Bless the Eternal Wiggle

Everything's always shimmying & jiggling & waggling.

Philosopher Alan Watts used to talk about how the whole world is wiggling all the time. Clouds, trees, sky, water, human beings: Everything's constantly shimmying and jiggling and waggling.

One of our problems, Watts said, is that we're "always trying to straighten things out." We feel nagging urges to deny or cover up or eliminate the wiggling. "Be orderly," we command reality. "Be neat and composed and predictable."

But reality never obeys. It's forever doing what it does best: flickering and fluctuating and flowing.

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PRAYER TO COMMUNE WITH NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCES

This week's prayer: Dear Goddess, I ask you to expand and deepen my attunement with the intelligence of animals and plants and elemental forces. 

Move me and realign me to become ever-more receptive to the non-human geniuses alive on planet earth.

Be my guide as I aspire to listen more subtly and tenderly to what the natural world has to teach me.

With love and rowdy reverence,

Rob Brezsny

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SAVING NATURE

How can we influence people to stop their desecration and extermination of nature? How can we motivate people to stop committing genocide against animal species? My suggestions:

1. Show people scientific data that shocks them into acknowledging how much harm human activity is inflicting.

2. Speak to people about the sin of bequeathing their descendants a damaged, impoverished planet.

3. Ask people to dissolve the unethical greed that leads them to consume so many of the earth's resources and produce too much waste.

4. Cultivate and express smart love for the interconnected web of life. Feel it deeply.

5. Celebrate the fact that there are other forms of consciousness and intelligence besides just the human kind. Cultivate loving relationships with them.

6. Embody the hypothesis that spending time in wild places enhances one's mental hygiene and physical health.

7. Value the feminine as much as the masculine.

8. Cultivate the art of empathy, and demonstrate how to make it flourish in everything you do.

9. Show what it means to think with your heart and feel with your head.

10. Stay in close touch with the Mysterium, the other real world that is the root of the material world.

11. Vow to bring the I-Thou dynamic to bear on all your relationships.

12. Be as curious about intimacy as you are about power.

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CONNECTED TO THE WORLD OF ANIMAL POWERS

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

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

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According to The Pluralism Project, “the animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most Indigenous peoples that they often don’t have a word in their languages that corresponds to ‘animism’; the term is an anthropological construct.” 

Psychotherapist Daniel Foor describes the animist perspective: “The other-than-human kin include mountains and rivers; the elders who are animals, plants, and fungi; the spirits of places and things; planets and stars; deities and unseen kin; and many others whose lives and bodies are entangled with our own.” 

“Learning to navigate these other kinds of relationships is not only a fundamental life skill but also supportive of personal transformation, a source of great joy and intimacy, and the foundation of healthy culture.” 

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TREES AND ROCKS AND RIVERS HAVE MESSAGES FOR US

So many Indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and Indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us. 

—author Derrick Jensen  

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Our original instructions are to listen to the cloud floating by and the wind blowing by. That’s poetry and prose in English, but it is wakahan in the Lakotan language. It means to consciously apply mystery to everything. Everything is alive and has its own consciousness. 

—Lakota elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse 

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WHY IS THE WORLD SO BEAUTIFUL?

‘Western science is a powerful way of knowing, but it isn't the only one," says Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is a member of the Potawatomi First Nation and she teaches environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York in Syracuse.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, she blends the study of botany with Indigenous lore

She says, "As a scientist, I have been trained to refer to our relatives, the plants and the animals, the water and the Earth herself, as 'it.'"

But in using the Potawatomi languages, she says, she learned to regard the living creatures and plants on the natural world as members of our extended family.

In one of her other books, Kimmerer asks why this inconspicuous plant has persevered for 350 million years.

While so many other species have gone extinct, why has moss had staying power through all the Earth's climate changes and upheavals?

And what lessons does its success have for us?

