let your heart speak without editing. Do this at least once every day for ten days.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In 1848, a Libra-born carpenter named James Marshall discovered a few glittering flakes of gold floating on the American River in California. His find ignited the Gold Rush, drawing hundreds of thousands of people westward. Alas, Marshall himself never became rich from the discovery, though many other people did. I’m hoping and predicting a different outcome when you locate treasure in the coming weeks, Libra. In this instance, you will share in the spoils.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The lyrebird can imitate almost any sound, including chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters, and other birds’ songs. But they don’t just mimic sounds randomly. They compose elaborate performances, weaving a variety of imitations into complex acoustic tapestries. In a sense, they are remix artists. During the coming weeks, Scorpio, I hope you give yourself permission to resemble a lyrebird. Sample freely from everything you’ve absorbed. Weave your influences into new configurations. Express your imaginative concoctions of repurposed ideas and enchantments. The voice isn’t less yours because it borrows from other voices. Originality is in part about arrangement, not just source material.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Astronauts who have orbited Earth describe the “overview effect.” Viewing the entire globe from high above triggers rich epiphanies and cognitive shifts, providing a visceral sense of the planet’s fragility and unity. Borders dissolve. Conflicts seem absurd. I surmise you are ripe for a similar blessing, Sagittarius. You’ll be able to see your current dramas from expansive vantage points that make their true scale and significance obvious. Armed with these perspectives, you will naturally clarify your priorities and allow petty concerns to fade away.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You are the result of an ancestral crowd: two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Without these 14 lives weaving together in the precise ways they did, your unique destiny would never have taken shape. Their choices and challenges helped sculpt your gifts and your rough edges, your cravings and your turn-offs. The coming weeks will be a ripe astrological moment to get more intimate with this lineage. As you delve into your family’s stories, you may uncover vital clues for refreshing your views on dilemmas that have dragged on for a while. Are you daring enough to let your sense of “where I come from” evolve—and, with it, your sense of what kind of future you want to create?

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You may have noticed that I give away my horoscopes for free here and on my website. I love it when people buy paid subscriptions to my newsletter, but they’re under no obligation to do so. It’s free for everyone who wants it to be free.

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In addition to paid subscribers, another way I raise funds is by creating Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text Message Horoscopes that DO cost money. If you would like to buy them, thereby contributing to my welfare, I invite you to partake. They’re here: RealAstrology.com

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): According to my investigations, there’s a place you need to go, but fear or timidity is holding you back. Where is it? Is it a physical location, a creative risk, a complicated conversation, or a spiritual threshold? Visualize it. Who would you be if you appeared there in your full glory? What do you worry might happen if you do? What interesting future might never bloom if you don’t? I hope you formulate a feisty plan. To begin, write these words: “If I decide to go there anyway, acknowledging my fear but not being controlled by it, what first step will I take and what help will I seek?”

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Professional athletes sometimes talk about “winning ugly.” That’s when they achieve a victory even though they haven’t played their very best. I foresee you using that phrase for yourself soon, after you notch a less-than-pretty but undeniably real success. There’s another expression you might also exemplify, too: “ugly ripe.” Officially, it’s the name of luscious heirloom tomatoes whose lumpy, offbeat forms contrast with the smooth, bland specimens stacked in most supermarket bins. In the coming weeks, it will describe the nonstandard yet succulent flavor of your life.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries artist Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles, France, for 15 months in 1888 and 1889. It was the most prolific time of his career. His buoyant genius overflowed, pouring out over 200 paintings, including the lavish *Sunflowers* series. I suspect you will enjoy your own surge of splashy productivity in the coming months. It may not be as manically generative as van Gogh, though. I think your creativity will be rather relaxed and deeply healing. Start planning now for how you want to channel all this imaginative exuberance.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I invite you to clear out every fixed idea your mind carries about where you are “supposed” to be. Once you have made that inner space wide and uncluttered, begin a fresh inquiry into the nature of your real home. Use questions like these to navigate: 1. What’s the first place you think of when you come across the word “sanctuary”? 2. Which environments reliably bring out your brightest, truest qualities? 3. Do you have what you would call power spots? If so, how do they make you feel in your body and psyche? 4. Which locations on Earth fascinate you, even if you have never visited them? 5. Could there be a future dwelling that offers a more peak-level experience of home than the familiar place where tradition now soothes you?

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The brain doesn’t literally multitask. It rapidly shifts attention between tasks, creating the illusion of simultaneity. For many people, each interchange costs mental energy and reduces efficiency. But some brains can switch faster with a lower energy cost, making them better at sustained task-switching. I’m sure you can guess the identity of the zodiac’s number one task-switcher: you, of course! And the good news is that in the coming weeks, you will be even more adept than usual in wielding your superpower. One implication is that you will know when not to overdo it and when not to use it trivially. You will be a master of seamless, effective, and meaningful transitions.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Astronomers know that many stars don’t travel alone. Binary stars orbit each other for eons, their mutual gravity shaping each partner’s destiny. I propose we make this your featured metaphor in the coming months. It will be a favorable time to de-emphasize the notion that strength and creative power require complete autonomy. I suspect that flexible, spirited interdependence will generate far better results than lonely self-sufficiency. Which alliances and relationships will expand your orbit rather than shrink it? Invest in them.

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Who Makes You Feel Real?

I don’t think I’m boring. I have an abundant curiosity, and I love to learn new things. I’ve worked at many different jobs, read widely, and enjoyed interacting with a broad range of humans.

Give me a stranger on a train or an untranslatable word in a language I’ll never speak, and I will find in it a reason to be more awake than I was a moment before.

And yet.

Now and then across the years, I’ve slipped into temporary relationships with people who regarded me as uninteresting. In their eyes I seemed to register as beige. They’ve seen me as forgettable, a background figure in their more vivid movie. They didn’t see much of value in me.

I’m tempted to believe it was entirely their fault. They couldn’t see me for who I really am. But I suspect something more unsettling was also going on.

It’s possible I lived down to their expectations. Their quiet conviction that I was dull may have subtly instructed me to become dull. In their company, I didn’t have full access to my own beauty. I lost touch, at least a little, with my own aliveness.

This rather appalling possibility suggests that our vividness isn’t a fixed possession we carry around like a wallet, always available and immune to circumstance. It’s more like a flame that needs oxygen, and the people around us are part of our air supply. Some of them fan the blaze. Others seem to smother it.

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We like to imagine that the self is a solid, self-generating thing. If we were truly authentic, we would radiate the same wattage in every room, unaffected by who’s watching. It’s a noble fantasy. But it doesn’t match my experience of being a living creature among other living creatures.

The more accurate truth is that we are partly called into being by the attention of others. A child becomes more fully a child under the delighted gaze of a parent who finds her fascinating. A musician plays better for an audience that leans in. And we all become more completely, unmistakably ourselves in the presence of certain people who give us permission to unfurl.

Being seen accurately is a nutrient. When someone perceives us as we really are, in the wild specificity of our idiosyncratic soul, they transcend the flattened caricature or the version that’s convenient for them. And as we bask in their appreciation, we remember things about ourself we had half-forgotten. Our jokes get funnier and our questions get braver. We feel real.

The reverse is just as potent. If we spend enough time being treated as smaller or more boring than we are, we may begin, against our own will, to comply. Not because it’s true, but because it takes an enormous, exhausting effort to keep being vividly ourself in front of someone who has decided we’re not.

Art by Valeri tsenov

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Now I’ll turn away from my lament and focus on my stubborn faith that life is conspiring to help us thrive.

That dull, deflated feeling in the wrong company is useful information. It’s our soul’s way of saying, “This isn’t your habitat. The light here doesn’t reach your particular colors.”

So the discomfort is a gift, if we’re willing to read it as one. It’s a compass needle swinging toward the places where we actually belong.

Because there really are people in whose presence we become more, not less. There are animals who love us without a single agenda, who reflect back a version of us that’s worthy simply by existing. In some situations, we slip effortlessly into the fullness of our gifts and forget to worry about whether we’re impressive.

So I’ll offer you the two questions that may help you organize your own life, as they do mine:

1. Which people, animals, influences, and situations make you feel real?

2. Who and what encourages you to be your authentic self?

Notice how your body answers before your mind does: A name or a face surfaces, or maybe an activity you’ve been neglecting because it doesn’t earn money or look productive. That flicker of warmth or longing is the trailhead.

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I bring this up to encourage you to do what can feel selfish but is in fact an act of profound self-respect: Remove yourself, whenever you reasonably can, from situations where you have trouble being and feeling your true self.

I don’t mean you should flee at the first sign of discomfort or demand that everyone perpetually validate you. Real relationships do involve friction, challenge, and the occasional bruising honesty that helps us grow. There’s a difference between someone who sees you clearly enough to lovingly disagree with you and someone who simply doesn’t see you at all.

What I’m naming is subtler and more corrosive: the chronic, low-grade experience of shrinking. Like the friendships where you perform a smaller edition of yourself. Or the rooms you leave feeling vaguely erased, wondering where your personality went.

You are allowed, in fact, I would say you’re obligated, to protect your aliveness from those places: out of reverence for the improbable miracle of your own consciousness.

And here’s the reciprocal magic, the part that turns this from mere self-care into activism: As you seek out the people who make you feel real, resolve to be that person for others. Become a fanner of flames. Look at the humans and creatures in your orbit with the generous, curious gaze that assumes there is far more to them than meets the casual eye.

See them so accurately and warmly, that they stand up straighter in your presence and remember who they are. This is one of the most quietly revolutionary things a person can do. It costs nothing and it changes everything.

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A proposed experiment: Make an actual list on paper, in ink. Title it: The People, Animals, Influences, and Situations That Make Me Feel Real.

Don’t censor. Include the friend who laughs at your strangest thoughts and the dog who greets you like you’ve just returned from war. Include the particular chair by the window where your best ideas arrive and the collaborator who treats your half-formed notions as treasure.

Then, gently and without drama, begin steering your life toward that list. Give those beings and places more of your hours.

You’re not boring and never were. You have simply, at times, been standing in the wrong light. So please go find the light that reveals your true colors. And while you’re at it, become a source of that light for everyone lucky enough to cross your path.

Addendum: In Praise of the Longing

Some readers may read my essay above and protest. They will reach for a famous prayer expressed by a certain self-help guru whose work I have mixed feelings about. This teacher says: “If I had a prayer, it would be this: ‘God spare me from the desire for love, approval, or appreciation. Amen.’”

In a moment, I’ll answer that prayer with a different one. Before I do, I’ll let you know that I reject this teacher’s sterile counsel. Not politely. Not with a nod toward how there’s wisdom on both sides. I just flat-out repudiate it.

To long for love and want approval are not weaknesses leaking through a crack in our enlightenment. They’re the felt evidence of our interdependence. Our body knows instinctively that we are made of each other and that each self is a collaboration.

Ask any mammal. Ask the elder whose loneliness shortens their life more efficiently than cigarettes. Our craving for each other’s care isn’t a spiritual error to be transcended. It’s a biological fact wearing the mask of a feeling.

I would rather be tenderly entangled than serenely untouchable.

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There is tremendous freedom in yearning for the care of others. That sounds like a paradox but isn’t.

The person who has renounced all need for appreciation has purchased their invulnerability at a steep price: They have made themselves unreachable. Nothing can wound them because nothing can enter. They have achieved a kind of safety that’s indistinguishable from not being home.

Whereas I very much want to be home. I want to be susceptible to the good opinion of people I admire, because their good opinion is information about whether my love is arriving and whether the thing I meant to say is the thing that got heard.

So yes, I strive for others’ approval and appreciation and love. I have done this my whole life and I intend to keep doing it. It has made me a better artist and a better human being. The wish to be worthy of my beloveds’ regard has pulled me, again and again, toward more more generosity and more courage than I would have summoned alone in a room with only my own standards for company.

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The teaching of the famous self-help guru implies there are only two available positions:

1. “I am obsessed with being appreciated, and therefore I betray every one of my own interests to get it.”

2. “I care nothing for anyone’s appreciation. I serve only my own needs and my own inner commands.”

But the fact is that between those two poles there is an enormous, fertile territory. Most of the good life happens there.

I live there. I am, I suspect, the most self-sufficient person I know. I satisfy my own fierce standards first and last, and no amount of applause will convince me that a weak sentence I’ve written is a strong one.

AND I also relish my need for the love of people who respect me and treat me well. I revere that need. I feed it and keep it well-watered.

There’s no contradiction. The desire to be loved and the discipline of holding one’s own sovereignty are not rivals for the same throne. They are two hands doing different work on the same instrument.

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I’ll grant the sane kernel inside the famous self-help guru’s prayer. There is certainly a version of the hunger for approval that can be tyrannical. Like the performer who no longer knows what they think, only what will please. Or the person who dissolves in every room to match its temperature. That phenomenon is real, and it’s a form of suffering that deserves compassion and repair.

But the cure for a distorted appetite isn’t the abolition of appetite. We don’t treat compulsive eating by praying for the end of hunger. We don’t cure jealous love by extinguishing love. The work is to metabolize the longing well. How can we want appreciation from people whose appreciation actually means something? How can we let it nourish us without letting it govern us?

Personally, I want to treasure my own compass while remaining warmly and riskily open to being moved by others.

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So here’s my prayer: May I never be spared of the desire for love. May I keep needing the regard of the people I cherish, and may that need make me kinder, wiser, wilder, more useful, and more awake.

And may I never mistake defended numbness for freedom.

Art by Yvonne Coomber

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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Find out more about the ASTROLOGY BOOKS I’ve written for you:

tinyurl.com/AstrologyBooksForYou

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of July 23

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Oak trees produce far more acorns than could ever grow into trees. Squirrels bury thousands and forget many of them, preparing the way for the next generation of forest. The trees succeed through strategic overproduction. I invite you to adopt their method, Leo. In the coming weeks, overproduce. Make more than you can track. Release more than you can manage. You don’t need to be perfect, just abundant. PS: This expansive capacity is yours to explore with delight and confidence, I guarantee it.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In the 19th century, Virgo naturalist Alexander von Humboldt helped launch the modern science of ecology. While exploring South America, he came to a revolutionary conclusion that’s obvious to us now: Nature isn’t a collection of separate objects but an intricate web of relationships. Mountains shape the weather. The plants and pollinators rely on each other. Underground mycelial networks perform many services for the trees. I propose that you channel your inner Humboldt, Virgo. Shift your focus away from isolated problems and instead observe the larger systems. Solutions may be elusive when you’re bound to a narrow view but strikingly clear when you perceive the wider pattern. If you’d like to take bold action, rely on the spacious perspective.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The coming months will be a favorable time to triple your devotion to the art of rowdy fun. I urge you to attend more revels and celebrations than usual, and always be ready to energize social functions with infusions of festive wit and gleeful conviviality. You will also have extra power to inject buoyant amusements into your intimate liaisons. Therefore, dear Libra, I designate you to be the Party Maestro of the Zodiac. I hope you will carry out your role with maximum exuberance, ingenuity, and joy.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): What if I told you that your most personal and potent dream can come true—but only through months of persistence, disciplined sacrifice, and stretches of bewildering but fascinating uncertainty? Would you reorder your priorities to chase it with every ounce of creativity you have? Or would you set it aside in favor of a safer and easier possibility? Between now and the end of October, I predict the moment will arrive to choose one path or the other.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): On some occasions, you just don’t have the power to act with impeccable integrity and do the totally right thing. Doing the partially right thing may, however, be a useful and compassionate option. I bet this will soon be helpful advice for you. Blunt truth: There are moments when the “perfect” ethical, emotional, or practical choice simply isn’t available: The timing is off, resources are thin, or someone else’s limits block the ideal outcome. In those situations, waiting around for the flawless solution is a kind of paralysis that keeps you stuck in guilt or indecision. Instead, you can aim for the best available good.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In botany and gardening, there is a practice called “companion planting.” Certain plants thrive when grown near each other because they share nutrients, repel or distract pests, or improve soil and microclimate. Here’s an example: Indigenous peoples of the Americas planted the “Three Sisters” together: Corn gave beans a living trellis, beans added nitrogen to the soil, and squash shaded the ground to hold moisture and deter weeds. This principle may be useful for you to contemplate now, Capricorn. The people, tools, and influences you place near one another will influence your productivity and well-being. By blending complementary energies, your efforts will flourish without strain.

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IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECASTS for YOU

You have just one more week to listen, and then they’ll vanish.

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR DESTINY with my Expanded Audio Horoscopes for the Second Half of 2026.

How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself in the coming months? What well-informed and ingenious approaches can you use to get the most out of the raw materials you’re presented with?

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, GO HERE:

https://RealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2026.”

The in-depth, long-range Expanded Audio horoscopes cost $7 apiece if you access them online. Discounts are available for bulk purchases. Each forecast is 6-8 minutes long.

You can also hear a short-term forecast for the week ahead by clicking on “This week (July 21, 2026.)”

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Author Alain de Botton observed that “the person we marry is always far more remarkable, frightening, and complex than we quite realized when we first declared our love.” Rather than feeling alarmed by this revelation, I invite you to find it thrilling as you apply it to your best allies. The fact that they contain mysteries you haven’t yet plumbed means the relationships aren’t likely to grow stale. There are undiscovered depths in those you may think you know completely. My advice: Approach even your most familiar intimacies as ongoing discoveries.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Do you ever fear or distrust your own desires? Are you suspicious of achieving “too much” success? Do you ever feel starved for hope, but belittle yourself for wanting it? Do you go emotionally blank in the face of possibilities that should thrill you? If so, the coming weeks could bring healing and a breakthrough. You will have a chance to perform a rare kind of exorcism—not of garish demons or foolish ghosts, but of the quiet defeatism and lack of faith that dull your brilliance. Seize this moment, dear Pisces! Purge the automatic doubts that the world has trained you to mistake for wisdom.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Authentic love songs are rare. Much of contemporary music leans toward infatuation, sex, heartbreak, and fury, while few artists seem interested in singing unabashedly about unique expressions of tenderness and enduring devotion. In the months ahead, Aries, your inner life will be gloriously out of step with that trend. Your heart is poised to wake up in sometimes surprising ways. Even if you’re not a trained vocalist, you may feel regular urges to express your passion and adoration in song. If I could give you a gift, it might be a curated playlist packed with the most radiant love songs of the last 60 years, so you’d have a soundtrack worthy of the lush emotions that I suspect will bloom in you.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Nobel Prize-winning Taurus physicist Richard Feynman kept a notebook titled “Things I Don’t Know About.” When he came across a question he couldn’t answer, he added it to the collection. I recommend a similar discipline for you now, Taurus, but with a twist. Keep a log of “Beautiful Mysteries I Don’t Really Need to Solve.” Rejoice that not every paradox and puzzle needs resolution. Savor the fun fact that some riddles enrich your life precisely because they remain open-ended. Hooray for not knowing! My theory is that some of your finest qualities will flourish in the presence of productive uncertainty.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): In the early days of radio broadcasting, engineers sometimes spoke of “tuning the receiver.” Even when a station was transmitting clearly, a listener might hear static until their radio dial was adjusted to exactly the right frequency. The message was present and clear; the challenge was homing in on it. There’s a similar phenomenon going on in your life, Gemini. Useful information, fun inspiration, and interesting possibilities may be circulating in your vicinity. But you will need to adjust your attention so you can actually receive it. To bring the signals into focus, listen differently. Or pose alternate questions. Or pay attention to sources you don’t usually notice.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Neuroscientists have found that remembering the past and imagining the future rely on many of the same brain networks. That overlap helps explain why vivid visualization may influence our emotions and behavior. When we repeatedly simulate alarming scenarios about what could conceivably happen, our brains treat them much like memories. This makes us prone to spotting “threats” in places that may be relatively safe. The good news is that the coming months will be an excellent time to retrain this habit, Cancerian. More than ever, your imagination can be a precision instrument you use to recalibrate yourself away from fear and toward possibility. Fantasize about wonderful possibilities with the same intensity that in the past you have dwelled on scary speculations.

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The Glorious Incompleteness of Now

You are magnificently unfinished.

I don’t mean this as consolation for your failures or a pacifier for your impatience. It’s a wild, insurgent fact that changes everything about how you regard this peculiar moment you’re living through. Even if this is a moment when you can’t tell whether you’re evolving or devolving.

You are not yet who you will become.

You are a gorgeous, flawed rough draft. The person you’ll be in five years would probably laugh affectionately at the things you’re certain about right now. They’d recognize you the way you might recognize your adolescent self in an old photograph: “Oh yes, that’s definitely me, but wow, I had no idea what I was growing into.”

Your current struggle is still transforming into wisdom. The pain you’re feeling is like compost that hasn’t finished its work. Maybe it even smells, is rotting, and is still a mess. But give it time and tending, and it will become rich soil. The very thing that’s breaking you down is breaking you open. You’re hosting the fertile ground for what wants to grow through you next.

Maybe your confusion has not yet clarified into purpose. That’s probably good. Clarity that arrives too early is just premature certainty, and premature certainty is the death of genuine transformation.

Real purpose usually emerges slowly, the way your eyes adjust to darkness. First there’s nothing but murk and stumbling. Then oh-so-gradually, you begin to make out shapes and find your footing. The confusion isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s the medium through which you’re learning to see.

So yeah, the mess may not yet be fully composted into soil. But here’s what composting teaches us: Nothing is wasted in the ecosystem of a life. Everything breaks down to feed what comes next.

