Friendly and Unfriendly Shocks

The Right Kind of Criticism Is Helpful

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.

Subscribe here: newsletter.freewillastrology.com/subscribe

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

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 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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