Kimmerer says, "Mosses have this ability, rather than demanding a lot from the world, they're very creative in using what they have, rather than reaching for what they don't have.

"When there are limits, the mosses say, 'Let's be quiet for a while. Abundance, openness, water, will return. We'll wait this out.'"

Moss teaches us the value "of giving more than you take, of working with natural law, sticking together, of finding creative ways to use what you have."

Read more about Kimmerer in this article, "Why is the world so beautiful? An Indigenous botanist on the spirit of life in everything" https://tinyurl.com/WhyIsTheWorldSoBeautiful

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Kimmerer was asked how she would go about cutting flowers to bring into her home.

She replied, "I would greet those flowers and say how beautiful they are. I'm so grateful that you're growing here. And, you know, my mom's coming over and I want to cheer her up. May I cut some flowers to bring your beauty to her in our house?

"If the answer is yes, I would cut them and give a gift in return and bring them in."

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ANCESTRY
by Fred Lamotte

My DNA results came in.
Just as I suspected, 
my great great grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.

Much of who I am is still 
wriggling under a stone.

I am part larva, but 
part hummingbird too.

There is dinosaur tar in 
my bone marrow.

My golden hair sprang out 
of a meadow in Palestine.

Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn't get his dimples.

My loins are loaded with 
banyan seeds from Sri Lanka,
but I descended from Ravanna, 
not Ram.

My uncle is a mastodon.
There are traces of white people 
in my saliva.

3.7 billion years ago I swirled 
in hydrogen dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown 
with lingams and yonis.

More recently, say 60,000 B.C.
I walked on hairy paws 
across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.

I am the bastard of the sun and moon.

I can no longer hide my heritage of
raindrops and cougar scat.

My mud was molded with your grandmother's tears.

Admit it, you have wings, 
vast and crystal,
like mine, like mine.

You have sweat, dark and salty,
like mine, like mine.

You have secrets silently 
singing in your blood,
like mine, like mine.

Don't pretend that earth 
is not one family.

Don't pretend we never hung 
from the same branch.

Don't pretend we do not ripen 
on each other's breath.

Don't pretend we didn't 
come here to forgive.


—by Fred LaMotte, 
from his book Fire of Darkness

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TO KNOW THEM, WE MUST LOVE THEM

To understand living things, we must love them. I don’t mean we feel romantic passion or express love tinged with expectation or sentimentality. The love I mean is characterized by compassion and empathy.

To open ourselves with love to an iris or redwood tree or hermit crab is to declare that we find it worthy to communicate with. We want to know its language. We affirm that we want to perceive and be influenced by its particular intelligence.

I'm not simply being metaphorical or poetic. I'm not only using fairy tale logic. My meaning is also literal.

Every living thing is a cell in the Divine Consciousness. It's a specific instance of the Universal Intelligence expressing itself. Moreover, every living thing longs to give us the gift of itself. Yes: longs to do so. Again, I mean that literally.

That longing is a selfish longing to be seen for itself but also a longing to give us the wisdom and beauty that it alone possesses: an encounter with the specific seed of Divine Consciousness that is embodied and expressed through it alone.

If we are receptive, the gifts we receive from the iris, redwood, or hermit crab are twofold. First, we are freed from our illusion that we are stranded inside a solitary form. We transcend our narrow intelligence so as to understand the iris or redwood or crab in its native tongue.        

The second gift is that we harvest the benefits of the “information” that the iris’s intelligence conveys (and the redwood’s and crab’s), whether that information comes in the form of an intuition about the nature of reality, or an opening in ourselves of the part of the universal Goddess hologram that corresponds to the iris or redwood or crab.

Yes, we are a tiny hologram of the Universal Projector, the One and Only Hologram that permeates all times and places, but sometimes, in order to consciously activate specific parts of the Universal Hologram within us, we must open ourselves to transmissions from those parts in the outer, physical world.

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I'm describing a key method in my strategy to enter into altered states and to viscerally commune with Goddess.