Those things you call failures? They’re ingredients. The ending that looms has not yet revealed the beginning it portends.

Endings are tricksters. They pretend to be conclusions when they’re actually thresholds. Every time you think the story is over, you’re just at the part where the protagonist loses what they thought they needed.

You know what comes next in every worthwhile story? The real adventure begins, which couldn’t have happened if everything had gone according to plan.

In sum: You are far from done.

I can’t emphasize this enough. You are so magnificently, frustratingly, gloriously far from done. The story is not yet over. The verdict is not yet in. And anyone who tells you otherwise, including the critic in your own head, is speaking prematurely.

You have not yet met everyone who will love you. Some of your most important people are still strangers. They’re out there right now, living their own unfinished stories, heading toward the intersection where your paths will cross. You can’t imagine them yet. You don’t know their names or their faces or the specific ways they’ll reshape your understanding of what it means to be known and cherished. But they’re coming.

You have not yet become delightfully impossible in the ways you’ll eventually become delightfully impossible.

That might be my favorite fact of all. Right now, you might be trying hard to be possible—to be reasonable, to be acceptable, to fit into the narrow slot the world seems to have assigned you. You may be editing yourself, hedging your bets, and playing it safe.

But the you that’s still emerging, the future version who has metabolized all this confusion and beauty and struggle and education and mess, is going to be so wonderfully, unapologetically, deliciously impossible that your current self wouldn’t believe it.

The future you will say things your current self is too afraid to say. They’ll pursue longings your current self keeps locked in a compartment marked “impractical.” I bet they will even laugh at things that aren’t funny to anyone else and find grace and meaning in places respectable people overlook and make choices that cause certain relatives to shake their heads in fond exasperation. That future self will be weird in precisely the ways you’re destined to be weird. And they won’t apologize for it.

The path from who you are to who you’re becoming isn’t a straight line. It’s more like a mycelial network spreading underground, connecting seemingly unrelated experiences, feeding the fruit that will eventually break the surface. You can’t rush it. You can only trust that the incompleteness isn’t a deficiency but a promise.

So here you are: unfinished, in process, still becoming. The caterpillar in the chrysalis doesn’t know it’s becoming a butterfly. It just dissolves into chaos and trusts the intelligence of transformation. Maybe that’s what you’re doing too. You’re not lost or behind schedule, but dissolving into the necessary chaos that precedes the next iteration of you.

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I’ve written an extra message for those of you in your sixties and seventies. Read it here: tinyurl.com/ElderWisdomNow

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And here’s a healing rant for all you unfinished souls, a bonus message: tinyurl.com/CongratsOnUpgrade

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I’ve published a new book:

Free Will Astrology: Love Oracles to Liberate Your Imagination: Aries

This collection is a tender and rowdy guide to understanding and embodying the Aries energy. It offers oracles, insights, and provocations to help Aries natives, their allies, and anyone who aspires to cultivate courage, candor, and daring.

Read the first few pages here: tinyurl.com/LiberatedAries

Confession: I had a beautifully orderly plan to publish all 12 astrology books in graceful succession. Life had other ideas.

So Aries arrives first, gloriously ahead of the caravan.

The other 11 books are deep in their final beautification rituals and will follow as soon as they’ve finished negotiating with Time, Fate, and the publishing gremlins.

Meanwhile, I’m delighted to offer you this first volume. I poured decades of liberated love, wild hope, and imagination into it. I think it’s a beauty. And I fully intend for the other 11 to be its worthy companions.

Where to buy: Ingram, only store with a 25% discount: tinyurl.com/IngramAries

Bookshop: tinyurl.com/BookshopAries

Barnes & Noble: tinyurl.com/NobleAries

Amazon: tinyurl.com/AmazonAries

ThriftBooks: tinyurl.com/ThriftAries

KoboBooks: tinyurl.com/KoboAries

It’s also available at Apple Books. Do a search for Rob Brezsny and “Free Will Astrology: Aries: Love Oracles to Liberate Your Imagination.”

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Check out my music and spoken word: televisionary.bandcamp.com/

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of July 16

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Make a list of your five greatest pleasures. These are experiences that stir your senses, steady your pulse, and remind you why you love being alive. Write them down as if they were sacred prayers. Sing a spontaneous song of praise of them. Then set out on a quest to discover pleasure number six. This is a delight you have never tasted, touched, or imagined before. Maybe it will come from saying yes to a possibility you usually decline. Treat this experiment as a form of worship and a way to boost your devotion to your healing life force.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): According to neuroscientists, the “default mode network” is the area of your brain that lights up when you’re daydreaming, drifting through thoughts and feelings, and letting your imagination roam around. This is when your deep self does crucial work: weaving memories into stories, making creative connections, rehearsing possible futures, and forging your sense of identity. I mention this, Leo, because the coming days will be prime time for you to indulge lavishly in this healing and restorative activity. Don’t let a task-obsessed world shame you out of your reveries. Your genius will bloom from their slowly swirling flow.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Here are three gentle nudges: 1. One of your trusty tools or assets still seems to be working fine, but I suggest you look into the possibility that it will soon need repair. 2. Unless you act proactively to ease the strain on your system, a mini-breakdown could be on the horizon. 3. The monster hiding in your closet is hibernating, which makes this the perfect time to summon an exorcist before it rouses. Here’s the very good news, dear Virgo: Because you are reading this oracle, you are now armed with all you need to stave off turmoil and head in the direction of an exciting renaissance.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Researchers who study improvisational jazz have found that master musicians often anticipate each other’s ideas milliseconds before anyone actually plays the notes. Their brains become exquisitely synchronized through deep listening rather than rigid planning. Maybe more than any other sign, you Libras possess a similar aptitude in managing your intimate alliances and social connections. In the coming weeks, this superpower will be even more necessary and available than usual. I’ll provide a reminder: Pay less attention to what people claim to mean and more attention to the rhythms beneath their words. Let your intuition guide you. The subtly shared timing will generate elegant cooperation.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “It’s bad luck to be superstitious!” is a delightful paradox that I enjoy playing with. It makes fun of our tendency to believe that invisible forces are constantly keeping score on our behavior. On one level, the phrase pokes at the way superstition multiplies anxiety instead of easing it. If you really believed it’s bad luck to be superstitious, then your belief about bad luck would itself be a superstition. So you’d have to avoid the very thinking pattern you’re using to feel safer. It exposes how easily the mind can tie itself in knots trying to control the uncontrollable. On another level, “it’s bad luck to be superstitious” is an invitation to examine which of your little rituals are entertaining and nourishing and which are cages. Keeping a lucky stone in your pocket is fine if it amuses you, but believing you’re doomed if you don’t carry the stone isn’t so fine. My advice: Notice when your charm or taboo is no longer a quirky companion, but starts being a tyrant that shrinks your freedom.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Are you the type of Sagittarius who pushes open doors with “pull” signs on them? Do you get a secret kick out of opening boxes from the end that says “open other side”? Maybe you even yack on your phone in designated quiet zones. If so, I’d like to suggest channeling your rebellious spark into grander acts. In the weeks ahead, you will be carrying some potent renegade energy. Used wisely, your radiant defiance could topple a stagnant situation that’s overdue for change.

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IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECASTS for YOU

You have two more weeks to listen, and then they’ll vanish.

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR DESTINY with my Expanded Audio Horoscopes for the Second Half of 2026.

How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself in the coming months? What well-informed and ingenious approaches can you use to get the most out of the raw materials you’re presented with?

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, GO HERE:

https://RealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page, and then click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2026.”

The in-depth, long-range Expanded Audio horoscopes cost $7 apiece if you access them online. Discounts are available for bulk purchases. Each forecast is 6-8 minutes long.

You can also hear a short-term forecast for the week ahead by clicking on “This week (July 14, 2026.)”

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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Many healers favor the slow-and-steady path. They often meet with people once a week, trusting that even stubborn issues must be unwoven with patience and gentleness. But there are also bold experimenters who work differently. I know an acupuncturist who invites clients to live at her clinic for six days straight, offering a new treatment every two hours during the waking hours. She creates a healing immersion chamber. That’s the spirit I recommend for you in the coming weeks, Capricorn. You’re at the threshold of resolving a long-standing imbalance. What will serve you best isn’t dabbling at it but offering it focused, sustained, wholehearted attention until the shift activates.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You can refresh and boost your ambition if you give it a firm, precise adjustment sometime soon. Your raw vitality will surge back if you refrain from indulging in a careless habit that has been draining it. Your willpower and determination have been weakened by the fallout from an old misstep, but you now have the clarity needed to repair that error. Your libidinous energy is not as clear and potent as it could be, but it will become so once you get more honest about what truly excites you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You’re like an arrow that has been shot from a bow and is three-quarters of the way to the target. You’re a delicious meal still simmering on the stove, or a pregnancy at seven months, or the last two weeks before a major election. When I tuned my inner vision to you, I glimpsed a honeybee wriggling a dance to show its coworkers where a stand of blooming lilac awaits. Have you ever been on the verge of speaking a new language with ease? That’s where you are now, Pisces: just before true fluency clicks.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In honor of the intensive homecoming phase of your astrological cycle, I have homework for you. 1. Make a prediction about how old you will be when you know precisely who you are. 2. Forecast the day when you will look in the mirror and recognize your face as an intricate portrait of every experience you have ever loved. 3. Imagine the dawn when the boundary between your own longing and life’s longing will dissolve, revealing they’ve always been the same current. 4. Predict when your heart will be as wild and free and brave as you have always wanted it to be.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Ornithologists studying migration know that some birds don’t fly directly to their destination. They follow “leading lines.” These are geographical features like coastlines and mountain ranges that provide orientation. Even when this means taking a longer route, the certainty of having a guiding landmark outweighs the efficiency of a straight line across nondescript terrain. I recommend the birds’ approach to you in the coming weeks, Taurus. Follow your own leading lines: practices and intuitions that provide lucid orientation even when they don’t offer shortcuts. The indirect path offers the surety you need.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): What’s an important truth you keep forgetting about? Maybe it’s a promise you once made to yourself, or an understanding that your younger self knew, or a wisdom your body keeps trying to communicate while your mind ignores it. What truth returns again and again in different guises: through synchronicities, seemingly random comments from friends, recurring dreams, or the same lesson repeating in new situations? What crucial insights about life do you remember during crisis or ecstasy, only to abandon them once normalcy returns? Now is a favorable time to fully recover this lesson and install it firmly at the heart of your life.

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I will begin by dismantling the compliment before anyone tries to hand it to me. When I strive to dismantle misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, I’m not merely being kind. When I devote my wild imagination to enhancing and celebrating the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people, my motivation goes way beyond an expression of niceness.

Niceness is a thin, well-behaved thing. It’s a way of being pleasant while changing nothing. What I’m doing is more selfish and sacred than that.

Here’s my confession: I do this work because I want to live in a gorgeous world, and I have understood for as long as I can remember that I can’t live in a gorgeous world while so much of it is caged.

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I was raised, as most straight white men are raised, inside an invisible bargain. The deal went like this: Accept a narrowed life, and in exchange you will be handed a little extra power. If you will only amputate your tenderness, ration your tears, treat your feelings as a security risk, and learn to dominate rather than to commune, then you will be permitted to stand a half-step above the women and the queer and nonbinary people and anyone else the culture diminishes.

I saw through it early. As a young man I understood, in my body before I could have argued it, that this was a robbery disguised as a coronation. The patriarchy did its utmost best to train me to devalue the feminine. It also tried to train me to deprecate the feminine in myself, including my own capacity for sensitivity, deep feelings, receptivity, and a sense of wonder.

The homophobia that the patriarchy tried to foist on me didn’t merely target other men who love men. It tried to install in me and every boy a low-grade panic that policed every unguarded affection and every place where male love might spill past its assigned borders. I watched it happen to other boys, but luckily it never took hold in me. I simply didn’t buy the fear. I didn’t accept that tenderness between men was a threat to be managed rather than one of the plain glories of being alive.

And I could see, even then, where the whole apparatus was headed: toward the lie that the self is a prison sentence rather than a work of art and that a person is stuck being whatever rigid roles they were assigned. I refused to believe that about anyone, which meant I got to refuse to believe it about myself, too.

I knew instinctively that every wall I was told to build against someone else’s freedom would turn out to be a wall inside my own imagination. So I refused to build them. And I as I emerged into adulthood, I got loud about it.

In the 1970s I turned my rock bands into loudspeakers for a high-intensity feminism and an unapologetic advocacy for gay rights and safety. For a straight white man in those years, this wasn’t a fashionable stance to strike; it was closer to a provocation. I caught a lot of shit for it from men who felt betrayed by a defector, from people who couldn’t fathom why I’d volunteer for a fight that wasn’t, as they saw it, mine to fight. But it was mine. It has always been mine. I wasn’t slumming as an ally. I was refusing to be swindled.

So when I fight for women and LGBTQ+ people, I am also fighting for the exiled parts of myself. This isn’t altruism performing a good deed for the less fortunate. It’s a jailbreak motivated by my clarity that we’re all susceptible to being snared in the same trap.

The Indigenous Australian activist Lilla Watson is often credited with a line I have carried for years: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I take that as scripture. My freedom and everyone else’s are not two freedoms. They are one thing pretending, under duress, to be separate.

A culture that despises women is a culture that has declared war on its own source. A culture that persecutes queer and trans and nonbinary people is a culture that has made imagination a crime. I don’t want to be a citizen of that country. Not just because I am virtuous, but because I am greedy for beauty and liberation, and that country is a wasteland.

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I will be specific about my winnings, because vague nobility bores me and specificity is a form of respect.

When women rise into their full sovereign intelligence—their sublime, unbossed, uncontainable intelligence—the entire world grows smarter, kinder, wilder, and infinitely more interesting.

And I get to live in that world. I get to be surrounded by people operating at full power instead of half-throttled by contempt. Who wouldn’t want that? Only a fool volunteers to be the smartest voice in a room emptied of geniuses.

When queer, nonbinary, and trans people are free to invent themselves in private and public, they teach the rest of us that we, too, are permitted to be creative authors of our destinies. Every trans person who insists on becoming who they are is informing me that my life isn’t a fixed sentence but a living poem I am allowed to revise. That’s a gift of staggering value.

When love is allowed to take whatever shape love takes, the total quantity of love in the culture increases. And love isn’t a scarce resource I have to hoard. It’s a fire that lights other fires without diminishing itself. A society drenched in permitted love is a warmer, wilder, more erotic and more alive place to spend one’s incarnation.

This is what I mean by PRONOIA: the hypothesis, always worth testing, that reality is rigged in our favor, and that the liberation of the people I was urged to diminish is not a loss for me but a windfall. Their flourishing is my inheritance.

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I want to be clear that I’m not offering to save anyone. The white male savior is one of patriarchy’s favorite cartoon characters, and I have no interest in auditioning for the role. Women don’t need me to rescue them from a burning building; they need me to stop stacking the kindling and, more often, to shut up and hand them the water and get out of the doorway.

My job isn’t to lead the parade. My job is to be a fierce and joyful accomplice, to spend my inherited advantages recklessly and gladly, in service of a world where such advantages no longer exist.

And I want to do it while fully embodied and incarnate, not as a bloodless moral position but as a visceral delight. Too much allyship is performed with a long, grave face, as though justice were a grim tax we pay to feel clean.

I reject that funeral. The dismantling of misogyny and homophobia and transphobia isn’t a chore. It’s one of the most thrilling collaborative art projects our species has ever attempted: the reinvention of what a human being is allowed to be.

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So yes, when I do this work I’m serving the higher good of my culture. A culture that liberates its women becomes more intelligent. A culture that honors its queer, nonbinary, and trans citizens becomes more imaginatively courageous and more capable of transformation. A culture that lets love run free becomes more beautiful. These aren’t sacrifices I make on the altar of goodness. They are the conditions of a life I actually want to live.

I fight misogyny and homophobia and transphobia the way a person trapped in a stale room throws open every window. It’s not out of duty to the wind, but out of hunger for air.

Call it selfish, then. I’ll accept the charge and raise the stakes: It’s the most enlightened selfishness I know. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s. And I have come, exuberantly and greedily and for the rest of my life, to work together.

For anyone counting who’s missing

Someone is going to read my essay above and feel a sting: Why only these groups? Where is everyone else?

The answer is built into the argument itself.

I wrote about misogyny and homophobia and transphobia because those are prohibitions I felt pressing on my own life, and the freedoms I had to win for myself before I could recognize them in anyone else. This essay is the map of one particular jailbreak, mine. I won’t pretend I’ve made every escape or know every prison from the inside.

But the thesis doesn’t halt at the borders of my biography. It can’t. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s isn’t a slogan I get to apply selectively. If it’s true, it’s true all the way down.

So I’ll say more of it plainly.

A culture that brutalizes Black people is at war with its own genius.

A culture that works to erase Indigenous peoples is trying to amputate its own oldest memory and its deepest knowledge of how to actually live on this land.

A culture that treats immigrants as invaders is starving itself of the exact hunger and nerve and reinvention that keep a nation alive.

A culture that scorns its Latina and Latino people is spurning the very warmth and boldness it needs and secretly hungers for. A culture that demeans and diminishes its disabled people is throwing away its hardest-won wisdom about adaptation. A culture that punishes the poor is criminalizing a wound it inflicted in the first place. A culture that treats the homeless as inconvenient scenery to be cleared away is refusing to look at its own failure. A culture that pathologizes neurodivergent minds is narrowing the range of the ways it’s allowed to think. A culture at war with certain bodies that don’t match absurdly narrow beauty standards is at war with the fact of embodiment itself.

Each of those cruelties impoverishes the world I have to live in. Each of those liberations is, by the same greedy logic, my inheritance too.

I don’t say all of it every time I say any of it because no single essay can carry the whole weight of everything that needs undoing. But I will never pretend the wrong I named is the only wrong, or that the freedom I’m this greedy for has a color, a border, or a limit.

The invitation is identical for all of it: not to help from a safe distance, but to work together, because we have always been in this together.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Check out my music and spoken word: televisionary.bandcamp.com/

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of July 9

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Male humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean change their songs over the years. New phrases can spread across thousands of miles as other whales take up and transform them. Researchers don’t know why, but the pattern is clear: The whales value novelty even in their ancient rituals. They create an evolving musical tradition. Consider what this practice might suggest for your own relationship with the past, Cancerian. The memories and patterns you’re carrying don’t have to remain frozen. You can honor your history while remixing it, adding new verses, and changing the key. What needs to be preserved isn’t the exact form but the living spirit.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Leo-born oceanographer Marie Tharp created the first comprehensive maps of the ocean floor. Her work was pivotal in proving theories about plate tectonics.​ She did much of this work in the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed aboard research vessels. She had to rely on data collected by others, never seeing the terrain she mapped. But her limitation became her advantage; distance allowed her to perceive patterns that field researchers missed. I suspect that you, too, are working with incomplete information, Leo. Does this disqualify you from drawing conclusions? No! I believe your inability to access certain details will compel you to see larger patterns. What you’re missing might be precisely what enables you to see what others can’t.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The “problem” confronting you right now is unusual: Your vision is too sharp, your thinking too precise, and your words too unambiguous. This would usually be good news to celebrate, but at the moment it’s blocking you from noticing the subtle openings life is presenting. Those portals may only reveal themselves if you soften your intense scrutiny and call on a creative, blurry logic. It’s like how, at night, you sometimes see more clearly when you peer from the edges of your vision rather than staring straight ahead.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): This is a perfect moment to express your own unique power more than ever before. I invite you to act with conviction, assert your influence, and claim what you’ve earned. For best results, clarify your ambitions and assert your authority. Write down a formal vow or two. Don’t wait for approval from anyone higher up, and don’t waste time wondering whether destiny is on your side. The succulent opportunities aren’t somewhere else or someday later. They’re here and now.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): I’m exultant when a vigorous bike ride up the trail of my local mountain leaves me so cleansed and energized that a flash of truth strikes and instantly dissipates the illusions I’ve been clinging to. I get a delightful shock when, while wandering through a city’s maze of asphalt and litter, a sudden breeze carries the earthy aroma of a rebellious garden. I love it when the reckless choices of misguided leaders jolt my community into doubling down on our quest for audacious harmony, inventive affection, and untamed wisdom. How about you, dear Scorpio? Where do you search for your awakenings and salvations? Keep your inner radar tuned; they’re circling close.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian physicist Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might build megastructures around stars to capture their energy. These “Dyson spheres” would be detectable from Earth as unusual infrared signatures. We haven’t found any yet, but his idea revolutionized how we think about looking for alien intelligence. Moral of the story: Valuable contributions can come from inventing the framework for how to search for unknown things. In the coming weeks, Sagittarius, you might not solve problems, but you could redesign the questions. You may not find the answers, but you could create better tools for exploration.

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Do you have a muse? If not, please find one. You shouldn’t go another day without a provocative, inspiring presence to stir your imagination and drive you deliciously wild. If you already have a muse and that genius has been faithfully fueling your creative fire, bestow a reward. Give a gift or blessing that provides a muse-like boost to your muse. And if your existing muse has grown quiet lately, go off on an adventure together. Dream up plans to stimulate the bursts of kaleidoscopic energy that you two are capable of generating.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In some monastic traditions, practitioners engage in “work prayer.” They transform ordinary labor into spiritual practice not by thinking holy thoughts while working, but by bringing complete presence and fond attention to ordinary labors. Chopping vegetables becomes meditation. Sweeping floors becomes devotion. The sacredness arises from their wholehearted attitude. This would be an excellent experiment for you to try, Aquarius. Divine solace and inspiration will arrive as you perform your daily duties with verve and gratitude. Try this: For a few days or even two weeks, approach routine duties and familiar obligations with a ceremonial reverence. Be joyful for the privilege of being alive in the most ordinary ways.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You’ve entered a phase when your magnetism and charisma will expand as you focus on ruminating deeply about what’s most meaningful to you. Seeking out new teachers and fresh lessons will bring lucky breaks and helpful influences into your sphere. Each fresh insight will polish your allure, and every surge of curiosity will add to your glow. Be extra sexy and ultra smart: Cosmic energies will work in your favor as you weave your id and intellect together.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): There are only two types of humans, right? Some of us serve beauty, truth, and goodness, while the rest pledge their allegiance to illusions, lies, and shadows. Our planet is now caught in a colossal showdown between these two sides. And it’s high time for you to align yourself with one or the other. JUST KIDDING! The truth is far messier and more interesting: Every one of us is a blend of luminosity and ignorance. And now is a perfect moment to study how those two currents move within you. When you clearly see how you contribute to the murky jumble, your commitment to love, harmony, and justice will soar.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You’ll move with style and purpose if you take quick jaunts, dare gentle risks, and make a few nimble leaps of faith. You’ll go awry and astray if you wander too far afield, chase swaggering adventures, or try vaulting across yawning chasms. Keep it light, sharp, and intuitive, Taurus. Refrain from lugging heavy emotional baggage or drifting into daydream limbo. It’ll be wise to trust your sprightly impulses, but foolish to dissect them so ruthlessly that the magic leaks out. The color amber and the number three will be your allies. Somber gray and the number four will not. Align with sly visionaries and soulful realists but sidestep bitter contrarians and nostalgic clingers.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I swear I’m smarter in some places than in others. My intelligence soars in Barcelona, Kyoto, Aix-en-Provence, France, and Florence, Italy. But I seem dull-witted in Munich, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. Even in Northern California, my long-time home, some areas bring out the best in me. I feel mediocre on Valencia Street in San Francisco, for instance, whereas I’m extra wise in downtown Berkeley. Why is this? The branch of astrology known as astrocartography says that my strengths are more likely to shine in certain spots than others. In the coming weeks, Gemini, I urge you to experiment with the possibility that this may be true for you, as well. Wander far and wide. Find out where you feel most aligned with your deep, bright, genuine self.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASKS

Below I name five tasks that are very hard and very fun to do. They are less like problems to be solved than like instruments to be played. We don’t “finish” or “master” the cello; we practice it for a lifetime and call the practicing music.

I offer these tasks to you in a spirit of cheerful impossibility. Each one asks for more than any of us can reliably deliver, which is exactly why they stay interesting. The goal isn’t to become experts at these arts, which will never happen, but to become smarter and wilder and kinder as we work on them.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #1. To thrive in the midst of raging contradictions

Our challenge is to not merely tolerate contradiction. Instead we cheerfully apply the truth that contradiction is often a nutrient.

The spiritual traditions we draw from know this well: Taoist sages don’t resolve the tension between yin and yang, but inhabit it.

Kabbalists say the chaotic material world is as real and valid and necessary as Ein Sof, the utterly pristine and unknowable aspect of the Divine.

The trickster, my own favorite archetype, is constitutionally drawn to paradox and contradiction, loves to play in the the overlap between realms. Why? Because that’s where the sacred action is.

What makes a contradiction “rage” is our expectation that it should resolve. Our task is to reframe the rumination so that we fully abide in an uncanny knowing: Contradictions aren’t necessarily problems that demand solutions, but usually the actual texture of reality at sufficient depth.

Life insists on being both precious and brutal. Beauty keeps appearing inside ugliness. Sublime redemption hides in the shameful.

Our job isn’t to file these opposites into separate drawers but to develop the suppleness that lets us be at home in the roar of irreconcilability.

Thriving means we can think clearly, love fully, and act decisively even when the ground is paradox all the way down.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #2. To interrupt and overthrow compulsively negative trains of thought in the middle of their flow through our brains

This is hard. Negative thought patterns have momentum. They gather speed.

By the time we recognize we’re in one, it may have already commandeered significant neural territory and is busy recruiting allies: memories that confirm its narrative, sensations that validate its urgency, and future scenarios that prove its gloomy predictions.

To interrupt the flow mid-stream requires an internal heroism that no one gives us credit for, because the battle is invisible. We have to locate and pull the emergency brake while the train is moving.

We have to remember that we aren’t the train. The thought isn’t a fact. The feeling isn’t a forecast. The story the mind tells with such compelling authority is a ramshackle story, not a verdict.

This is some of the most demanding spiritual athleticism available to humans. And it must often be performed while exhausted, in public, with no applause.

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A Pre-Emptive Word to the Skeptic: People who don’t know my work well may read the passage above and cry “toxic positivity.” If you’re one of them, here’s my reply: https://tinyurl.com/NoToxicPositivity

IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #3. To negotiate partial solutions to complex problems; to do the partially right thing when it’s impossible to do the totally right thing

Perfectionism isn’t the noble virtue it pretends to be. Too often it functions as paralysis dressed in high-mindedness. It’s a refusal to act until conditions that will never arrive will supposedly finally arrive.

Real life rarely offers the pure, clean, uncompromised option. It offers the messy middle and the imperfect compromise. If we’re honest and compassionate, the 60% solution might actually help someone—if we’re willing to stop mourning the 100% solution that exists only in our imagination.

To negotiate a partial solution requires the intellectual humility to admit that the half a loaf on the table is far better than having no loaf at all.

We’ve got to prize moral flexibility by accepting that doing some good is better than doing a perfect nothing.

And we must have tolerance for the discomfort of knowing we fell short of the ideal.

Those who gain skill at this exercise become genuinely useful in the world. Those who don’t often become experts at explaining why nothing can be done.

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IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #4. To be discerning as we protect ourselves from people’s flaws while at the same time being generous as we celebrate their beauty.

This one is exquisitely difficult because the two moves, protection and celebration, may seem to be each other’s enemy.

Our discernment can congeal into coldness; our generosity can slide into enabling. The task is to keep both valves fully open at once, which requires a bifocal vision most of us were never taught.

What it demands is seeing people in layers. Their wounds or limitations, which can genuinely harm us, occupy one layer. The irreducible beauty of their soul occupies another layer. And neither cancels the other.

Protection without celebration produces a defended, armored life. We become safe but small. Celebration without discernment produces naivety and eventually resentment.

The mature form of this practice lets us avoid exposing ourselves to someone’s destructive patterns in the same breath as we honor their beauty.

This is fierce love rather than sentimental love. It sees clearly and cherishes anyway.

IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASK #5. To graduate from a batch of weird karma that has persisted.

Is it even feasible to graduate from a batch of weird karma that has persisted despite our efforts to outrun and outgrow it? I say yes: But we must:

1. accept the situation as it is;

2. acknowledge our role in precipitating and prolonging it;

3. feel gratitude for what it has taught us.

These are three distinct and sequential gates, and most of us get stuck at the first one.

Acceptance isn’t the same as defeated resignation. It’s the refusal to keep paying the psychic tax of wishing reality were otherwise.

The second gate is harder still: acknowledging not just that we are in a dicey mess, but that we helped create the dicey mess. We didn’t build it alone and we may have done it without our full conscious knowledge. Our unconscious patterns may have played the largest role.

This gate tends to provoke intense resistance, because the ego experiences accountability as an attack. But without passing through it, we remain victims of circumstance rather than participants in our own story.

The third gate, gratitude, seems at first like cruelty, but is in fact liberation. Not gratitude as performance or toxic positivity, but the real thing: the recognition that this peculiar affliction delivered lessons available nowhere else.

It honed capacities that simple ease would never have forged. It revealed dimensions of ourselves that fair weather never would have exposed.

If we pass through all three gates, there’s a good chance that we will graduate from the messy karma. Ignore even one gate, and it willn arrange for our enrollment in the next semester.

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None of these five IMPOSSIBLE BUT FUN TASKS will ever be checked off completely. We will practice them badly, then slightly less badly, then badly again in some fresh way we hadn’t yet imagined. Eventually, we may develop some decent but eminently fallible skill.

That’s the fun of it. The impossibility is what keeps the door open, forever, to becoming more interesting than we currently are.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Check out my music and spoken word: https://televisionary.bandcamp.com/

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of July 2

CANCER (June 21-July 22): There are phases when the cosmic energies and I urge you to put others first—even tend to their pain before you tend to your own. But this isn’t one of those times. Right now, sacrificing yourself for the sake of others would obstruct the flow of righteous grace into your life. So then what is the most soul‑honoring path available? Here’s what I think: Summon your inventive brilliance and use it to imagine generous ways to care for yourself. Shower yourself with gifts, treats, and blessings that delight you. Take the loving care you so deftly pour into other people and lavish it wholeheartedly on yourself.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Most fields of human endeavor work like this: A few people are truly brilliant, a handful are actively harmful, and the majority fall somewhere between “not great” and “pretty good.” That’s true whether you’re talking about engineers, doctors, poets, or astrologers. So it’s inadvisable to assume a physician is wise about your well-being just because they’ve logged 15 years on the job, or to trust your life direction to the first astrologer whose promotion catches your eye. In the coming weeks, dear Leo, discernment like this matters even more than usual. Let your natural hopefulness be balanced by sharp, thoughtful judgment. Don’t just challenge obvious authority. Put every so-called fact, spin, assumption, and official line under your own clear-eyed review.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Architects designing spaces for collective use try to balance two human needs: to see expansively and also have safe places to retreat. Too much exposure creates anxiety; too much enclosure brings claustrophobia. The ideal is to provide both shelter and spaciousness. Let’s use this theme as a metaphor for your life during the coming months. You’ll be wise to create an equilibrium between engagement and privacy, between vastness and protection. Make it easy for yourself to observe the larger scene and also withdraw when needed.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Self-proclaimed “skeptics” love to sneer at astrologers, as if pondering what lies ahead were a violation of scientific purity. And yet economists, sports analysts, trend watchers, and political commentators churn out shaky predictions every day. Honestly, those professionals of probability often create more confusion than those of us who read the heavens. Take weather forecasters, for instance: From Europe to Japan, their models routinely miss sudden floods and twisters and trigger more than a few false alarms. But do the debunkers brand them as charlatans? Of course not. Forgive the outburst, but I’m building to a key foresight: Every forecast, projection, or vision that crosses your path over the next month will miss the mark—except for this one. So free yourself of their meddling.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Ethnobotanists describe how certain Indigenous traditions work with “teacher plants.” These are flora that offer not only physical benefits but spiritual instruction. They include psychoactive substances, but also ordinary plants approached with extraordinary attention. In the spirit of reinventing your education, Scorpio, I invite you to expand your understanding of who and what your teachers are. What ordinary elements of your daily life might offer wisdom if you engage them with deep respect? What situations at the edges of your awareness could bring lessons that enrich your perspectives? Now is an excellent time to seek new apprenticeships.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Western science and Western religions may disagree about how the universe began, but both place its birth in the distant past. Tantra and other spiritual paths, by contrast, propose that the universe is born afresh in every instant through the sacred, erotic interplay of God and Goddess. When humans approach love-making as an experimental sacrament, these traditions suggest, we can tune in to the union of those primordial forces and, in a sense, take part in the continual creation of existence. So, are you ready for a bit of world-making erotic play? The current astrological indicators say yes, you are.​

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If you would like to support my work, consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

which includes a long-term look at the coming months as well as a new shorter-term report about the coming days

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): A common obstacle to healthy intimacy is the belief that a beloved ally should automatically know what you need, without you saying a word. I used to suffer from this delusion myself and worked hard to dissolve it. I no longer unconsciously assume that my companions are so attuned to me that they can always intuit my desires. But I know this bad idea feels romantic to many people, even though it can sabotage even the most promising bond. In the weeks ahead, Capricorn, I invite you to starve this fantasy. Your intimate world is ripe for a fresh infusion of lucid, straightforward honesty.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Your next few weeks will be sponsored by CoffeeBeer, the paradoxical elixir that both pumps up your energy and decompresses your defenses. You will be an exemplary role model for this innovative product because you will epitomize what occurs when a sensitive soul gets excited and mellows out at the same time. I also expect you will soon be exploring intriguing opportunities that become available to you because of your supercharged calm. Fortunately, you don’t need to drink actual coffee and beer together to make this happen. The cosmic forces will be conspiring to help you.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Finish this sentence, Pisces: “The one thing that really keeps me from being myself is _______.” Is it someone’s opinion, an old story about who you are, a fear of loss, a habit of over-pleasing, a secret shame, or a belief that you’re “too much” or “not enough”? Whatever first pops into your mind is probably closest to the truth. Here’s your next step: Loosen the grip of this stressor by even just 20 percent. I bet your real self will feel relaxed enough to bloom more fully.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Archaeologists studying ancient wells have discovered that some weren’t finished in a single effort. Communities might dig to the current water table, use the well for years, then probe further down when water levels dropped or needs increased. This is a useful metaphor for you, Aries. As of yet, you don’t have the ability or tools to reach the deepest layers you aspire to reach. My counsel is to go as far as you can now and gather what you find there. Later, when you’re readier, you will build on what has come before.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The doom‑and‑gloom wing of astrology is exhausting. The superstition that Mercury retrograde causes scrambled messages and dire mix‑ups is dull and misguided. The planet’s apparent backward motion, which is happening right now, shows up about three times every year like clockwork. It’s perfectly normal! In my view, Mercury retrograde isn’t threatening unless you obsess on the idea that it is, in which case, yes, your payment might go astray, and a friend may misunderstand you. But if cultivating relaxed clarity is more fun and productive for you than coping with fearful tension, treat the time between now and July 23 as a rich opportunity to refine, deepen, and upgrade how you communicate.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You Gemini readers have decreed that I must halt all musings about maddening, riddle-drenched ambiguity. You’ve delivered the message to me that you’re tired of wrestling with enigmas wrapped in paradoxes. Straightforward, plainspoken factualness is what you want. Well, OK. (Please remember that I don’t make this stuff up; I simply channel cosmic omens.) Maybe I’ll start obeying your orders next time. But first, I will advise you: 1. Unexpected gifts are coming from people and situations in transition. 2. Tough but friendly interventions will nudge you toward healthy course corrections. 3. Mysterious assistance is on its way.

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Sometimes we have a strong sense of what our destiny is calling us to do, but we don’t feel ready or brave enough to answer the call. We need a push, an intervention, a serendipitous stroke. I call it FATE BAIT.

It might be a person or event that awakens our dormant willpower and draws us inexorably toward our necessary destiny. It could be a thunderbolt or siren song or stage whisper that gives us a good excuse to go do what we know we should do.

Do you have ideas about how to put yourself in the vicinity of your fate bait?

Here are a few provocations to get you started:

1. Go where the discomfort is. Fate bait may sometimes show up in the places where you feel comfortable and confirmed. But on other occasions it lurks at the edges of your known world, like in the conversation you’ve been avoiding or an intriguing twist you don’t quite feel ready for. Awkwardness may mean fate bait is nearby.

2. Confess your dream out loud. There may be uncanny magic in actually speaking what you have only dared to think. The moment you tell someone, “I think I’m supposed to be doing this,” the universe may rearrange the furniture. Moral of the story: Fate bait is often drawn toward the vibration of a declared intention.

3. Follow the thread of strange attraction: a pull that doesn’t quite make rational sense, a clue that keeps recurring, or a dream image that lingers past noon. These may be the advance scouts of fate bait. Follow these preliminary correspondences with a reckless earnestness.

4. Make yourself a moving target. Fate bait can’t find you if you are perfectly still and totally defended. So maybe say yes to the odd invitation. Attend a gathering that’s slightly outside your tribe’s territory. Take the longer road home. The catalyst you need may be lingering in an intersection you’ve never passed through.

5. Ask fate a direct question, then pay attention for three days. Write it down: What do I need to meet? What needs to meet me? Then watch with relaxed alertness. The answer often arrives sideways, like in the form of a stranger’s offhand remark or a lyric on the radio.

6. Ritualize the readiness. Sometimes fate bait is waiting for a signal that you’re serious. So clear a space. Make a gesture, however private and strange, that says: I am available. I am willing to be interrupted by my own unimagined life. A ceremony you do only for yourself may open the door and glimmer an invitation.

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Surprise! Fate bait isn’t entirely outside you. It’s your own deeper self, engineering encounters and sending emissaries from the future version of you who already made the leap.

When the thunderbolt strikes or when the stage whisper finally reaches you, you will be ready.

IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECAST for YOUR LIFE

Who do you want to become in the coming months? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do? Will there be opportunities disguised as challenges?

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE with my Expanded Audio Horoscopes for the Second Half of 2026.

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 my IN-DEPTH, LONG-TERM AUDIO FORECAST for YOUR LIFE during the coming months, go here, then register and/or sign in:

https://RealAstrology.com

After you log in through the main page, click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for 2nd Half of 2026.”

You can also listen to your short-term forecast for the coming week by clicking on “This week (June 23, 2026).”

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The Expanded Audio horoscopes cost $7 apiece. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

The Greatest Gift You Can Give

The greatest gift you can give might be the gift that you yourself were never given. Not the gift you received in abundance and thus understand how to pass along. I mean the gift whose absence left a hollow in you, a shape you learned to recognize because it was missing.

You know its contours better than anyone. You ached and searched for it. And in that long searching, you became an expert in its necessity.

So I invite you to give that gift with the particular tenderness of a soul who knows what it costs not to receive it. Give it as an act of repair for both the other person and for every version of yourself who once went without.

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The most valuable service you have to offer your fellow humans may be the service you always wished were performed for you. Not necessarily the service you were trained for, credentialed in, or celebrated for providing.

Rather, I’m referring to the service you silently longed for in your hours of need, which nobody seemed to know you needed or bothered to provide. That longing was intelligence: your soul taking careful notes.

So I invite you to offer that service. Provide it with the authority of a soul who knows it intimately.

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An experience that wounded you could move you to help people who’ve been similarly wounded.

This isn’t a requirement. You’re not obligated to make meaning from your suffering, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But if you find, as many do, that the wound has left you with an uncanny fluency, then consider turning toward it rather than away. Maybe you now have an ability to recognize others who are in that same darkness and speak to them in a language they thought nobody knew.

The alchemists were onto something: The most contaminated substance, under the right conditions, may become the most precious.

So I invite you to heal yourself by healing others. You may discover that the help you offer them was the help you needed all along. In building the bridge for someone else to cross, you may move yourself on the other side.

Birthday announcement: I’m turning one year older this week—and hopefully at least three years weirder, wilder, and cheekier.

If my words have ever helped you dodge despair, cultivate wonder, or flirt with the Divine YaYa, one of my favorite birthday gifts would be you upgrading to a paid subscription—but only, of course, if it’s easy and joyful for you to do so:

Here’s the link: newsletter.freewillastrology.com/subscribe

PS: The very best gift you could give me for my birthday is to be your authentic self even strong and truer and wilder than ever before.

I wish you fluid insights and “ah-ha!” revelations that lead to cathartic integrations.

I wish you captivating yet relaxing adventures that inspire you to weave together diverse threads of your life story, enabling you to feel at home in the world.

I wish you unexpected encounters with beauty so piercing that they shatter your cynicism and build your faith in the sacramental possibilities of ordinary moments.

I wish you increasing evidence that life is more generous, more interested in your flourishing, and more responsive to your sincere questions than your conditioning has allowed you to believe.

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of June 25

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Now is an auspicious time to declare a sweeping amnesty and observe a personal season of pardon. To the best of your ability, release your clenched feelings about people who have caused you pain. Banish blame! Purge any lingering resentment and regret that has curdled into self‑reproach. Celebrate atonement and absolution! Most vital of all, exonerate yourself. Shed the guilt you’ve carried for missteps and missed chances. And please offer yourself a sweet gift: a ritual of renewal.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): If you happen to be swallowed whole by a dragon or whale sometime soon, don’t freak out. It’s far preferable to being chomped into bits first, which absolutely won’t happen. You may indeed spend a brief spell inside the creature’s dark belly, but I confidently predict you will ultimately be deposited on the outside in one intact piece, after which you will only need to find your meandering way back home. The whole episode may be confounding or humbling, but I bet it will also scrub you free of a load of old karma.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Bees perform what scientists call a “waggle dance” to communicate the location of flowers to their hive-mates. But the directions are sometimes imprecise, and the apparent sloppiness actually helps the hive. It forces other bees to explore more broadly, discovering new food sources that the original bee missed. Perfect information would make them too efficient to be adaptable. Your precision is one of your gifts, Virgo, but right now I think you need strategic vagueness and fuzzy logic. Leave some directions unclear. Mistakes and misunderstandings might lead to discoveries that your perfect plans would have eliminated.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In ancient Greek thought, kairos referred to the opportune moment. It meant the right timing, when circumstances aligned for action to be most effective. The term chronos, on the other hand, was about sequential time, which blindly marched forward without any regard for special moments or auspiciousness. Most of us are more or less hypnotized by chronos-consciousness. We measure our lives by calendar dates and external schedules. But in the coming weeks, Libra, I recommend you stay on high alert for kairos-rich pivots. For now, suspend inquiries like “Am I on schedule?” and ask, “Are the circumstances ripe?”