If I learn the language of the iris and redwood and crab, and awaken the parts of my intelligence that are like an iris’s and redwood’s and crab’s, then I slip into an altered state.

I jolt myself out of my humdrum awareness and add to my repertoire a fresh perspective, an additional mode of perceiving and understanding the world: as the iris or redwood or crab does.

Let’s say I do this every day. I regularly instruct my psyche to welcome a transmission from the iris or redwood or crab (or egret or salt grass or red fox or sea otter . . .), I allow those living beauties to do what comes naturally, to do what Goddess made it to do—which is to unveil themselves to me with love.

And so the iris or redwood or crab initiates me into the mysteries of its intelligence, teaches me to experience the world as it does, and bestows on me the power to expand my awareness. This enables me to know Goddess not just conceptually but with gnosis: with visceral understanding.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week beginning November 17

Copyright 2022 by Rob Brezsny

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Scorpio author Sylvia Plath had a disturbing, melodramatic relationship with romance. In one of her short stories, for example, she has a woman character say, "His love is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart." I urge you to avoid contact with people who think and feel like that—as glamorous as they might seem. In my view, your romantic destiny in the coming months can and should be uplifting, exciting in healthy ways, and conducive to your well-being. There's no need to link yourself with shadowy renegades when there will be plenty of radiant helpers available.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): I like Sagittarian healer and author Caroline Myss because she's both spiritual and practical, compassionate and fierce. Here's a passage from her work that I think will be helpful for you in the coming weeks: "Get bored with your past. It's over! Forgive yourself for what you think you did or didn't do, and focus on what you will do, starting now." To ensure you make the most of her counsel, I'll add a further insight from author Augusten Burroughs: "You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will—because you can only live in the past inside your mind."

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): How would you respond if you learned that the $55 t-shirt you're wearing was made by a Haitian kid who earned 10 cents for her work? Would you stop wearing the shirt? Donate it to a thrift store? Send money to the United Nations agency UNICEF, which works to protect Haitian child laborers? I recommend the latter option. I also suggest you use this as a prompt to engage in leisurely meditations on what you might do to reduce the world's suffering. It's an excellent time to stretch your imagination to understand how your personal life is interwoven with the lives of countless others, many of whom you don't even know. And I hope you will think about how to offer extra healings and blessings not just to your allies, but also to strangers. What's in it for you? Would this bring any selfish benefits your way? You may be amazed at how it leads you to interesting connections that expand your world.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Aquarian philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development." He also said, "Every really new idea looks crazy at first." With these thoughts in mind, Aquarius, I will tell you that you are now in the Season of the Silly Question. I invite you to enjoy dreaming up such queries. And as you indulge in that fertile pleasure, include another: Celebrate the Season of Crazy Ideas.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): We all love to follow stories: the stories we live, the stories that unfold for people we know, and the stories told in movies, TV shows, and books. A disproportionately high percentage of the entertainment industry's stories are sad or tormented or horrendously painful. They influence us to think such stories are the norm. They tend to darken our view of life. While I would never try to coax you to avoid all those stories, Pisces, I will encourage you to question whether maybe it's wise to limit how many you absorb. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to explore this possibility. Be willing to say, "These sad, tormented, painful stories are not ones I want to invite into my imagination." Try this experiment: For the next three weeks, seek out mostly uplifting tales.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Virginia Woolf wrote a passage that I suspect will apply to you in the coming weeks. She said, "There is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have — positively — a rush of friendship for stones and grasses — there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us." Here's my question for you, Aries: How will you harness your wild horse energy? I'm hoping that the self-possessed human in you will take command of the horse and direct it to serve you and yours with constructive actions. It's fine to indulge in some intemperate galloping, too. But I'll be rooting for a lot of temperate and disciplined galloping.

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WHY IS IT CALLED "FREE WILL" ASTROLOGY?