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Ravens are strongly motivated to engage in elaborate play: aerial acrobatics, complex games, sliding down snowbanks, and sharing food with non-relatives. These behaviors lack an immediate payoff, yet support learning, motor skill development, and social relationships. They seem to be both emotionally rewarding and indirectly advantageous for survival and success over the long term.​ Let’s apply this to you, Scorpio. Let’s conclude that delight isn’t wastefully frivolous and that pleasure doesn’t need to justify itself through productivity. In the coming weeks, you may face pressure to explain or defend your joy, as if to prove it’s worth it in some utilitarian way. Refuse. Like the ravens, engage in purposeless beauty and fun simply because it feels so good.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Glaciologists studying ice cores can read Earth’s climate history going back 800,000 years. Each layer contains trapped air bubbles. These are time capsules that preserve the atmospheric composition of each moment. The ice remembers everything. You accumulate similar records, Sagittarius. Each of your experiences leaves its trace. And in the coming weeks, you will have extra access to these archived layers of your own history. Memories and patterns you thought were lost will surface with intriguing clarity. I hope you study these revelations to glean insight about your long-term patterns and cycles. It’s time to see the Big Picture.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Many people forget, but you know: Structure is the foundation for freedom, not a suppression of it. While others fantasize about escaping responsibility, you know that mastery is key to every emancipation. When properly practiced, your flair for discipline adds vigor as well as rigor. More than any other sign of the zodiac, you are adept at using limits to give unlimited possibilities their specific shape. I trust you will express all these Capricornian powers to the max in the coming weeks. People in your life need them even more than usual.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Horticulturists practice “deadheading.” They remove spent flowers from plants to encourage new vitality. Faded flowers drain energy that could go toward fresh growth. Plants that have been deadheaded produce more abundant blooms than those left to manage their own decay. I recommend a metaphorical version of this practice to you, Aquarius. You’ll be wise to deadhead your emotional garden. Certain attachments, once vibrant and nourishing, have expired. They’re not evil or wrong; they’re simply finished. It’s best not to keep directing precious energy toward maintaining their faded forms. With gratitude for the old beauty, clear the way for new beauty.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): For maximum safety, be as uninteresting as possible. Shun risks that might shake up your beliefs and avoid adventures that could expose you to people who aren’t similar to you. If you really want to be certain about preserving your security and stability, as I’m recommending, the surest method is to retreat to your power spot and do nothing at all. WAIT! STOP! Dear Pisces, everything I just said was pure misdirection! I was joking! In fact, the opposite is true. The true way to nurture genuine safety and security is to pursue what sparks your curiosity and lights up your zeal. And the coming days are likely to provide you with plenty of chances to do exactly that.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): The interesting struggles you’ll wage in the coming weeks will require your vulnerability: showing up exactly as you are when you might rather fight or escape. Your warrior nature probably prefers a clear enemy or a definable problem you can confront, but the truer conquest will come from laying down your weaponry. I suggest you meet aggression with curiosity and engage chaos with receptive stillness. At least for now, your greatest strength will be to remain undominated by your own reactive impulses. Think of it as an advanced martial art.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In accordance with astrological omens, I invite you to be inspired by this wisdom from artist Pablo Picasso: “I am always doing that which I cannot do in order that I may learn how to do it.” He’s proposing that we treat a lack of expertise not as an embarrassment, but as a doorway. Instead of waiting until we feel ready, trained, and confident, he suggests we head into territory where we fumble, guess, and feel awkward. Our discomfort may lead to gratifying growth. So I dare you to ask yourself whether there’s a capacity or skill you’d love to add to your repertoire but are too shy or timid to try. Then take small, imperfect steps toward it, trusting that each move will teach you how to do what once felt impossible.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Hummingbirds keep track of every flower they visit and know how long it will take each one to replenish its nectar. They maintain mental maps of many feeding sites and visit them on precise schedules. To ensure their survival, they can’t waste energy on flowers that aren’t ready yet. Your mind could work like this if you want it to, Gemini. Which people, places, and projects need time to refill before you visit them again? Who have you been approaching too frequently, seeking their nectar before it has had time to regenerate? In the coming weeks, practice strategic patience with your resources. In your secret conversations with yourself, call yourself “Hummingbird.”

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HOW COULD YOU NOT FEEL THRILLED?

You are alive in your mysterious, endlessly interesting life, and you are imbued with the fantastically potent power of awareness.

You can perceive a hummingbird hovering at a fuchsia blossom and the light that left a distant star before your ancestors had language, only now arriving in your eyes. You can exult in a lover’s sigh and the taste of ripe peach, the memory of your sixth birthday and a plan you’re hatching for next fall.

All of it streams through the impossible miracle of your attention, this radiance you carry everywhere without ever being able to explain it. How could you not feel thrilled?

You are living on a planet that’s always surprising: a wet blue miracle hurtling through the dark at 67,000 miles per hour while you sit drinking your favorite beverage.

You’re living at a time when so many things are changing that you can’t help being fascinated: empires wobbling, old certainties dissolving, new visions being born in basements and gardens and the secret laboratories of people’s imaginations. You get to witness it. You can participate if you want. How could you not feel thrilled?

You have some intriguing project to look forward to, or some challenging but interesting work you’re in the midst of, or some mind-bending riddle you’re trying to solve with all your heart.

Maybe it’s a book you’re writing or a wound you’re healing or a friendship you’re rebuilding or a melody you can almost hear but haven’t yet captured. Maybe it’s a question so big you will need the rest of your life to answer it.

Whatever it is, it tugs at you. It calls you forward. It refuses to let you sink into numbness. How could you not feel thrilled?

You are wearing a wild, pulsing, improbable body that breathes 25,000 times a day without you ever having to think about it, that knits your skin back together when you cut it, that converts bread and apples into thoughts and laughter.

Your heart has been beating since before you were born and has never once taken a vacation. Trillions of cells are conspiring at this very moment to keep you here, alert, reading these words. You are a collaboration of sun and earth and fresh water. How could you not feel thrilled?

You’re playing the most enigmatic game in the history of the universe, also known as your life on Earth, and you love asking questions about what it all means. Why am I here? What are my gifts? Who are these other dreaming creatures I love, and where did we all come from, and where are we going?

The questions don’t torment you so much as enchant you. You can’t prove it, but you suspect that the questions themselves are a kind of nourishment, and that to live inside the Great Glorious Mystery and keep wondering is its own reward.

Big bonus: There are people who have decided, against all odds, to walk beside you: the friend who knows your complicated stories and offers support; the stranger who held the door; the elder whose face has become a map of everything they’ve survived; the child or animal that looks at you as though you know something worth knowing.

You get to love them. You have the immense privilege of being confounded by them, and forgiven by them, and changed by them. You’re not playing this game alone. How could you not feel thrilled?

You never know what’s going to happen next. Tomorrow could bring a phone call that rearranges your whole understanding of who you are. A book could fall open to the one sentence you’ve needed for years. A song could come on the radio and crack you wide open.

The plot isn’t finished. The twists are still coming. It’s as if you’re one of the heroes in an epic movie that is inexhaustibly entertaining, and you don’t have the script. How could you not feel thrilled?

Even the hard parts feed the thrill. The grief that proves how much you loved and the confusion that comes right before a breakthrough.

You’re not promised comfort, but you’re promised meaning, and meaning is the more electrifying gift. The shadows in the story make the light beautiful.

So here you are: aware, alive, embodied, accompanied, questioning, surprised, mortal, and far more powerful than you usually let yourself believe. You woke up this morning inside a vast, intriguing enigma that has no bottom and no edges, and you are equipped to relish it.

How could you not feel thrilled?

EXPLORE THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE

with my MID-YEAR AUDIO PREVIEW of YOUR DESTINY

for the REST of 2026:

https://RealAstrology.com

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 the most interesting 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, go here, then register and/or sign in:

https://RealAstrology.com

After you log in through the main page, click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2026.”

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The Expanded Audio Horoscopes cost $7 apiece. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.

HOW DO I LOVE YOU?

I love your renegade soul—the insurgent flame in you that refuses to be tamed by small definitions and safe harbors. And I love your ever-deepening eyes, which have learned to hold more light precisely because they’ve been willing to hold more darkness.

I love how unflinchingly you peer into the heart of your own darkness—not as a penitent seeking punishment, not as a tourist seeking thrills, but as a cartographer making creative maps of difficult territory so others might find their way.

I love how you’re making yourself more and more receptive to truths in their wild states, before they’ve been groomed and domesticated. You meet truth the way a naturalist meets a rare creature in the field: with stillness, reverence, and the discipline not to grab.

I love how you can lose yourself completely in passion, but never once shirk your commitment to the good and the true.

I admire the way you never bear a grudge against the mountains that stand in your way. You don’t curse them or petition the sky for their removal or waste yourself in futile assault. You study their contours with curiosity and tenderness, and then you find the path around.

And I love your patient, stubborn, luminous devotion to deciphering the code you left for yourself before you came into this life. These are the clues you planted in your own nature and the instructions hidden in your longings. You keep reading, decoding, and honoring the Big Self who loved you enough to leave a trail.

Listen to my spoken-word song, “Glory in the Highest”:

The lyrics begin like this:

Thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up. Through some magic you don’t fully understand, you’re still breathing and your heart is beating, even though you’ve been unconscious for many hours. The air is a mix of gases that’s just right for your body’s needs, as it was before you fell asleep.

You can see! Light of many colors floods into your eyes, registered by nerves that took God or evolution or some process millions of years to perfect.

The interesting gift of these vivid hues is furthermore made possible by an unimaginably immense globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into light and heat and energy for your personal use.

Read more of “Glory in the Highest” freewillastrology.com/beauty

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOY

Week of June 18

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Eastern monarch butterflies migrate annually from the American Midwest to central Mexico. The individuals who start the journey from Nebraska or Wisconsin die long before they reach the oyamel fir trees of Mexico. So do their children and their grandchildren. Their great-grandchildren finish the trip, though they have never been to the destination. Somehow they know where to go, navigating thousands of miles to trees they’ve never seen. Let’s apply this as a metaphor for you, Gemini. I suspect you are carrying navigational wisdom you didn’t realize you possessed. Inherited knowledge, encoded deep in your secret places, is ready to guide you. So pay attention to inexplicable certainties. Trust the directions that arrive without logical explanation.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): A large earthquake doesn’t relieve stress evenly along a fault. Instead, it creates zones where stress is reduced and others where stress increases, making future ruptures more likely. So the stress is redistributed, but not uniformly. According to my reading of the omens, Cancerian, you recently experienced a metaphorical shake-up. I suggest you identify where stress has grown and where it has dissipated. Your next moves should account for this new distribution of pressure. Some areas of your life are now more vulnerable, while others have become more stable. Read the landscape accurately before proceeding.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Songbirds like zebra finches practice their melodies while asleep. Their vocal muscles move in ways that mirror daytime singing. These replay patterns help young birds learn their songs and adults maintain and refine their tunes over time. I suspect that you are engaged in a similar type of learning, Leo. You are enhancing skills and uncovering insights while asleep and dreaming. Bonus! Even when awake, you’re absorbing clues on a subconscious level. Your deeper intelligence is gathering information you will need for your upcoming breakthroughs. Hooray for mysterious help!

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Architects who design concert halls know that perfect sound isn’t achieved through perfect smoothness. The best acoustics come from strategic irregularities, textured walls, and angled surfaces that distribute vibrations in pleasing ways. Too much uniformity creates dead zones and echoes; too much chaos creates muddle. Pleasing resonance arises from organized complexity. In my estimation, Virgo, your life is currently too smooth in some areas and too haphazard in others. You may need more strategic irregularity. Consider introducing productive unpredictability into relationships that have become too routine. Add inventive structure to efforts that have become shapeless. Don’t aim for either total order or complete randomness. What will generate maximum beauty?

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Have you ever been ambushed by unexpected bursts of gratification emerging from subtle miracles? Maybe a loved one finally grasps a truth you’ve been trying to convey for eons. Or you feel balanced in a situation that once made you feel lopsided. Or you grasp, with shivers of awe, that you got uncanny spiritual guidance at a key crossroads. I foresee at least three such blessings for you in the coming weeks. To ensure you recognize them, don’t get distracted in the pursuit of splashy bonanzas and gaudy prizes. Be nimbly alert for subtle breakthroughs.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Poet Emily Dickinson rarely left her family home but bequeathed us a marvelous body of lyrical work as she roamed through vast inner worlds. Sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler rose early to write before long shifts at low‑paid jobs, imagining visionary futures during her limited hours to be creative. Lucille Clifton raised six children while shaping poems of distilled, luminous insight, showing us how to summon fierce originality from a life crowded with responsibilities. Moral of the story: Buoyant power can flourish even when circumstances are limited. This lesson may be relevant for you in the coming weeks. If conditions seem imperfect or incomplete, trust that your resilience and adaptability can compensate for external obstacles. I have faith in your ability to generate useful beauty.

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BRAINSTORM ABOUT THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE

with my Expanded Audio Horoscopes for the Second Half of 2026:

What will be the story of your life during the coming months? How can you exert your free will to create the adventures that will bring out the best in you, even as you find graceful ways to cooperate with the tides of destiny?

If you’d like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and justice and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your long-term outlook:

https://RealAstrology.com

After you register and/or log in through the main page, click on the link “Long-Term Forecast for Second Half of 2026”

The cost is $7 per sign. (Discounts are available for bulk purchases.)

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“Your big-picture audio horoscope was somehow both a balm for my soul and a call to action. How did you do that?” - David G., Coral Gables, FL

“Your big-picture horoscopes filled the gaps in my imagination. They woke up the fun plot twists that had been just on the tip of my ability to visualize.” - Ani Kraft, Brattleboro, VT

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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Our tongues are primed to heal astonishingly fast thanks to dense blood vessels, saliva’s repair proteins, and a rapid immune response. Wounds that would take more patience elsewhere can heal here in days. I suspect that your psyche now possesses your tongue’s high level of healing power. So I hope you will launch a phase of accelerated repair. Call on every possible form of therapeutic assistance, please!

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Now is an ideal time to clear out old romantic karma from the past. Please consider performing a DIY ritual to release painful memories, leftover grudges, and long-standing hurts that keep tugging at your intimate connections. The coming weeks will also be a favorable phase to discard rigid beliefs about gender and dismantle anything that blocks you from experiencing full-bodied sensual and sexual delight. Expect to be freed from at least some energies that have limited your ability to explore fun and vigorous ways of savoring your desires.​

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I suggest you adopt a new honorary title like “Charm Weaver” or “Emissary of Radiance” or “Beauty Whisperer.” Why? Because I hope it will help inspire you to stir up delightful play and lyrical mystery wherever you wander. For instance: Infuse your conversations with sparkling harmony and sly, graceful humor. Burst into whimsical songs, fling out extravagant compliments, pose clever questions that spark fresh ideas, and call attention to systems and relationships in your world that are functioning wonderfully well. Many perks will flow your way as you do.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Is there a dream from childhood that you’re ready to revive on a higher octave? Think of something you longed for before the world told you to be boringly realistic: an art you wanted to practice, a way you wanted to live, or the kind of person you hoped to become. The question isn’t “Can I go back and do it exactly the same?” but “What is the mature, wiser, present-day version of that dream?” You might write in your journal: “The childhood dream I’m ready to lift to a higher octave is ______,” and then add, “If I took one concrete step toward it, what would it be?”

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries mathematician Paul Erdős lived without a permanent address, traveling the world to collaborate with other mathematicians. He owned little, claiming “property is a nuisance.” His life was structured around doing mathematics and helping others do mathematics. He published over 1,500 papers, more than any mathematician in history. Was his minimalism a form of deprivation? I prefer to think it was liberation from everything that didn’t serve his purpose. What would your life be like if you eliminated things that don’t serve your deepest purposes, Aries? In the coming weeks, you have permission to be ruthless about your priorities. What are you maintaining out of habit rather than conviction? What burdens masquerade as responsibilities?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A friend told me about the creative writing class he took with renowned poet Brenda Hillman. “I recall being in class,” he says, “and having the thought, wow, this teacher works far harder at teaching than I do at learning.” Dear Taurus, please don’t indulge in a similar laziness anytime soon. Your educational opportunities are currently richer than usual. To extract the full benefit, you must match the verve and vigor of your teachers. (PS: The teachers may or may not think of themselves as teachers. They could even be animals, rainstorms, or ancestors.)

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ASTROLOGY WITHOUT DOOM

I’ve been an astrologer since I began studying astrology at Goddard College at age 19.

But I’ve never been a traditional astrologer. I love the ancient art too much to keep peddling its most fearful inheritances. Over the centuries, astrology has absorbed a heavy cargo of dread, including curses, afflictions, exiles, and warnings of cosmic bad luck.

I’ve spent years reading the same sky that the dread-ridden practitioners read, and I’ve arrived at different conclusions about what it’s trying to tell us.

On this Freedom from Fear holiday, I will offer disclaimers to refute the doom-mongering and uphold the zoom-and-boom approach to living our magical lives.

1. I don’t use any version of astrology that claims some planets and some houses are “malefic.” There are no villains in the solar system. There is no celestial body whose essential job is to ambush or ruin you.

So, for example, Saturn isn’t a hooded executioner; it teaches discipline, patient structure, the dignity of limits. Mars isn’t a brute; it grants courage, drive, and the holy capacity to fight for what we love.

To brand a planet or a house as evil is to misread the gift inside the intense packaging.

Read more about my understanding of Saturn: tinyurl.com/BlessingsOfSaturn

Read more about my understanding of Mars: tinyurl.com/MarsWithinUs

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2. I don’t believe that planets are in “detriment” or “fall” in particular signs. The notion that a planet is crippled, demoted, or exiled simply because of which signs it happens to occupy strikes me as an astrological caste system: as if Venus in Scorpio were a broken instrument, or the Moon in Capricorn a wounded animal. I know people with Venus in Scorpio and Moon in Capricorn, and I guarantee you that those placements don’t hobble or torment them.

No to all that noise. In fact, I relish the hypothesis that every placement is a particular intelligence—a specific flavor of power, a distinctive way of getting things done—not a defect to apologize for.

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3. I don’t regard planetary retrogrades as inherently problematic. Mercury retrograde, in particular, has become pop culture’s favorite scapegoat, blamed for every dropped call and missed text.

But a retrograde isn’t a malfunction. It’s a different mode: a turning-inward, a season for review, revision, recapitulation, and second looks. The backward-seeming motion isn’t the universe glitching. It’s the universe inviting us to circle back and finish what we left unfinished.

My understanding of Mercury Retrograde: tinyurl.com/RetrogradeMercury

Read more about retrograde planets in general: https://tinyurl.com/y89kuwa6

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4. I don’t think we should do anything differently when the moon is “void of course.” I won’t tiptoe through my life, postpone my decisions, or hold my breath because tradition warns that “nothing will come of” what I begin during those hours.

I start my projects whenever the spirit moves me. The cosmos isn’t waiting to penalize my timing.

Read more about my understanding: tinyurl.com/PraiseMoonVoidOfCourse

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5. I don’t treat the aspects of square and opposition as being inherently negative and troublesome. The so-called “hard aspects” are engines of growth, not glitches in the wiring. Tension isn’t the enemy of a vivid life; it’s one of its primary creative forces.

A square denotes friction that strikes a spark. An opposition is the dynamic, generative tug between two truths that both deserve to be honored. Smooth and easy is lovely, but it’s less likely to make us braver, deeper, or more alive.

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6. I don’t believe that solar or lunar eclipses portend peril or distress. Eclipses are thresholds, hinges, and dramatic punctuation marks in the ongoing narrative of our lives.

They’re portals: moments when energies can be released and new modes born. To greet them with anxiety is to mistake intensity for worrisome twists.

More about my understanding of eclipses: tinyurl.com/EclipsesAreInvitations

When I periodically lay out my approach to astrology on social media, some readers are alarmed, even angry, as if they imagine I’m a first-class spiritual bypasser. One sneered, “So you practice astrology that strips away negative aspects and shadow?”

That’s a big, unjustified leap from what I actually say.

The answer is no, I’m not stripping away shadow. I’m not saying everything that ever happens is cheerful, positive, and easy. What I’m refusing is far more specific: the assignment of fixed, fatalistic, fear-based verdicts to the phenomena of the sky. I’m questioning the medieval bookkeeping that decides in advance which configurations are curses and which are blessings, before we’ve even had the chance to live them.

Shadow is real. Difficulty is real. Grief, loss, struggle, and the long dark passages of a human life are real, all worthy of our intense attention. As a chaos magician and dreamworker, I am on intimate terms with what’s unresolved, wounded, and not-yet-redeemed. I work with the shadow every single day and have for years. It’s one of my deepest callings. It’s an important reason why I am such a diligent dreamworker.

The difference is this: I don’t believe the shadow is a punishment handed down by malefic planets. I believe it’s raw material: teachings that invite us to grow into a more beautiful and resilient version of ourselves. The squares that grind against us and the transits that jolt us out of our habits are the curriculum. They’re not sentences pronounced by a hostile universe

To strip away shadow would commit the grave error of toxic positivity. I have zero interest in that. PRONOIA—my conviction that the whole of creation is conspiring to move us in the direction of liberation—isn’t the denial of pain. It’s the radical trust that even our pain is conspiring to liberate us.

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So here’s the core of how I practice:

All omens deserve to be interpreted in ways that provide guidance and teaching. All configurations deserve to be read as messages about how to live more skillfully, love more fiercely, and wake up more fully: including the comfortable and the uncomfortable aspects, the flowing trines and the disruptive squares, the new moons and the eclipses.

All omens are revelations about how to successfully wrangle with our problems, perpetrate liberation, ameliorate suffering, find redemption, and perform the tricky maneuvers and ingenious tweaks that enable us to slip free of our mind-forged manacles and discover the deeper meanings beneath our experiences.

Those manacles, as William Blake understood, are often forged in our own imaginations. They are made of our fears, inherited superstitions, and half-conscious agreements about what we’re allowed to become.

And astrology at its best is a locksmith’s art, not a fortune-teller’s racket. It hands us the picks and shims and skeleton keys. It shows us where the lock is, and how the mechanism turns.

An omen isn’t a verdict handed down from on high. It doesn’t tell us what will be done to us. It’s an invitation that reveals what might be done by us and through us and with us if we’re cunning and brave and generous enough to read it as a teaching rather than a threat.

I read the same sky every other astrologer reads. I refuse to read it as a rap sheet. To me, it’s a love letter that includes, among its tender passages, the hard and holy lessons we need to learn.

MORE FROM ME ABOUT ASTROLOGY:

For more of my thoughts about astrology, read my book ASTROLOGY IS REAL and/or read free excerpts from the book here: tinyurl.com/BraveBliss

Read my Love Letters to You, oracles for your sign: tinyurl.com/OraclesForYou

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Bonus: Your Uranian Talents: tinyurl.com/YourUranianTalents

Do It Now!: tinyurl.com/DoItAllNow

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Check out my LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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You may have noticed that I give away my horoscopes for free here and on my website. I love it when people buy paid subscriptions to my newsletter, but they’re under no obligation to do so.

So then how, you may ask, do I earn money? How do I pay my rent and buy gas for my 2008 Honda Element and create my future books?

In addition to paid subscribers, another way I raise funds is by creating Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Text Message Horoscopes that DO cost money. If you would like to buy them, thereby contributing to my welfare, I invite you to partake. They’re here: RealAstrology.com

You can also donate at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob (contribute as Friends and Family)

If my work has blessed your life and you’re in a position to help it thrive, please consider donating!

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of June 11

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “Dear Oracle: Why do we always have to start at the beginning? I’d much prefer just jumping into the middle of things. Right now, I would love to bypass all the tedious baby steps I’m being forced to take as I try to get some momentum going. Please slip me a few clues about how to fast-forward directly to the fun stuff. —Bored with the Groundwork.” Dear Bored: Your timing is perfect. The planetary omens say you are now authorized to vault over the preludes and prologues and dive right into the heart of the action.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Restoration ecologists work to revive damaged prairies. They’ve discovered that seeds of many native plants can lie dormant in the soil for years, waiting for the right conditions to germinate. If they remove invasive species and restore the land’s natural cycle of controlled fire, wildflowers long absent from the landscape spring back to life. With this metaphor in mind, Cancerian, consider what dormant possibilities may lie buried in your own psyche. What seeds did you plant long ago and then forget? What dreams or talents are waiting for you to clear away the choking overgrowth and create space for them to emerge? Old potentials may be patient, not dead.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Better than any other sign, you understand that ego and generosity can be collaborators rather than enemies. Your charismatic radiance is often a public service. When you express your interesting beauty, you give others permission to tap into their own luminosity. The world always craves your unique flavor of audacious joy, and especially now. The rest of us need your intense insistence that flair and flamboyance are forms of resistance against the forces that would diminish life’s splendor.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Many people struggle with what could be called “imagined ugliness,” a condition clinicians refer to as body dysmorphic disorder. It usually involves fixating on a supposed physical defect, or even on a flaw that exists only in one’s mind. I suspect that almost everyone carries a trace of this tendency, including you and me. The good news, though, is that the current astrological climate is ideal for you to at least partially shatter its spell. You are poised to transform your self-image so vigorously that you begin to regard yourself as a flawless exemplar of quirky, one-of-a-kind beauty.​

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The Golden Gate Bridge, which is a few miles from my home, is painted continuously. Painters start at one end, work their way across, and by the time they reach the other side, it’s time to start over. The job is never finished; maintenance is the permanent condition. Some people find this depressing, but I find it oddly liberating. It means the bridge doesn’t have to achieve some final, perfect state. It just has to be tended. Similarly, you don’t have to fix everything once and for all, Libra. The relationships, projects, and internal states you’re concerned about aren’t meant to reach completion. You shouldn’t worry about trying to finish what’s meant to be an ongoing practice. Just keep starting the cycle again.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Innovative theater director Viola Spolin was a Scorpio. She taught that the best scenes emerge when the actors avoid trying to control outcomes. Instead, they fully commit to the reality they’re creating together. Spontaneous responses are their gold standard. Let’s make this a keynote for you in the coming weeks. Your assignment is to give yourself heartily to improvisation. The most interesting magic will happen as you relax into the collaborative process, trusting it to guide you toward beauty and meanings none of you could have scripted alone.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Musicologists distinguish between “perfect pitch” and “relative pitch.” A person with perfect pitch can sing or identify a specific note without hearing any other music beforehand. Relative pitch is the ability to recognize musical notes in relation to other notes. In the coming weeks, Sagittarius, relative pitch will be a more useful metaphor for you than perfect pitch. Don’t insist on perfect clarity about what’s right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, worthy and unworthy. Instead of obsessing on fixed standards, practice relational discernment. How does this choice feel compared to that one? How does a person behave in this context versus another? For you right now, truth lives in the intervals and connections.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The best way to eliminate a bad habit is to replace it with a good one. Now is an excellent time to acquire more expertise in this art. Start by choosing a specific habit that drains your energy, time, or self-respect. Then identify what that habit is secretly trying to give you, like comfort, distraction, or a sense of control. Your mission is to find a healthier behavior that offers a similar payoff without the damage. For example, maybe you go online and binge-scroll through bad news because you imagine it soothes your anxiety. Instead of that, read an uplifting book or listen to serene music for a while. Be concrete: When the itchy habit hits, what exactly will you do as an alternative?

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In 1905, 26-year-old Albert Einstein worked full-time as a clerk in a Swiss patent office. During his off-hours, he wrote four audacious papers that fundamentally changed how physics understood space, time, light, and matter. He accomplished his revolution without the sponsorship of a renowned university or laboratory. His example suggests that we can perhaps re-imagine and recreate the world even if we’re not supported by glamorous circumstances. I suspect this principle applies to you these days. Breakthrough insights and earth-shaking realizations may arrive while you’re doing ordinary tasks. Be alert for the flashes that arise in seemingly routine and modest situations.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): For linguists, “untranslatable” words are concepts that exist in one language but have no equivalent in others. One example is mono no aware, which in Japanese refers to the tender poignance and appreciation you feel in the presence of fleeting beauty, like cherry blossoms falling. I bring this to your attention, Pisces, because I suspect that you, too, are untranslatable right now. My advice is to forget about trying to get others to grasp what’s going on with you. Here’s a suggestion that might help: Find soulful artists and emotionally intelligent creatives who speak the language of your mystery.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Many of you have a fraught relationship with discipline. You recognize you need it if you want a life rich with epic adventures. Yet you sometimes resist planning ahead or organizing your resources, fearing it might dampen your immediate pleasures. The problem is that when you skip the planning and organizing, the short-term fun you default to may turn out to be unsatisfying. That’s the challenging news. The encouraging news is that you’re now in a cycle when you can transform how you relate to discipline. I bet you can render some of those old patterns obsolete.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Gemologists evaluate opals less for flawless uniformity than for their mesmerizing play‑of‑color. They study how light interacts with a stone’s microscopic internal structure to produce vivid, shifting hues. The most prized opals aren’t necessarily the most perfect in shape, but the ones whose internal pattern and rainbow-like displays are most vibrant, varied, and alive. This is a marvelous metaphor for you in the coming weeks. I hope you don’t obsess on consistency or smooth away your complications. Let the world see your play-of-color.

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Here we see two pronouncements placed side by side as if they were equivalent insights into the human condition.

On the left is Rebecca Solnit’s affirmation: “The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.”

On the right, Byron Katie’s verdict: “Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.”

The meme presents these as two flavors of wisdom on the buffet of contemporary spirituality. But they aren’t merely flavors. They are rival political and metaphysical philosophies. And one of them, in practice, becomes dangerous far too often.

I’ll begin with what Byron Katie is right about. There is indeed a form of self-storytelling that becomes a prison. We all have narratives that harden into compulsive loops: rehearsals of grievance, fixed identities forged from old injuries, endless re-litigation of humiliation and betrayal. Anyone who has stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. replaying ancient wounds knows this purgatory.

To question such stories can be good medicine. Katie’s inquiry process has helped many people loosen their needless suffering. Yes! We should ask whether our stories are true and whether they are the only stories available.

But the leap from “some stories cause suffering” to “there is no authentic story” is a metaphysical confidence trick. And like many confidence tricks, it’s performed most successfully on people who can least afford to lose what is being taken from them.

In various forms of Advaita and contemporary nondualist spirituality, the personal narrative is often treated less as a sacred human inheritance than as a toxic veil to be dissolved. Advocates for this view include Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Papaji, Mooji, Byron Katie, and Eckhart Tolle. More info: tinyurl.com/Anti-StoryTeachers

There’s some wisdom in their perspective. Humans do become trapped inside compulsive mental loops and rigid identities. But what begins as a useful critique of fixation too often expands into a sweeping suspicion toward storytelling, as though the ancient human acts of narrating one’s personal experience and expressing one’s unique identity were merely primitive errors to transcend.

Consider who benefits from a philosophy of no-self and no-story. Whose stories have already been institutionalized? Whose versions of reality already sit inside textbooks, courts, archives, movies, law, and inherited power?

The colonizer can comfortably announce that identity is illusion. The descendants of empire, having spent centuries imposing their narrative on the world, may retreat into transcendence and declare all narratives equally unreal.

All of the following perpetrators are welcome to float into the cool green pool of no-story, where accountability dissolves and the question of what actually happened becomes spiritually unsophisticated: the strip-miner, the pharmaceutical executive, the architect of unjust laws, and the billionaire who profits from poisoned rivers and exhausted laborers.

Meanwhile, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass couldn’t afford this teaching. The survivors of the Magdalene laundries couldn’t afford it. Nor the Indigenous elders finally speaking about the children stolen into residential schools. Nor the survivors of abuse by Epstein, Trump, and Company, who are finally finding language for what was done to them.

For the silenced, storytelling isn’t delusional narcissism. It’s re-entry into reality.

That’s why Solnit’s sentence describes one of the primary mechanics of liberation.

The first revolt of every oppressed person has always been linguistic: I will name what happened. I will say who I am. I will repudiate the implication that the dominator’s story is the only story.

Read Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and you understand that unexpressed trauma doesn’t disappear. It remains trapped in the nervous system as recurring emergency. Unnamed pain becomes cyclical pain.

The act of telling, especially when finally done in safety, is what allows experience to move from perpetual alarm into metabolized memory. Stories are among the primary ways the flesh digests reality.

To declare all stories inauthentic is, at the level of the body, to risk keeping wounded people imprisoned inside undigested experience.

There is another sleight hidden inside Byron Katie’s formulation: the word “authentic.” The truth is that no story is authentic in the sense of being total, final, or omniscient. Every story is partial and perspectival. Every story is shaped by memory, longing, limitation, imagination, and revision.

But that’s the nature of human consciousness. A story doesn’t need metaphysical perfection to carry truth.

To demand absolute purity before granting legitimacy to lived experience is a trick as old as illegitimate power. It resembles the tactic by which patriarchs have dismissed testimony because it failed to emerge from the “proper” authority.

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The transcendental temptation is to escape the difficult particulars of embodiment by dissolving them into luminous abstraction. Sometimes this impulse produces beautiful poetry and genuine saints. But it also generates huge quantities of spiritual bypassing disguised as wisdom.

Curiously, many teachers who proclaim there’s no self continue behaving as though their own selves deserve careful branding, paid seminars, copyright protection, and excellent lighting. The doctrine of no-self has a tendency to leave the teacher’s bank account intact.

What Rebecca Solnit offers instead is more difficult, more grounded, and ultimately more humane: Stay incarnate. Tell what happened. Express who you are.

And yes, even tell the story knowing it will evolve; realizing that memory is imperfect; recognizing that tomorrow you may understand yourself differently. Tell it anyway.

Storytelling is the ancient human act of cooking raw experience into meaning that can be shared, witnessed, and carried together. It predates writing and even agriculture. It precedes the religions that would later try to demote it to mere illusion.

Long before certain spiritual teachings attempted to deny, disappear, and transcend the self, humans sat around fires and stitched themselves into community through narrative. To say “I am” is one of our oldest sacred gestures.

Every storyteller, from the Paleolithic cave painter to the contemporary memoirist, is participating in an ancient project: weaving a self that can enter relationship with other selves.

Is there any spiritual achievement higher than this? The false varieties of transcendence pretend to compete for that title as they skip the complicated part about actually being here on earth in a body with an ego, soul, feelings, memories, and yearnings.

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I invite you to choose Rebecca Solnit’s version of story, which lets Tubman keep her testimony and the trauma survivor keep her name for what was done to her.

Pick the truth that lets your own difficult, unfinished, fervently incarnate life count as an idiosyncratic treasure worth saying out loud.

Tell your story. It’s already a victory. It’s already a revolt.

WHAT DO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE SAY ABOUT STORIES?

One of the strangest consequences of anti-story spirituality is how poorly it fits many Indigenous cosmologies, where storytelling isn’t regarded as an egoic distraction from reality but as one of the primary ways reality remains alive.

For many Indigenous peoples, stories are not merely psychological interpretations floating inside isolated minds. They are relational vessels that bind human beings to ancestors, landscapes, animals, obligations, seasons, ceremonies, and communal memory. A story isn’t simply “a thought,” let alone a fabrication or delusion. It’s a living thread in a web of reciprocal existence.

This is why certain forms of nondualism can sound bizarrely disembodied when placed beside Indigenous traditions. When some contemporary teachers announce that “all stories are illusion” or that liberation requires transcending narrative identity altogether, they may imagine themselves to be speaking from spiritual sophistication.

But from the perspective of many Indigenous worldviews, such statements can sound less enlightened than socially amputated.

Indigenous storytelling traditions often arise not from narcissistic self-fixation but from responsibility. Stories carry ecological intelligence. They preserve instructions for how to live with rivers, animals, weather, kinship systems, grief, and conflict. They store historical memory so communities don’t disappear into collective amnesia. They allow the dead to remain in relationship with the living.

To tell the story of a people whose land was stolen or whose children were kidnapped isn’t egoic attachment. It’s cultural continuity fighting for survival.

And this reveals a crucial truth: The luxury of declaring all stories unreal often belongs to those whose stories have already been secured by institutions of power. The empire can afford metaphysical detachment from history because its history is already carved into monuments, maps, textbooks, and property law.

But communities threatened with erasure don’t experience storytelling as a neurotic indulgence. They experience it as resistance against disappearance.

The Indigenous critique also exposes how oddly individualistic many anti-story teachings are. The isolated meditator attempting to transcend personal identity is a very different figure from the tribal elder whose stories maintain continuity between generations and between humans and the more-than-human world.

In many Indigenous traditions, identity isn’t imagined as an isolated ego trapped inside illusion. It’s relational all the way down: kinship with land, with ancestors, with animals, and with future generations. Storytelling is a sacred technology through which those relationships are renewed.

Which means that from an Indigenous perspective, the question may not be: “How do I escape the story?”

But rather: “What stories keep the world alive?”

For the Indigenous Ojibway people, the word Adizokan means both “story” and “spirit.” In fact, story and spirit are the same thing. Everything has a spirit and everything has a story, including people, animals, trees, lakes, rivers, and rocks.

Inspired by these thoughts, I invite you to meditate on how your rich life stories are central elements of your spirit.

I further encourage you to spend some sweet time telling yourself the stories from your past that you love best.

For extra delightful bonus fun, dream up two prospective stories about your future that you would ultimately like to create.

Info about Adizokan comes from Ann and John Mahan.

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FUN TRUTHS ABOUT STORYTELLING

Storytelling is subversive because it belongs to the community; it’s a medicine to transmute the toxins of industrialized society; it’s a spiritual practice. Storytelling is the antidote to empire. —Nurete Brenner, professor of organizational behavior

The stories we tell ourselves shape our realities. If we don’t tell our own stories, someone else will tell them for us—and they will not tell them kindly. —author and activist Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabe, an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Minnesota

Personal storytelling and testimony are vital spiritual practices of self-care that enable us to prayerfully explore ourselves. —Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary

Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. —author Rebecca Solnit

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. But Indigenous peoples tell stories in order to remember how to live together. —author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg people

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it’s impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That’s why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good. —Durga Tagore and Shakti Guhathakurta

Each one of us has a story to tell, and the telling of that story is a spiritual act. Our stories heal us, connect us, and enrich our lives. —author Erin Springer

Dancing, singing, storytelling, and silence are the four universal healing salves. —author Angeles Arrien

Stories create community, enable us to see through the eyes of other people, and open us to the claims of others. —actor Peter Forbes

Storytelling is how we resist erasure. It is how we return stolen time to ourselves. —poet Joy Harjo, Muscogee (Creek) Nation

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. —author Maya Angelou

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives—the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change—truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. —author Salmon Rushdie

To tell a story is to place oneself back into the circle of life. —botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, Citizen Potawatomi Nation

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STORIES WILL LAST LONGER THAN THE CLOUD

Stories are humanity’s most powerful and durable technology for preserving knowledge. They carry ecological, historical, and spiritual truths across thousands of years. Indigenous storytelling traditions have developed a deep form of permanence.

READ MORE: https://tinyurl.com/StoriesLast

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Check out my LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of June 4

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Neurologist Oliver Sacks said, “I am haunted by the density of experience.” He meant that every moment contains far more richness than we can fully register or remember. This observation will be especially relevant for you in the coming weeks. Your mind (and heart!) will be flooded with an abundance of stimuli, ideas, feelings, and impressions. It might initially feel overwhelming, but will ultimately be a boon—especially if you prepare yourself for the intensity and abundance. Imagine yourself standing next to a fountain and feeling cheerful about getting soaked.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): You have superpowers that hardened hearts and tough guys can’t fathom. Receptivity is a key part of your genius, for example. Emotional fluency is at the root of your intelligence. Your ability to feel so much and so deeply makes you dangerous to status quos managed by people who overthink everything. Wait! There’s more. You can nurture without smothering and protect without imprisoning. You wield the powers of memory without being enslaved by nostalgia. You make home a verb, not a noun, as you build shelter for yourself and your tribe. I hope you will express these gorgeous talents to the max in the coming weeks and months.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): An astrologer rooted in older traditions might claim that now is an ideal time to promote your personal agenda through sly, gossipy maneuvering. But since I am devoted to building a new culture grounded in compassionate values that nourish the soul, my message is different. I’m pleased to tell you that the coming weeks will be a potent phase to engage in elevating gossip that serves the greater good, to celebrate unsung heroes, and to call attention to everything that is thriving. For practical dreamers like you and me, carelessly speaking ill of others undermines our own aspirations. One of the most effective ways to expand our own possibilities is to use the power of language to boost other people’s chances for joy and success.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The ancient Library of Alexandria contained over half a million scrolls. If you devoted eight hours a day to reading, you could finish about 5,000 books over the course of your life. The librarians back then knew they would never read all the texts they managed and protected. Their job wasn’t to consume all knowledge but to be stewards of abundance. They’re good role models for you, Virgo. The wonderful fact is that you don’t have to master every single thing that attracts your attention. Your far more relaxing task is to curate with care and wisdom. Your growing edge is to know what to preserve and what to release. One of your noblest projects is to commune pleasurably with the intriguing mysteries that life brings you, not obsess on them.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Libra psychologist Carol Dweck distinguishes between fixed mindsets (”I’m not smart enough”) and growth mindsets (”I can become smarter”). When you have a fixed mindset, obstacles weigh you down. With a growth mindset, they motivate you to develop. What determines your trajectory isn’t your current skill level but how you relate to your edge. With this in mind, Libra, I invite you to monitor your self-talk as you encounter challenges. Are you prone to thinking that limitations are permanent, or do you see them as temporary states you can use as opportunities? You now have a good chance to instill the latter as a root habit.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): What’s something you wish you could change about yourself? Is it a trait, pattern, fear, or story about your body? And what exactly tells you that this can never change? Is it loyalty to old expectations or a rotting prophecy someone laid on you? Consider the possibility that maybe the “can’t” is really a “won’t,” or a “don’t know how yet,” or “I’m afraid of who I’d be without this.” Then imagine that you don’t have to transform this thing instantly, but, for starters, need only shift it by 10 percent in the direction of mercy and freedom. What small, specific action would generate that 10 percent?