It's called Free Will Astrology because my goal is to create horoscopes that nurture your free will!

And if you ever want more than the 'scopes you're reading here, keep in mind that I also create EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for you. They're four-to-five-minute meditations on the current state of your destiny.

Need more help in figuring out the questions life is asking you? Crave more support in your efforts to build your courage? Check out the EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES.

To listen to your Expanded Audio Horoscope, go to https://RealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page.

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The cost is $7 per sign. (Discounts are available for bulk purchases.)

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TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "The failure of love might account for most of the suffering in the world," writes poet Marie Howe. I agree with that statement. Many of us have had painful episodes revolving around people who no longer love us and people whose lack of love for us makes us feel hurt. That's the bad news, Taurus. The good news is that you now have more power than usual to heal the failures of love you have endured in the past. You also have an expanded capacity to heal others who have suffered from the failures of love. I hope you will be generous in your ministrations!

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Many Geminis tell me they are often partly awake as they sleep. In their dreams, they might work overtime trying to solve waking-life problems. Or they may lie in bed in the dark contemplating intricate ideas that fascinate them, or perhaps ruminating on the plot developments unfolding in a book they've been reading or a TV show they've been bingeing. If you are prone to such behavior, I will ask you to minimize it for a while. In my view, you need to relax your mind extra deeply and allow it to play luxuriously with non-utilitarian fantasies and dreams. You have a sacred duty to yourself to explore mysterious and stirring feelings that bypass rational thought.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Here are my two key messages for you. 1. Remember where you hide important stuff. 2. Remember that you have indeed hidden some important stuff. Got that? Please note that I am not questioning your urge to lock away a secret or two. I am not criticizing you for wanting to store a treasure that you are not yet ready to use or reveal. It's completely understandable if you want to keep a part of your inner world off-limits to certain people for the time being. But as you engage in any or all of these actions, make sure you don't lose touch with your valuables. And don't forget why you are stashing them.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I know I don't have to give you lessons in expressing your sensuality. Nor do you need prods and encouragement to do so. As a Leo, you most likely have abundant talent in the epicurean arts. But as you prepare to glide into the lush and lusty heart of the Sensuality Season, it can't hurt to offer you a pep talk from your fellow Leo bon vivant, James Baldwin. He said: "To be sensual is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread."

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Many Virgos are on a lifelong quest to cultivate a knack described by Sigmund Freud: "In the small matters, trust the mind. In the large ones, the heart." And I suspect you are now at a pivotal point in your efforts to master that wisdom. Important decisions are looming in regards to both small and large matters. I believe you will do the right things as long as you empower your mind to do what it does best and your heart to do what it does best.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Social media like Facebook and Twitter feed on our outrage. Their algorithms are designed to stir up our disgust and indignation. I confess that I get semi-caught in their trap. I am sometimes seduced by the temptation to feel lots of umbrage and wrath, even though those feelings comprise a small minority of my total emotional range. As an antidote, I proactively seek experiences that rouse my wonder and sublimity and holiness. In the next two weeks, Libra, I invite you to cultivate a focus like mine. It's high time for a phase of minimal anger and loathing—and maximum reverence and awe.

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WANT TO GET YOUR ASTROLOGICAL CHART READ?

If you want your personal chart done, I recommend a colleague whose approach to reading astrology charts closely matches my own. She's my wife, RO LOUGHRAN. We've been enjoying regular conversations about astrology since 1989! Her website's here: https://www.roloughran.com

Ro utilizes a blend of well-trained intuition, emotional warmth, and a high degree of technical proficiency in horoscope interpretation. She is skilled at exploring the mysteries of your life's purpose and nurturing your connection with your own inner wisdom

In addition to over 30 years of astrological experience, Ro has been a licensed psychotherapist for 22 years. This enables her to integrate psychological insight with the cosmological perspective that astrology offers.

Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.

Check out Ro's website at https://www.roloughran.com

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