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If you would like to support my work, please consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): What’s your most vital relationship? I dare you to surprise each other in the coming weeks. Refresh your bond with playful experimentation. Here are adventures you two could explore: 1. Take a walk together with no destination in mind, letting curiosity guide you. Talk about the paths you have not yet taken in life but might like to. 2. Describe the most beautiful future you can imagine for each other. Share practical steps you could take to make these scenarios happen. 3. Choose a food treat you both love, speak a blessing over it, then eat it slowly together as you name what you are most grateful for in your connection.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Chess masters and accomplished musicians practice differently from amateurs. They focus most intensely on their weak points, less so on rehearsing what they already do well. It’s uncomfortable to confront inadequacy, but they’re better for it. In my astrological opinion, Capricorn, you should specialize in a similar courage during the coming weeks. I invite you to direct your generous attention toward your shakiest skills and most uncertain territories. Glorious growth will happen at the edge of your competence.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Be more like a lightning storm over a green meadow and less like a porch light attracting moths. Be more like a spiritual riddle in an ecstatic poem and less like a slogan printed on a T‑shirt. Be more like a Miles Davis improvisation and less like a tune played note‑for‑note from the sheet music for a formulaic pop song. Can you stretch yourself into more fertile wildness, Aquarius? Will you expand your future with adventures that thrill your imagination? I believe you can and should. For bonus magic, be more like a dream of wandering in a rowdy paradise and less like the old version of yourself. Trust the frontier signals that make your pulse quicken, and speak less about the obvious truths that make everyone nod in agreement.

PISCES (Feb. 19-Mar. 20): Are you ready to assess the state of your emotional pain? Every few years, I invite you to take stock. I ask you to reflect on how well you’ve been cultivating meaningful stress while avoiding useless pain and misery. So, how’s your progress since our last check-in? Have you improved at sidestepping dull torments you’ve relived a thousand times? Are you less vulnerable to being wounded by ignorant or thoughtless people? Can you more swiftly shake off the sting of minor troubles? Most importantly, are you increasingly magnetized to the intriguing dilemmas that challenge you to grow wiser and more resourceful?

ARIES (Mar. 21-April 19): You are often the best possible remedy for stale, unoriginal thinking that’s festering in your vicinity. And you are especially so these days. Others might have the gall to disrupt the deadening status quo, but you have the charm to do it without scorching every bridge and laying waste to the land. So I invite you to step into the role of cheerful troublemaker. Unleash your iconoclastic sparks with the intention of making life friskier and more imaginative, not more tangled and irritating.

TAURUS (Apr. 20-May 20): In many farming cultures, including parts of India, growers speak or sing to their crops as they walk through the fields. It’s a gesture of personal care that mirrors growing scientific interest in how plants respond to sound and vibration. Some studies suggest that plants exposed to sustained speech and song may grow more vigorously. Your assignment in the coming weeks, Taurus, is to speak to the growing things in your life with similar devotion. Talk to your projects. Sing to your relationships. Tell jokes to your dreams. The universe is extra responsive to your sweet voice.

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Disappear Your Fear; Resurrect Your Audacity

Morning Practice

You’re lying in bed, having just awakened. Soon you’ll rise, but not yet. You love hovering in the liminal zone between dream and day. This is the perfect moment, when your psyche is extra receptive.

Place one hand on your heart and the other on your belly. Enjoy the luxurious pleasure and privilege of breathing. Feel the rise and fall of the ancient rhythm that has sustained you through the night.

Now sing softly:

“I disappear my fear.”

As these words flow out of you, imagine your fear as a dark mist or a weight pressing on your chest. Simply acknowledge it with curiosity: “Ah, there you are. I know you.”

Now watch it dissolve, like morning fog touched by the first rays of sun. Your fear doesn’t fight you. It evaporates into the air you’re breathing out.

Take a deep breath in and sing:

“I resurrect my audacity.”

Feel the boldness that has always belonged to you. Maybe it has been buried under layers of conditioning and caution, but it has never deserted you. So in other words, you’re not creating audacity from nothing. You’re summoning it up from the underworld of your forgotten powers.

Audacity is rising in you like an old song you love. Your birthright is reminding you it’s always there.

Now say or sing:

“I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity.”

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Variations: Playing with Power

The mantra is alive and wants to move through you in various forms at different times of the day. Don’t let it become stale with repetition. Instead, try other renditions:

Sing it like an anthem. Chant it like a psalm. Let it be ridiculous, sublime, or both. Wail it in the shower as if you were bellowing it under a waterfall. Growl it while you’re making coffee, turning the morning ritual into a brash ceremony.

Murmur or spout it in different voices. Proclaim it as your future self, who’s already living audaciously. Say it as your younger self, who needed to hear it. Celebrate it as a brave warrior, as a sly healer, or as a loving parent to your own soul.

Rhythm variations:

• Quickly and percussively: “IdisappearmyfearandIresurrectmyaudacity”

• Slowly and spaciously: “I . . . disappear . . . my . . . fear. I . . . resurrect . . . my . . . audacity.”

• With the blessing of breath: “I disappear my fear” (exhale). “I resurrect my audacity” (inhale).

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Movement practice.

As you say, “I disappear my fear,” make a gesture of releasing. Push your palms away from your body. Open your arms wide and dance. Or shake your hands as if flinging water from your fingers.

As you say. “I resurrect my audacity,” pull a precious object toward your heart, or raise your arms overhead, or gently pound your fist against your chest, or stand on your toes reaching upward.

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Deepening: The Evening Practice

As you prepare for sleep, the mantra takes on different work. Now you’re not launching yourself into the day but releasing yourself into the healing powers of the night. Lie down and get comfortable. Close your eyes and scan your day:

Where did fear sneak into the picture? Just notice this, and don’t judge yourself. Was it in a conversation you avoided? An email you didn’t send? A truth you swallowed? A dream you talked yourself out of?

See each eruption of fear. Then say, with compassion:

“I disappear my fear.”

Watch the fear from today dissolve into the darkness around you. You don’t have to carry it into tomorrow. Let it go, send it away, and watch it disintegrate.

Now scan for times during the day when your audacity yearned to emerge. Even if you didn’t act on it, where did you feel that spark: an impulse toward your feisty courage and pluck?

Honor that impulse. Stoke that flame. Say:

“I resurrect my audacity.”

Feel it growing stronger as you acknowledge it. Your unconscious mind is listening. You’re programming your dreams, setting an intention for the night’s journey. While you sleep, your audacity will be gathering force, preparing for tomorrow.

Repeat the full mantra, making your voice more daring, playful, or boisterous with each repetition:

“I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity.”

“I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity.”

“I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity.”

Let the last repetition sail off into the dreaming dark where your psyche will do its effervescent work.

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The Subtle Practice: Throughout Your Day

You don’t have to wait for morning or evening. The mantra is a portable spell, available whenever you need it.

Before a challenging conversation: Murmur it under your breath.

When you’re in the grip of anxiety: Say it silently in your mind, over and over, until the fear loses its hold.

If you feel a familiar impulse to play small or hide or stay safe: Make the mantra be your rebellion.

When you’re about to take an action that makes you nervous: Invoke it as your war cry and your prayer.

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Within these two statements is a complete technology for transformation. You’re doing two things:

1. Disappearing your fear by seeing through its illusory power and letting it dissolve.

2. Resurrecting your audacity by remembering it was always there, just waiting to be called back to life.

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The Invitation

For the next 33 days, make this mantra your companion. Chant it reverently each morning as you wake. Sing it defiantly every evening before sleep. Pray it confidently whenever fear tries to insinuate its familiar lies.

Notice how your relationship with fear gradually shifts because you’ve learned to make it disappear. Rejoice as your audacity resurrects itself—in small ways at first, then in increasingly gutsy expressions of your true vitality.

You are performing an ancient alchemy: transforming the lead of fear into the gold of courage. And you’re doing it with your breath, your voice, and your willingness to speak the truth you want to live.

I disappear my fear. I resurrect my audacity.

So shall it be.

For inspiration in mastering the difference between your fearful fantasies and accurate intuitions, go here: tinyurl.com/Fear-Intuition

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HELP AND SUPPORT

I get many heart-rending requests from people who are going through challenging times in their lives and would like my personal advice.

I wish I could respond to these inquiries, because they are often profound and well-thought-out, demonstrating an ability to define the problems at hand with lucid insight.

Unfortunately, I can’t respond. My various lines of work are too demanding to add any other tasks to my life, no matter how interesting they might be. But I’ve developed a basic response to those people who seek my personal input. I’m offering it below.

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I’m honored that you regard me as someone who might be able to provide answers or solace, but I don’t think it would be responsible for me to fling advice your way without knowing more about the complexities of your problem. And I’m afraid I can’t give the time necessary to explore those complexities.

The only thing I’ll suggest, as you seek to clarify your situation, is for you to arrange to go on a retreat, even if it’s just in your own home. During that time of withdrawal from the world’s everyday madness, I urge you to avoid all media and to be as silent and relaxed as it’s possible for you to be.

During the first part of your retreat, spend hours visualizing in your mind’s eye the entire story of your life, from the earliest memory to the present moment.

During the second phase of your retreat, begin your meditations by establishing contact with the highest source of wisdom and love within you. You can call this source God or Goddess or your Guardian Angel or Higher Self or even Nature itself. Spend luxurious time in dialogue with this source, making sure to ask these questions:

1. “What is it I want more than anything else?”

2. “What is the best way to serve the mission I came to Earth to carry out? What are the very best gifts I have to offer other humans?”

3. “What path will allow me to ultimately learn the most about wise love?”

4. “How do I need to change in order to get what I want, carry out my life’s mission, and learn about wise love? What influences and attitudes do I need to eliminate?”

During the third phase of the process, write out a mission statement: what you want to accomplish by the time you die many years hence. Then create a master plan of the actions you will take in order to make that mission statement come true. Include three actions you will take in the next month to get more serious about accomplishing your mission.

During the fourth phase, visualize the following scenarios in lush detail: that God/Goddess/Life loves you, that the entire universe is conspiring to give you the lessons and blessings and kicks in the ass and liberations you need exactly when you need them, and that you are ready to welcome that love and guidance with all your heart.

P.S. I’m a big believer in trusting your intuition. Even if it doesn’t lead you to what your ego thinks is a successful outcome, your intuition will always guide you to the experiences that your soul needs.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

WEEK OF MAY 28

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Among the Dogon of Mali, Sigui so is a secret language. It’s used in a sacred ritual when people gather to retell their beginnings and patch up strains in tribal harmony. I’m borrowing “Sigui so” here as a symbol for a way of talking that I hope you will specialize in during the coming weeks: language that eases tensions, soothes friction, and fosters unity. Start like this: Unleash your trademark wit but spike it with sly blessings and tactful probes. Wield your fluency to burn away confusion and uncover unspoken feelings. If you’re in an extra-bold mood, give everyone tacit permission to be their idiosyncratic selves instead of their polished personas.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): What’s the holiest, most healing trouble you could rustle up right now? I mean trouble that freshens what’s stale but doesn’t scorch the earth. Maybe it’s a buoyant disruption, like telling wild truths you usually tend to soften. Or maybe it’s asking for what your future self pines for instead of what your past self regards as polite and reasonable. As a Cancerian soul myself, I dare both you and me to give ourselves permission to rumble. Let’s be brazen as we instigate creative upheavals in service to our cheerful vigor. Let’s instigate at least one concrete action that will rattle the stagnant pattern just enough to make life more interesting.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Sea otters are a keystone species. Their presence is essential to the health of their entire ecosystem. As they eat sea urchins, the kelp forests flourish. Without otters, the urchins overgraze, and kelp forests may collapse, which in turn affects hundreds of other species. One creature’s appetite helps regulate an entire undersea neighborhood. I suspect you’re serving a similar function, Leo. You’re having more impact and wielding more influence than you realize. No pressure! But please act accordingly: with maximum integrity and robust responsibility.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): A Dutch woman who died left her grand-nephew an inheritance of 220,000 euros. The only problem is that he’s homeless and constantly on the move, so the executors haven’t been able to find him. This echoes a recurring pattern in your life. Even now, sources of blessings are searching for ways to reach you, but you are slow to notice their approach or to magnetize yourself to their arrival. My prayer: May you figure out what needs to be done to make yourself fully available for these gifts—and then ingrain that capacity in your habit mind.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Visualize your fears. Consider how few of them rest on a genuine likelihood that the scary events could ever take place. Then ask yourself how much of your uneasiness springs from vivid fantasies or from a practiced tendency to fret. You might also ruminate on how you absorb the background worry that’s amplified by mass culture. After reflecting on all that, I invite you to take one concrete action to lower the level of tension you have come to treat as normal. Take another action to weaken the grip of your deepest dread. The current planetary patterns suggest you now have the bold, creative power necessary to shrink your baseline anxiety.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Even more than usual, you have a sacred duty to celebrate your poignant sweetness and dark intelligence. For the sake of your emotional health, you should pay wild reverence to your deepest, most mysterious yearnings. To be the person we all you need you to be, you must tenderly nurture the parts of your inner world that resemble the aurora borealis. I want to support you in these sublime sacraments, which is why I suggest you memorize the following prayer by Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.”

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If you would like to support my work, please consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

and/or

becoming a paid subscriber to my Free Will Astrology Newsletter

and/or

donating at my Paypal site: paypal.com/paypalme/GiftsForRob

(contribute as Friends and Family)

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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Linguists use the term “false friends.” These are words in different languages that seem similar but don’t have the same meaning. For example, the Spanish word embarazada resembles “embarrassed” to English speakers but actually means “pregnant.” I suspect you’re dealing with another type of false friend, Sagittarius: people or situations that turned out to be at variance with what you initially imagined. But rather than feeling unsettled by these revelations, I suggest you treat them as a prod to see with fresh eyes. Your disorientation could be the beginning of more interesting understandings.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a code assigned to a book for commercial and cataloging purposes. It contains key information and includes a built-in error-detection notation. If you transpose two numbers when entering an ISBN, the last digit will tell you something’s wrong. In this spirit, Capricorn, I heartily recommend that you build more mistake detection into your life. Invest in extra safeguards. Add verification steps. Build in double-checks. The goal is to create systems robust enough to survive oversights and gaffes. I very much want you to give yourself the gift of safety nets that will empower you to take smart risks and intriguing gambles.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You may not yet grasp how richly creative you are right now, nor how much more abundant your generative powers could become. So it’s auspicious that you are reading this horoscope now. Consider this your advance notice: Your capacity to originate ideas, projects, and connections is surging, and it’s crucial to choose with care which possibilities you nurture and which you decline. If you are selective and intentional about what you sow, then about six months from now, you will be far more likely to gather lush, beautiful harvests instead of wrestling with overgrown, unruly tangles.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Ethnobotanist Wade Davis documented how different cultures perceive entirely different realities despite inhabiting the same physical world. It means that two people can stand in the same forest and see different forests through their cultural lens and personal mythology. This is simultaneously the problem and the opportunity you face, Pisces. You and others in your orbit are inhabiting divergent realities that superficially seem the same. If you hope to reconcile the differences, you must first acknowledge them as real. You’re dealing with fundamentally different ways of constructing meaning, not just small misunderstandings.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the weeks ahead, simply being right won’t necessarily lead to success. Having strength, intelligence, wealth, or connections might help, though not as much as usual. But a different approach will work well as you strive to overcome challenges: a blend of cleverness and integrity. I invite you to be cunning while remaining honorable. Practice subtle strategy in service of higher aims. And here’s one more secret to ensure victory: Let go of any need to receive full recognition for your efforts.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “Dear Horoscope Guy: Two astrologers have assured me that as a Taurus, I’m a natural-born money magnet. So why am I broke? I keep begging the Divine for cash miracles, and I buy lottery tickets twice a week. Still nothing! Please tell me when I’ll finally hit the jackpot. Better yet, give me the winning numbers. –Taurus Desperate for Dollars.” Dear Desperate: The “luck” you crave will arrive as you diligently pour yourself into building your sweetest dreams, spurning shortcuts and enjoying yourself as much as possible. The Divine prefers to fund eager co-creators, not wishful thinkers. I predict that a slow-motion jackpot will ultimately arrive through your devoted attention to doing what excites you.

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Art by Mindy Eve Ouellet

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I understand the longing by astrologers to peg particular world events to specific astrological aspects and configurations.

There is something deeply satisfying about the idea that the wheeling of planets through the sky might illuminate the patterns of history in detail. What fun it would be if the chaos of human events might yield its secrets to those who can read the celestial maps with precision and care.

I recognize the sincerity of the many astrologers who even aspire to predict specific future global events and trends through the power of astrological ruminations. The ambition is noble. It speaks to astrology’s ancient covenant with the human hunger for meaning.

But such meditations are beyond my capacity. I am insufficiently knowledgeable about the myriad factors that would need to be held in mind to make this kind of speculation viable—including the histories and the intricate political, economic, and cultural details of major nations and civilizations.

A credible astrological reading of world events would require not just fluency in the symbolic language of the planets, but something approaching the polymathic mastery of a historian, geopolitical analyst, cultural anthropologist, and economist all at once.

I also think the world as a whole is just too complicated and multifaceted to draw clear, simple conclusions about its evolution. It resists the kind of elegant synthesis that astrology, at its best, can offer for individual lives.

Assessing the soul’s code of the World Soul is a profoundly different undertaking than assessing the soul’s code of an individual human.

The birth chart of a person is already a labyrinthine mystery; the birth chart of a civilization or a nation or of humanity itself is of an entirely different order of complexity and interpretive challenge.

I know of only one astrologer who has managed this immense work with some grace and genuine proficiency: Richard Tarnas in his landmark book Cosmos and Psyche.

His scholarship is formidable, his humility authentic, and his capacity to hold enormous amounts of historical and philosophical detail in productive relationship with astrological thinking is rare.

But it’s worth noting that his work in that book is primarily retrospective: analyzing past events through the lens of astrological thinking, looking backward with the considerable advantage of already knowing what happened.

Retrodiction, however impressive, is a different beast than prediction.

And honestly, I know of no other astrologer who has come close to offering big-picture, global projections that ring consistently true—either about the past, when examined rigorously, or about the future, which is even harder to scry.

The literature is full of confident proclamations that, viewed in hindsight, dissolve into vagueness or simply miss the mark. I say this not to disparage the wonderful tradition, but because intellectual honesty demands it.

I don’t mind, and even genuinely enjoy, playing around with ideas and making speculative guesses, as long as I don’t pretend I’m an authority and don’t encourage others to treat my musings as prophecy. Astrological pattern-noticing can be genuinely illuminating, even thrilling, when held lightly.

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So why am I willing to offer the broad astrological reflections that follow below when I’ve just disclaimed any ability to predict specific world events? The distinction matters to me, and I want to name it.

There’s a difference between forecasting tomorrow’s weather in your exact zip code and saying, “We’re entering a season of storms; expect wind.” The first is a precise empirical claim that lives or dies by what actually happens at your front door. The second is an attunement to atmosphere that invites attention rather than demanding belief.

What follows is offered in that second spirit. I’m noticing patterns and tracing symbolic resonances. What trends have accompanied these planetary configurations in the past and what might accompany them now?

I’m not naming dates or events or outcomes, but sketching the energy that seems to be circulating and the questions it appears to be asking. What work are we invited to undertake?

Held this way, astrology becomes less a fortune-telling apparatus and more a contemplative tool: a way of asking what season the World Soul is in, and what that season might be requesting of us.

Readers stay in possession of their own discernment. The future stays unwritten. And the symbolic imagination, one of the great human faculties, gets to play.

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For example, it’s spookily interesting to notice that the last three times Uranus was in Gemini, as it is now, coincided with three of the most seismic ruptures in American history: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II.

Uranus will be in Gemini until May 2033, and it’s tempting to fantasize that our era will undergo changes comparable to the last three phases. But the prospect of making specific predictions about what’s going to unfold? That’s beyond me.

I’d venture to say it’s beyond everyone—even the most gifted, learned, and clairvoyant astrologers working today. We can say: Something significant is stirring. We can say: Pay attention, the atmosphere is charged, and the old structures are vulnerable

But to claim to know the precise shape of what’s coming—the wars, the revolutions, the breakthroughs—is to overclaim in a way that ultimately dishonors both astrology and the irreducible wildness of history itself.

As the old motto goes, The stars incline, but they don’t compel. And the World Soul, like any soul worth knowing, keeps its deepest secrets close.

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Read what I’ve written about Uranus in Gemini: tinyurl.com/UranusThroughGemini

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NEPTUNE IN ARIES

Neptune entered Aries on January 26, 2026. It remains in Aries (with a brief dip into Taurus) until March 23, 2039.​

Previous Neptune visits to Aries:

The American Civil War, dated from the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, coincided precisely with Neptune’s transit into Aries.

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In 1533, when Neptune entered Aries, Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the “Reformation Parliament” severed England from the Catholic Church, inaugurating centuries of Protestant–Catholic realignment and empire-building.

Around the same time, Spanish conquistadors captured the Inca capital of Cuzco, a pivotal moment in the destruction of the Inca state and the consolidation of Spanish colonial rule in the Andes.

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The 1697–1712 Neptune-in-Aries epoch included the War of the Spanish Succession and Queen Anne’s War, major dynastic and colonial conflicts involving much of Europe and its American colonies.

In 1707, the Act of Union joined England and Scotland into the new entity of Great Britain, a constitutional re-founding that reshaped the British state and its future imperial trajectory.

SATURN AND NEPTUNE IN ARIES

Saturn and Neptune were exactly conjunct at 0° Aries on February 20, 2026. They will both continue to be in Aries until April 2028.

Here are some ideas about the meaning of this aspect:

This is the time when we are no longer allowed to fantasize a better world from the sidelines, but must live it in our bodies, with all the risk and exposure that Aries entails.

The age of curated spiritual personas is closing. The cosmos is impatient with our beautiful theories and exquisitely articulated longings.

Neptune and Saturn together in the sign of the warrior demand that we incarnate what we have only imagined. They insist that our visions take on weight and make demands of us. Aries insists on first-person presence, on showing up in the flesh with whatever we’ve got, even if that feels insufficient. More:

• The hero’s journey can’t be about conquest or mastery but has to bear the wound of the world in a new way: transmuting private disillusionment into public, embodied compassion.

The old myth is being retired. No more of the lone seeker venturing out, claiming the treasure, and returning triumphant. In its place, a stranger and more demanding initiation emerges: warriors who fight not to win but to learn how to be in love with life. They clear a path that others can actually walk on, not just admire from a distance.

• Our ideals must get robustly practical. Dreams that can’t survive contact with the brawl-and-jostle world are being dissolved. Only those visions willing to scuffle and rumble are allowed to go on.

This is a brutal but loving sorting. The cosmos is composting our spiritual escapism to clear the ground for visions that can survive difficult conversations, financial setbacks, and sleepless nights with a sick child. Can our prophecies negotiate, organize, build, and repair?

• Our faith has to become less about what we believe and more about what we dare to enact in the face of fear, failure, and futility.

Belief is no longer a noun we possess but a verb we perform. The question shifts from “What’s your spiritual path?” to “What does your spiritual path lead you to do on a Tuesday morning when nothing feels meaningful?”

Saturn cares about our follow-through. Neptune cares about whether we can stay devoted to mystery even when mystery offers no comfort. Together they are midwifing a faith that is athletic, weather-beaten, and unromantic. It’s a faith we could trust our life to because it has already been tested by life.

• This is the end of spectator spirituality. The cosmos is pressuring us to choose. Do we retreat into anesthetized cynicism, the easiest religion of our era, requiring nothing but a smirk? Or do we take up the vulnerable, unglamorous work of living our most compassionate vision in real time, in real bodies, in real conflict?

There is no neutral position anymore. Every soul is being summoned onto the field, not as a champion but as a participant in a cause that’s larger than personal victory.

Aries is the sign of beginnings, and what begins now is the long, awkward, exhilarating practice of becoming the people our prophecies have been describing.

Not someday. Not when conditions improve. Now, with this body, in this hour, with whatever fear is currently moving through us.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

WEEK OF MAY 21

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): When many people reflect on their early years, they focus on the alienation and wounds they endured. Few recall, in vivid detail, the moments of joy, triumph, and breakthrough. It’s a symptom, I suppose, of our era’s compulsive cynicism, and not necessarily an accurate account of the past. So many good things happened, too! This isn’t to dismiss the real pain that shaped us in our tender years. Still, I want you to know that you are in a season when it’s essential to recognize and celebrate the blessings of your beginnings—the fun, guidance, and grace that helped you flourish. Update your gratitude!

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Of all the zodiac signs, you have the most potential to cultivate robust emotional intelligence that’s helpful in practical situations. More than everyone else, your feelings are less likely to render you vulnerable and fragile and more likely to make you a powerhouse. The coming weeks will be prime time to deploy these talents to the max. I encourage you to summon gleeful exuberance as you provide your sensitive, heartful nurturing. Practice the ingenious art of keeping the world emotionally literate and spiritually alert.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I am pleased to predict that you will be less egotistical and narcissistic in the coming weeks than you have ever been in your life. In saying that, I don’t mean to imply that you’re any more egotistical and narcissistic than the rest of us. I’m simply saying you can get a liberating reprieve from the excessive pride and selfishness that regularly debilitates us all. Congratulations, Leo! This grace period should enable you to deepen your attunement with your soul’s blueprint, the design of destiny you chose before birth. I bet you will enjoy a period of vibrant, exciting tranquility.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Consider this a friendly heads-up to your inner critic, your gloomy side, and any voice in your head that expects too little from life. Upcoming astrological omens are influencing me to predict a stream of auspicious omens and fortunate events. So if you’d rather cling to tired stories about not being good enough or strong enough, you might want to skip my forecasts for a while. But if you’re ready to vivify your faith in your power to eagerly create what you desire, stay tuned. Karmic blessings are coming.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): To be blunt, dear Libra, I think you need soul medicine that’s most available in frontiers, borderlands, and thresholds. Some of these might be bright, shiny places, and others may be akin to mazes and tunnels. Please keep in mind that your main motivation, as you seek adventures in the outskirts, should be the quest to have fun as you blow your own mind. For the sake of your lust for life and joie de vivre, you really must explore power spots untouched by trivia and pettiness: sanctuaries where vastness, freedom, and raw vitality can wash away at least some of your fixations and habits.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Giant Pacific octopus dens are identifiable by the “gardens” of debris outside. They include shells and bones, arranged like ornamentation around the entrance. Are the creatures trying to decorate? Scientists don’t know. But it’s clear they are leaving evidence of their appetites. The result is distinctive, artistic, and revealing. With this scenario as your metaphorical meditation, Scorpio, I invite you to look at what you have been pursuing and consuming in recent months. Contemplate the stuff piling up in your sphere. What do your finished experiences reveal about your quest for meaning? Does this pattern reflect your deepest intentions? Is this who you want to be? Make sure the story you’re teling about yourself is the right one.

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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Advising a Sagittarius to be patient is like asking a bonfire to burn slowly and politely. Still, I will give it a try. Because I love you, I will dare to be frank. So here goes: If you want to align yourself with astrological currents, practice being reverently at ease with life’s madness as you watch and wait. See if you can take genuine pleasure in resting within a field of calm trust. Imagine, with fearless delight, the rewards that will find you as you nurture a steady, unhurried confidence in your intuition, which will ultimately tell you exactly what you need to do.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In 1994, immunologist Polly Matzinger revolutionized her field with a radical theory. She discovered that our immune systems don’t focus on distinguishing “self” from “non-self,” but rather responding to threats. The body puts less emphasis on asking “is this me?” and more on “is this harmful?” Her breakthrough transformed our understanding of immunity, autoimmune disease, and transplant rejection. According to my analysis of the astrological riddles, you Capricorns could benefit from a similar adjustment. Don’t worry about whether any particular influence harmonizes with your identity or aligns with your history. Instead, ask, “Is it nourishing or harmful? Supportive or useless?” As you refresh your approach to guarding and protecting your precious self, new options will become visible.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): According to my interpretation of the astrological signals, you have run into an obstacle to your creative flow, or may soon do so. Though this could feel discouraging at first, I think it’s a promising sign. It indicates that a hidden bug is surfacing. An inner saboteur is no longer operating in the shadows. You’re being given the opportunity to repair an unseen energy leak that has been sapping your vitality. To illuminate this process, consider the wisdom of author Joyce Carol Oates. She says that writer’s block arises when a writer subconsciously believes that what they’re trying to create is false, misguided, or harmful to themselves, which results in a temporary creative paralysis. Be brave and relentless in hunting down the glitch in your self-love, Aquarius.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Maybe you’ve been having thoughts like this: “I’m too scrambled to do what’s necessary to get unscrambled.” Here’s another snag that may be tangling your mind: “I’m too mixed up to know what questions to ask to sort out my confusion.” If this is true, Pisces, I’m here to offer advice. Imagine calling a timeout on the whole noisy world and slipping free of the habitual trance. Consider retreating to a sanctuary where time doesn’t oppress you and complications subside. Let your mind be empty, give your ambitions a rest, and immerse your tender attention in the deepest part of yourself you can find.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): If you’re a professional photographer, now is an ideal moment to invest in the higher-end lens you know would expand your best work. If you’re a committed chef, it’s a perfect time to spring for a precision knife set that elevates your craft. If you’re a devoted yoga or meditation teacher preparing a new series, you might decide to purchase an upgraded sound system to share your vocal offerings more crisply. And if you are none of the above, consider this your sign to obtain a key instrument or tool that will help you move to the next level of professionalism in the work you’re called to do.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): When we hear people described as having fertile imaginations, we may assume they are artists, writers, or musicians. But the truth is that many creative visualizers are engineers, city planners, inventors, and the like: those who design and build functional wonders. Of this group, you Tauruses make up a disproportionately high percentage. Your tribe is often most imaginative when vitalizing concrete details and transforming practical matters. In the coming weeks, this will be a vibrant X-factor in your relationship with the world.

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The Tyranny of the Eternal Now: What Eckhart Tolle’s Promise Misses

Eckhart Tolle’s work tells us that life is only ever lived now. Regret about the past and anticipation of the future can become tyrannies. Compulsive identification with our thoughts can keep us from direct contact with reality. Thanks for the tips, dude!

His invitation into presence has helped many of us loosen the grip of anxiety, obsessive thinking, and self-punishing mental loops.

But here’s a key caveat: There’s a crucial difference between liberation from compulsive identification with the past and the denial of the past’s living force in us.

Tolle’s declaration that “nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now” is simplistic and reductive. It mistakes freedom from compulsive identification with memory for freedom from memory itself. Those are different achievements.

The statement redefines “presence” so narrowly that it excludes much of what makes us human.

Yes, technically, in this precise nanosecond, you can notice your breath, feel your feet on the ground, and observe the play of light through the tree leaves.

But this atomized present-moment awareness, severed from the continuous stream of experience that constitutes a human life, may be psychologically harmful and ethically incomplete. Toll’s version of NOW is strobe-lit consciousness.

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Presence Isn’t the Problem

The quote at the beginning of this essay isn’t taken out of context. Tolle repeatedly says things like:

“Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now.”

“The past has no power over the present moment.”

“You can’t find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.”

“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time.”

Taken together, these teachings subordinate historical consciousness to presence. That’s a big problem for me.

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The Past Lives in Our Bodies

Anyone who has worked with trauma knows that the past doesn’t politely wait in a sealed archive marked “Then.” It lives in the nervous system, shaping our baseline arousal levels and our capacity to regulate emotion.

When I’m walking down a dark city street in May of 2026, my body reminds me that on another May evening many years ago, my beloved flesh was assaulted by a gunshot from a stranger. Read about it here: https://tinyurl.com/ShotWithaRealGun

Is my body wrong or bad for sounding that echo? Of course not.

My experience is far from atypical. Seventy percent of us have experienced at least one traumatic event, and some of us, like me, have PTSD as a result.

Fact: When someone with PTSD enters what should be a neutral social situation and experiences a fight-or-flight activation, they’re dealing with a past that has rewired their neurobiology.

The body keeps score. Traumatic memory is embedded in muscular tension, breathing patterns, and the hair-trigger responsiveness of the amygdala.

To tell someone that “nothing from the past can prevent you from being present” when their autonomic nervous system is screaming danger signals based on actual past danger is willful naivete that blames the victim for their own dysregulation.

The Complexity of Integration

Being present involves continual negotiation with the past. As we arrive at each moment, we’re carrying:

• Learned patterns that developed in response to what we have previously experienced

• Cultural conditioning that influences what we perceive and how we interpret it

• Emotional associations built through repetitions

• Knowledge, gained through previous encounters, that we apply to what’s happening now

• Somatic memories that shape our felt sense of safety or threat

To be genuinely present means showing up with all of this stuff. If we don’t acknowledge it, we’re not genuinely present! It’s a fraudulent stance. The goal isn’t to transcend it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but to integrate it. That’s hard, and it takes a while to accomplish.

Veterans of war who’ve been wounded by shrapnel often find that years later, some of the metal fragments eventually migrate to the surface and pop out of their skin. The moral of the story: The body may take a long time to purify itself of toxins.

The same is true about our psyches. It might not be able to easily and quickly get rid of the poisons it has absorbed, but we should never give up hoping it will find a way.

If we have any hope of pulling off such a heroic feat, we need to cultivate this awareness: When we see ourselves reacting with disproportionate anger to a minor slight, presence means recognizing “Ah, this rage is an imprint from all those times I was belittled and dismissed as a child.”

And then we choose how to respond, which is different from simply “being in the now.”

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The Ethics of Spiritual Amnesia

Tolle’s formulation carries disturbing ethical implications. If nothing from the past can prevent our pure presence, then historical trauma becomes irrelevant.

Generational wounds can be dismissed. Systemic oppression that operates through the accumulated weight of injustice becomes an inconvenience we should simply rise above through better consciousness.

This is historical evasion at its most pernicious. It transforms legitimate suffering into personal failure.

Can’t be present? Must be your attachment to past narrative. Can’t access peace? Must be your identification with victimhood. The teaching shifts responsibility away from addressing actual conditions and onto the individual’s consciousness practice.

For those of us dealing with the intergenerational legacy of slavery or genocide or colonization, such teachings can function as a form of moral erasure, obscuring the ways historical trauma remains vividly active in the present.

It denies the reality of how trauma moves through families, communities, and cultures. It pathologizes reasonable responses to unreasonable circumstances.

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The Dangerous Luxury of Historical Amnesia

The dangers of Tolle’s ahistorical consciousness is even more alarmingly acute in light of the collective crisis we now inhabit. As America slides toward routine cruelty and authoritarianism, the recommendation that we should liberate ourselves from historical consciousness is catastrophic.

Any spirituality that weakens our relationship to historical memory risks colluding with authoritarian culture. It requires populations who have no knowledge of how democratic norms erode and how quickly the unthinkable becomes normalized.

When we sever ourselves from historical memory, we become hideously exploitable. We can’t see the trajectory we’re on because we’ve lost the reference points that would make it visible. The cruelty being perpetrated on us RIGHT NOW has precedents, and those precedents have consequences we’re wise to heed.

That’s why authoritarian thugs unfailingly assault and undermine historical memory. They understand that people unaware of what happened in the past are easier to control.

The “eternal now” becomes a tool of oppression when it discourages us from asking: How did we get here? What patterns from the past are reasserting themselves? What do we know from previous struggles about how to resist? What obligations do we carry from those who fought before us?

As the Trumpocalypse rages and destroys, we need robust historical perspective.

How many Americans know that FDR’s New Deal emerged from the ashes of unregulated capitalism’s collapse? Do we remember how the civil rights movement built power through sustained organizing, not solely through individual consciousness raising? Our practical wisdom grows as we ruminate on how authoritarians consolidate power, because then we can recognize and resist each step. Our effectiveness grows as we study the tactics that worked and learn from the strategies that failed.

Equally crucial: We need to remember the future as well as the past. How do we hold ourselves accountable to our beloved descendants, who will inherit what we’re building or destroying right now?

What do they need from us? What stories will they tell about this moment? Can we find ways to preserve what’s precious and build what’s necessary? Or will we sit on our meditation cushions, perfecting our present-moment awareness while democracy dies and the climate collapses around us?

Being present to NOW means we acknowledge the lessons of history and our obligations to the future.

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The Grace of Temporal Continuity

Tolle’s formulation is a weird dismissal of the richness that’s available because we’re temporal creatures. The stories we tell are at the tender core of our love for life. We create meaning through the relationships we nurture between past, present, and future.

When I recognize my daughter’s hand gesture as echoing my wife’s, or the tone in my own voice that resembles my father’s, I’m relishing the beautiful and mysterious continuity of our family lineage.

When I summon lessons learned from my old failures to navigate a current challenge, I’m calling on the wisdom I’ve earned.

When I honor a commitment made two months ago despite the fact that I’m not in the mood today, I’m exercising integrity.

None of this is likely in Tolle’s flattened now.

The grace we seek comes from moving through time with an appreciative consciousness of how our past informs our present without determining it, and how our choices now shape what becomes our past.

What Rigorous Vigorous Presence Requires

I love being present! It’s my treasured goal to be deeply, lovingly, excitedly present 24/7/365, even while I’m asleep.

But the alternative to Tolle’s version of presence is what I call incarnated and embodied presence. We show up fully in this wildly entertaining and amazingly uncanny NOW, empowered by the accumulated wisdom and wounds of our history, working skillfully with both.

We value memory without fixating on it. We honor our wounds without organizing our identities around them.

For me, it’s great fun and tough work to develop these capacities:

- Know the difference between insight (”I feel rage because my father was emotionally distant”) and compulsion (”I must rage at everyone because my father was emotionally distant”).

- Notice when a current reaction is disproportionate to what’s actually triggering me now.

- Feel compassion and respect for my younger self who formed that reaction pattern in innocence, and update the wisdom embedded in those old survival strategies. The hypervigilance that kept me alive at age 12 doesn’t need to run my rhythm today.

- Process unintegrated experiences from the past so they stop running me from the shadows.

- Maintain accountability for how my wounds might wound others, which requires remembering where those wounds came from. Awareness of my triggers helps me avoid inflicting them on others who don’t deserve it.

- Consciously choose a response that serves the real present rather than the conditioned past.

- Accept that this work is never done; reverently acknowledge how difficult this ceaseless navigation is.

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This is tough work, far more demanding and honest than simply “being in the now.” It requires us to be emotionally intelligent and tolerant of complexity.

The past does indeed impinge on our present capacity. Pretending otherwise doesn’t free us. What frees us is developing greater skill at working with that impingement. We feel our reactivity without being ruled by it. We remember our history without being imprisoned by it. Gradually, we become more skilled at carrying our wounds without inflicting them on others.

The work is hard enough without also having to maintain the fiction that we should be able to access some pristine presence untouched by everything we’ve lived through.

Here’s the beautiful truth: We transform our wounds into medicine by showing up for our lives as they actually are — complex, temporal, embodied, and gloriously, messily human.

PS: But Doesn’t Tolle Already Account for This?

Sophisticated Tolle defenders may object that I’m reading him too literally. They’ll say that he distinguishes between clock time and psychological time.

Clock time is the practical, literal kind, where we keep appointments and adjust to daily rhythms. Psychological time is the compulsive looping of regret, rumination, and anticipatory dread that he’s critiquing.

Tolle writes that clock time “includes learning from the past so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over,” and that you should “be alert as you practice this so that you do not unwittingly transform clock time into psychological time.”

Fair enough. There’s nuance in the fine print. In his more careful moments, Tolle makes a bit of room for memory, history, and learning. A generous reading might claim that “presence” in his framework already includes at least some integration.

But it doesn’t save him. Here’s why: A teaching isn’t just what its author intends, but what it does in the world. It’s how it’s metabolized by readers, repeated by acolytes, printed on Instagram tiles, and translated into actual human behavior.

The fine print about clock time appears in scattered passages of The Power of Now. But the bumper-sticker formulations are the parts that travel: “the past has no power over the present moment” and “nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now.”

Those are the lines that get tattooed on forearms and quoted at grieving relatives and offered to trauma survivors as spiritual instruction.

The clock-time / psychological-time distinction is a philosophical safety valve that almost no one actually uses. What gets transmitted is the pure dose: presence good, past bad, history a trap. The doctrine produces the bypass regardless of what subtleties live three chapters deeper into the book.

This is true of every popular spiritual teaching, by the way. We can’t evaluate them only by their most charitable interpretation. (Has anyone noticed the atrocities that evangelical Christians are perpetrating in dramatic contrast with the compassionate counsel of Jesus Christ? Or the Buddhists perpetrating genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar?)

We have to evaluate teachings by their actual cultural footprint and by the lives they shape and the harms they enable.

By that standard, Tolle’s eternal now has been doing damage for 25 years, and the damage isn’t an unfortunate misreading by careless students. It’s a predictable consequence of the rhetoric itself.

So yes, the meticulous Tolle reader can find passages that slightly complicate the picture. But the careful reader isn’t the typical reader. The typical reader hears: “the past can’t touch you here.” And acts accordingly.

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For further responses to Tolle’s defenders, go here: tinyurl.com/RealWorldTolle

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of May 14

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Soil biologists say a teaspoon of productive soil may contain billions of living organisms. These bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes work in cooperative networks, generating a hidden abundance that ensures everything above ground thrives. Your immediate future has this quality, Taurus. Beneath the visible surface of your life, beneficial processes are generating fertility and possibility. You don’t need to see the miracle to trust it’s happening. Your role is simply to have faith as you maintain the conditions that allow this mysterious abundance to do its work.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I suspect you would benefit from engaging with a friendly devil’s advocate or two in the coming weeks. Your clarity and understanding will deepen in just the right ways if you converse with affectionate skeptics who like and respect you but also want to help you grow. I realize that such people may be hard to find. If you can’t locate any, you could hire one. Or do the next best thing: Argue with yourself. Entertain lines of thought that are contrary to your usual ideas. Don’t let your habitual self get away with its usual rationalizations. The benefits of this exercise will be unpredictably huge.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the Northern Hemisphere, the North Star holds a fixed place in the sky. Also known as Polaris, or the Pole Star, it hangs in almost the same spot throughout the night while other stars rise and set. Because of this steadfast presence, it has long served as a trusted marker for navigation, especially for sailors at sea. Over time, it naturally came to represent an inner compass or a guiding ideal. In your own experience, Cancerian, what serves as your symbolic North Star? What’s the steady, orienting force that helps you decide where and how to move next? Now is an auspicious moment to tend to and revitalize your bond with this central source of direction.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): In the mid‑1950s, researchers developed reliable methods for creating synthetic diamonds in the laboratory. Since then, advances in technology have made it possible to grow large, high‑quality diamonds from small seed crystals in a relatively short time. I invite you to make this one of your operative metaphors, Leo. In the coming weeks, the forces of destiny will align with your efforts if you experiment with nurturing and expanding the parts of your life that are most like a diamond. Facilitate the development of your valuable beauty.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Scientist Stuart Kauffman theorizes that living systems are healthiest when they operate near the “edge of chaos.” There’s a critical zone between rigid order and unstructured randomness where complexity and adaptability can flourish. Too much organization creates brittle stiffness, while excessive chaos prevents coherence. Life thrives when it has some of both. I invite you to ruminate on these themes in the coming weeks, Virgo. According to my edgy analysis of the astrological omens, you’re being invited to cultivate and foster your own personal “edge of chaos” territory. Your interesting task is to create sweet spots where structure and spontaneity synergize. Locate these happy places and abide there for a while.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Choose two small and specific ways you’re going to stop pretending. One example might be how you respond when someone asks how you’re doing. Another may be an opinion you’ve been softening to keep the peace. Or maybe there’s a desire you’ve been downplaying because it feels impractical or too revealing. Here’s the name of this experiment: Incremental Precision Liberation. The key is to do it casually, with no melodrama or self-consciousness. If it’s successful, you could try another round in two weeks.

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If you would like to support my work, please consider:

buying my Expanded Audio Horoscopes and Daily Horoscopes

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(contribute as Friends and Family)

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SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Scorpio primatologist Frans de Waal devoted years to watching chimpanzees reconcile with each other after enduring discord. He was fascinated by how they rebuilt trust through elaborate rituals of appeasement, grooming, and kind gestures. Once the chimps stopped fighting, he marveled, they actively repaired their connection, which often emerged stronger than it was before the dispute. I hope you will borrow their primate wisdom in the coming weeks, Scorpio. Do your best to navigate through conflict or alienation, and then instigate generous acts of rebonding. Don’t sulk, be evasive, or go silent. Be creative as you work to replenish what was damaged. The renewed relationship could be closer for having weathered the difficulties.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The wandering albatross harnesses the wind, enabling it to travel vast distances with minimal effort. There’s an initial effort that leads to big energy savings. The bird climbs into strong winds and then relaxes as it gets transported, surfing the air currents. I mention this, Sagittarius, because I suspect you’ve been trying too hard and working too much—unnecessarily so. Less strenuous exertion, more gliding, please! Ask yourself what flows are already streaming in your favor. Could you catch a ride on existing momentum? Here’s my advice: Figure out where life’s tides are already moving, then position yourself to get carried along.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Ethnomusicologists studying throat singing know that Tuvan singers can produce two or more tones simultaneously. The human voice, it turns out, has the ability to harmonize with itself. Most of us never discover this because we never try. What other multidimensional capacities are you not using because you’ve never investigated them or tested their limits, Capricorn? The coming weeks are ideal for experimentation. What unexpected capacities might you get access to if you explored possibilities you’ve assumed were beyond you? You may be able to develop aptitudes and acquire gifts you haven’t discovered yet.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Cartographer Gerardus Mercator created his famous world map in 1569, enabling sailors to plot straight-line courses across oceans. But his technique dramatically distorts the size of landmasses. Greenland appears larger than Africa, when in reality Africa is 14 times bigger. And the truth is that every map privileges certain truths while distorting others. This is a key teaching for you right now, Aquarius. Examine the mental maps you’re using to navigate your life. Might they be hiding or warping reality in any way? Consider whether you would benefit from redrawing your inner visualizations of the wide, wild world out there.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Perfectionism has increased dramatically in recent decades. Young people are especially affected. But here’s the twist: The compulsion for perfection rarely improves performance. It’s more likely to undermine achievement by triggering paralysis and excessive self-criticism. Now is a favorable time for you Pisceans to rebel against the trend. I encourage you to cultivate a relaxed devotion to being “good enough” as you enjoy yourself thoroughly. Do you know the difference between cheerfully seeking excellence and grimly striving for perfection? Move away from what demands your obsessive rigor and focus on what requires soulful completion.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): When naturalist John Muir wanted to experience a storm, he climbed to the top of a 100-foot Douglas fir and rode it for hours through gale-force winds. He later reflected that the danger, in his judgment, was “hardly greater” than staying under a roof, and that the exhilaration and sensory richness justified his experiment. I’m not counseling you to be exactly like Muir in the coming weeks, Aries. Please don’t take foolish risks. However, I would love you to explore what truths are available when you put yourself in the path of intensity.

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MAESTRO OF THE OBVIOUS

I am a Maestro of the Obvious. I’m a simpleton who states truths that are hard to see because they are so easy to see.

To begin, I’ll name which institutions in our culture do bad and self-serving things, causing suffering and mayhem:

ALL OF THEM!

EVERYTHING IS DANGEROUS!

The institutions that do bad and self-serving things are corporations, religions, governments, the media, the military, big science, medicine, the pharmaceuticals, AI companies, academia, publishing, the film and art and music industries, the big tech companies, professional sports, and every other system I neglected to name. All of them. No exceptions.

They all do corrupt and shortsighted things that are profoundly influenced by the crass motivations of profiteering and egotism.

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The Other Side

Here’s another set of truths that’s hard to see because it’s so easy to see:

Our culture brainwashes us to think in absolutes. Many of us are inclined to believe that an institution is either completely trustworthy or utterly corrupt. A system either serves the people perfectly or exploits them horrendously.

Superficially, this binary framework feels clarifying. It sorts the world into good guys and bad guys, simplifying our moral landscape into a manageable package.

But the alleged clarity is false. It’s a sedative that prevents us from seeing what’s actually in front of us.

The uncomfortable and obvious truth that becomes invisible through its very obviousness is that many powerful institutions and groups are simultaneously doing harm and also providing value. They exploit and they serve. They oppress and they occasionally liberate.

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Discernment Is Hard Work

So here’s what we Maestros of the Obvious do: Toward all the myopic, greedy, unscrupulous institutions, we develop discerning skepticism, based on accurate evidence. We criticize them. We do what we can to reform them. And we acknowledge that they may also do some good and helpful things that we are grateful for.

Our practice is discerning skepticism, based on accurate evidence. Not reflexive rejection. Not the conspiracy theorist’s blanket assumption that everything official is a lie, nor the true believer’s assumption that established institutions deserve our faith and trust.

Discernment is hard work.

When corporations lobby against environmental regulations or oppose DEI initiatives, we document which corporations do that and what the consequences have been.

When pharmaceutical companies suppress unfavorable research and overcharge for their products, we trace the specific studies and the specific harms that resulted.

When media outlets slant coverage to favor the rich and powerful, we identify the ownership structures and the editorial decisions driving it.

And we also acknowledge complexity. The same corporation that exploits workers and destroys ecosystems may fund research that saves lives.

The same religious institution that covers up abuse may also run soup kitchens and provide community.

The same drug companies that often serve gross profit over compassionate health may provide life-saving products—as they did to help heal my cancer.

We Maestros of the Obvious maintain intellectual and imaginal hygiene. We distinguish between documented fact and speculation, between justified skepticism and lazy dismissal. When new evidence emerges, we revise our understanding. Maybe we admit when we don’t know something rather than filling the gap with unresearched feelings and assumptions.

And we stay useful. Criticism without engagement is performance. The point isn’t to feel superior to flawed institutions but to make them less flawed. We can build alternatives, or at a minimum protect ourselves and others from their predations while still accessing whatever genuine value they provide.

The Intelligence of Foolishness

So we Maestros of the Obvious go forward, holding in our minds a poised understanding of their contradictions, as intelligent fools do.

We cultivate an awareness that everything on earth is flawed and imperfect, and that many imperfect and flawed things, though not all, also have value and beneficence.

Intelligent fools like me aren’t people who know nothing. Rather, we refuse the false comfort of cartoonish certainty and absolutism. We hold multiple truths simultaneously so we can critique systems while using them.

This is really fucking hard. The human mind craves coherence. We want our allies to be purely good and our enemies to be purely evil. We want the institutions we depend on to be trustworthy, or we want permission to reject them entirely.

The middle path, the path of discriminating engagement, requires constant recalibration and willingness to be uncomfortable.

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It’s Complicated

Case in point: The pharmaceutical industry has engaged in predatory pricing, fraudulent research, aggressive marketing of addictive substances, and systematic exploitation of developing nations. These are documented facts. Goddamn them.

And also: Their antibiotics, vaccines, insulin, and countless other medications have prevented immeasurable suffering and death. These are also documented facts. Praise them.

The intelligent fool doesn’t resolve this tension by choosing a side. The intelligent fool says: I will take the medications that help me be healthy while fighting for a system that doesn’t price-gouge the sick. I will be grateful for medical advances while demanding accountability for medical corruption.

This applies across every domain. Academia produces both liberating knowledge and credentialist gatekeeping. Technology creates both connection and surveillance. Religious communities offer both spiritual nourishment and dogmatic control.

The work is learning to navigate these contradictions without becoming paralyzed by them or collapsing them into false simplicity.

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The Wisdom of Co-Emergence

We intelligent fools and Maestros of the Obvious meditate on the psychological concept of co-emergence, which postulates that every beautiful, useful thing is intertwined with some challenging problem. And many challenging problems have useful clues and insights to teach us.

Co-emergence isn’t the same as false equivalence. It’s not saying that good and evil balance out, or that we shouldn’t distinguish between better and worse. We simply recognize that reality is woven from threads that can’t be fully separated.

The internet gives voice to many and enables unprecedented collaboration; it also facilitates surveillance and new forms of manipulation. These aren’t separate facts. They emerge from the same technological capacities.

The scientific method gives us knowledge about the material world that enhances our lives in countless ways. It also gets deployed to justify eugenics, serve corporate manipulation, facilitate militarism, and dismiss functional medicine. The same commitment to empirical evidence that liberates us from superstition can be twisted to obscure moral questions behind claims of objectivity.

Understanding co-emergence doesn’t mean resignation. Our work isn’t to find a purely good institution or a completely uncorrupted system. The complicated task is to strengthen the beneficial aspects while constraining the harmful ones, knowing that this work is never finished and that new problems will emerge from our solutions.

Every challenging problem teaches us something about where our blind spots are. The corruption in institutions encourages us to be vigilant. The contradictions we encounter force us to develop more sophisticated thinking.

The Five-Year-Old’s Wisdom

When my daughter was five years old, she said, “There’s nothing in the world that is either all good or all bad.”

Many pundits and prophets lack her wisdom. If we heed it, we save ourselves from the exhausting cycle of idolizing and demonizing every new force that arises in the human story.

Fill in the following blank with any influence of your choosing: ______________ is neither our savior or destroyer. It’s another flawed tool. It will harm and heal, confuse and inspire.

Guess what? It’s not only institutions that act like this. Most people, including me and you, do both generous and selfish things. We illuminate and obscure. Our understanding is always partial, and our own actions sometimes have unintended consequences.

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Living as a Maestro of the Obvious

To hold complexity with grace requires specific practices.

• Regular reality checks. Am I criticizing this institution based on documented evidence or tribal affiliation? Am I defending it because it actually serves people well, or because I’m uncomfortable with ambiguity? What would change my mind?

• Both/and thinking. We train ourselves to say “yes, and” instead of “yes, but.” Yes, this system has serious problems, and it also provides genuine value. Not “but,” which implies one fact negates the other, but “and,” which holds both truths as simultaneously real.

• Distinguish between critique and rejection. Criticizing an institution’s flaws isn’t the same as wanting it destroyed. Often the most scathing critics are those who believe in an institution’s potential and are frustrated by its failures.

• Notice what we’re grateful for. Even as we document harms, why not acknowledge benefits? We can be grateful for antibiotics while fighting pharmaceutical price-gouging. Gratitude and critique aren’t opposites. The discipline of gratitude actually sharpens our analysis by preventing bitterness from distorting it.

• Accept imperfection as the permanent condition. There will never be a moment when institutions are perfected and systems fully align with our values. The ongoing work is liberating. It means we can stop waiting for perfect conditions before we engage and stop letting perfect be the enemy of good.

The Radical Center

What I’m describing might sound like the bland both-sides-ism that treats every issue as equally balanced. It’s not.

This is the radical center that refuses the lazy comforts of ideological purity. It insists on thinking for ourselves rather than outsourcing our opinions to teams. It demands we hold ourselves and our allies to the same standards we apply to opponents.

The radical center acknowledges that corporations do tremendous harm but also create wealth and resources that may sometimes benefit us all. It admits that mainstream media spreads dangerous propaganda and also employs journalists doing crucial investigative work. It knows that big tech companies invade privacy and also create tools that expand human capability.

From this poised, uncomfortable, constantly recalibrating position, we become harder to manipulate because we’re not waiting for permission from authorities or reflexively rejecting everything they say. We become more effective because we’re working with reality as it actually is rather than as we wish it were.

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ADDENDUM: A Sobering Caveat

Everything I’ve written above is true. But there is one glaring exception: a source of toxicity that does NOT warrant our generous efforts to hold open the possibility that it has some saving grace.

You know what I mean: the relentless perpetrators of awfulness that are purely horrible, heinous, and far past any hope for redemption.

I’m talking about the Trumpocalypse: the ongoing assault on everything good and beautiful and just and true by the gang of fascist, misogynist, oligarchic, bigoted thugs who now hold the power in the federal government.

The Trumpocalypse is perpetrating the destruction of the rights of women over their own bodies. It’s doing all it can to destroy the dignity of immigrants and refugees. It’s working hard in its effort to destroy the safety of trans people, queer people, Black and brown people, disabled people, poor people, and anyone deemed disposable.

There are many other things it seeks to decimate, too many to name all of them. They include: the independence of the courts; the integrity of elections; the protection of the environment; the credibility of science; and the ability to distinguish between fact and propaganda.

The Trumpocalypse is the elevation of cruelty as policy; the criminalization of compassion; the looting of the public commons; the persecution of dissent; the methodical cultivation of a personality cult around a very sick man whose stated ambition is to be a dictator.

This is pure atrocity, and it’s NOT doing even a little good. It’s purely a weapon aimed at the heart of everything we love.

So here is the sobering caveat to my essay on holding complexity: Complexity is a discipline for engaging with the flawed and the partial. It’s not a discipline for engaging with evil.

When fascists are dismantling the republic in real time, the radical center isn’t the position that says “well, they have a point too.” The radical center is the position that has done the actual work of discernment, and, having done it, names the danger that’s in front of us without flinching.

The Maestro of the Obvious states the obvious: This regime isn’t redeemable. It must be resisted, defeated, and ended.

We Maestros of the Obvious know that many things in life are both poison and medicine, but some poisons are just poison.

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The Maestro’s Manifesto

Here’s what it means to be a Maestro of the Obvious:

We state simple truths that complexity-averse thinking obscures.

We acknowledge that every institution capable of doing good is also capable of doing harm, and usually does both.

We develop discerning skepticism based on evidence, not tribal loyalty.

We criticize what needs criticizing while remaining grateful for genuine benefits.

We hold contradictions without resolving them prematurely.

We meditate on co-emergence: the intertwining of benefit and harm, and the way solutions inevitably generate new problems.

We remember what the five-year-old knows.

We stay useful, engaged, discriminating, and honest.

We refuse the false clarity of binary thinking in favor of the difficult wisdom of complexity.

We are simpletons who see the obvious: that reality is complicated. The work of building a better world requires engaging with the flawed materials at hand rather than waiting for perfect tools that will never arrive.

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Check out my LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of May 7

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): When lightning from a cloud hits sand or soil, the current travels down into the ground. It melts material along its path and forms tubular, branching glass structures that can penetrate deep below the surface. I believe that metaphorically similar phenomena will soon happen in your life, Taurus. Sudden insights or electrifying feelings will leave permanent traces in your psyche, creating new pathways for energy and information to flow. These disruptive inspirations and inspiring disruptions will rewire your internal circuitry, creating channels that will enhance your receptivity to future revelations. You’ll be able to absorb clues and hints from life that you weren’t tuned into before.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I invite you to ruminate on death not as the conclusion of physical life, but as a metaphor for discarding what’s stale and outmoded. In that light, what would be the best deaths you could generate during the coming weeks? Use your imagination with verve and vigor as you dream up scenarios in which you purge parts of your life that are not serving your strongest, most vital yearnings. Visualize how much fresh potency that will liberate. (PS: To reiterate: You are NOT in physical danger.)

CANCER (June 21-July 22): What part of you is too tame? Maybe your imagination is politely well-behaved, or maybe your voice edits itself before it dares to say what it really thinks. Can you inspire it to be wilder and freer? Not reckless or destructive, but more honest and experimental? Here’s a suggestion: Go on regular excursions with your wild side, maybe once every two weeks. Follow it as it chooses what to explore and create. This might ultimately teach your tamed self that it’s safe to let primal wisdom help steer you.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): According to quantum physics, particles can become “entangled,” which means they share a single connected quantum state. Observing and measuring one particle reveals information about the other, even if they’re not in close proximity. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.” I predict that different parts of your life will also interweave in unlikely ways during the coming weeks, Leo. Moves you make in one area will seem to produce mysterious effects in other domains. For example, adjusting your morning routine may boost your creative output. Healing an old alliance could unlock a professional opportunity. Everything will be more intermingled than the visible evidence suggests.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Your key power word for now is stretch. Speak it aloud multiple times every day, and write it on a card that you put in a place where you will keep seeing it. Also, make a point of physically and spiritually living out these three senses of stretch: 1. to lengthen, widen, or expand without snapping or tearing; 2. to unfurl your body to its full reach, boosting circulation and warding off stiffness or cramps; 3. to take on challenging tasks that push you to amplify your abilities and move beyond what you previously believed you could do.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Four oracles for you, Libra: 1. You’re in possession of keys to doors that haven’t been built yet. Tuck those keys away somewhere safe. 2. You’re ready to dream up titles for stories your life hasn’t lived through yet. Write those titles down. 3. You are being granted sneak previews of your future, even though you can’t yet see the bridge that will carry you there. Imprint these glimpses on your memory. 4. You have everything required to grow a more muscular faith that’s grounded in real evidence, not in vague hopes and wishful thinking. Take advantage.

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SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): At the ancient Library of Alexandria, editors did far more than copy manuscripts. They compared multiple versions of important works and produced editions that aimed at definitively reliable texts. Their efforts at preservation required active intervention rather than mere reproduction. In the coming weeks, Scorpio, I think it will be fun and transformative for you to make similar adjustments to your own life story. How might your memories of the past need to be corrected and refined? How could you make your personal mythology more accurate and liberating? I invite you to revise and revivify the tales you tell yourself about your magnificent journey from the moment you were born until now.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The speed of light is how fast it travels through a vacuum. When moving through water and other media, though, light’s swiftness decreases. The fastest possible speed in the universe only applies in emptiness. If you put anything in light’s way, it slows down. Let’s use this as a metaphor for your life. I suspect you may be frustrated by how incrementally things are moving. But you’re not in a vacuum. Your bright intelligence is traveling through the complex situations that life has brought you. So of course you’re not zipping along with maximum haste. My advice: Be grateful for the slowdowns. Learn all you can about how they are educating and transforming your brilliance.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Cryptographer Claude Shannon (1916–2001) was the father of information theory. His achievements were comparable to those of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin. Here’s one of his secrets: He kept his office filled with juggling equipment, unicycles, and mechanical toys, which inspired him to solve abstract problems. His playful tinkering helped inspire breakthroughs that ultimately created the digital age. For him, recreation and innovation happened at the same time. I invite you to try a similar approach in the coming weeks, Capricorn. Blend “serious work” with “just messing around.” Be alert for key insights that emerge from improvisation and experimentation. Your diversions won’t be distractions from your purpose but rather pathways toward it.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Master calligrapher Yukimi Annand is an Aquarius. She teaches that beautiful letters emerge not just from the hand that holds the brush, but from the entire body and relaxed awareness. Breath, posture, centered weight, and quiet mind all flow through the arm to create each stroke. Trying to control the outcome with arduous effort produces rigid, lifeless art. This is an excellent teaching for you right now, Aquarius. Whatever you’re striving to accomplish, I beg you to refrain from forcing results through grueling, overly laborious exertion. Instead, align your whole being so that graceful outcomes flow naturally from your soulful coherence.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The placebo effect is getting stronger over time. Placebos in drug trials are becoming increasingly effective, to the point where it’s sometimes becoming harder to prove that actual drugs work better than sugar pills. Are we getting better at healing ourselves through belief? That would be a problem for pharmaceutical companies but interesting for the rest of us. Dear Pisces, I believe your placebo response is exceptionally strong right now. In the coming weeks, use it deliberately. Be daring and exuberant in your efforts to heal yourself.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Astronomers depend on instruments to collect the observations that fuel their work, but they don’t spend every night glued to the stars. On overcast nights, they turn to what they have already gathered, digging into past measurements and reworking the data. You’re in a comparable phase, Aries. For now, looking farther out into the glittering world won’t give you anything essential. The guidance you need is folded into what you’ve previously seen, felt, and taken in. It’s waiting for you to sort through and understand it on a deeper level.

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