Kick Your Own Ass
Discover more from Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter
Kick Your Own Ass
. . . and wash your own brain
Dear Readers,
I've gathered all the long-term, big-picture horoscopes I wrote for you in recent weeks, and bundled them in one place. Here's a compendium of your forecasts for 2023:
https://tinyurl.com/BigPicture2023
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In addition to these, I've created EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES that go even further in Exploring Your Long-Term Destiny in 2023.
What will be the story of your life in the coming months? What new influences will be headed your way? What fresh resources will you be able to draw on? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?
To listen to these three-part, in-depth reports, go here: https://RealAstrology.com
Register and/or log in through the main page, click "Play Readings", and then select "Part 1" or “Part 2” or “Part 3” of the "Long Term Prediction for 2023."
Each of the three parts is a separate report, though related to the other two.
If you'd like a boost of inspiration to fuel you in your quest for beauty and truth and love and meaning, tune in to my meditations on your Big-Picture Outlook.
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Each of the three-part reports is seven to 13 minutes long. The cost is $7 per report. There are discounts for the purchase of multiple reports.
P.S. You can also listen to a short-term Expanded Audio Horoscope for the coming week.
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IF I AM ELECTED
My beloved allies:
Today I am asking you to vote for me. I am asking you to cast your ballot for me in my bid to become the Sublime Synergizer of the United Snakes of the Blooming HahHa.
You may not know much about me or my policies. So I will tell you briefly.
First. I am the most total nobody in a world full of nobodies. I am a sex-laugher and a friendly shocker and a fantasy doctor. I'm a time traveler and a jinx unraveler and a curiosity savior. I champion the art of adoration and I battle the genocide of the imagination.
And here's the single most important fact about me: The people I trust most are those who wrestle and negotiate with their own shadows. In other words, they make preemptive strikes on their personal share of the world's evil. They fight the good fight to keep from spewing their darkness on the people around them.
I aspire to be like those shadow-wrestlers. Which is why I kick my own ass and wash my own brain on a regular basis.
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So I am asking you to vote for me. And I Am telling you that if I am elected, you will learn you why and how to kick your own ass and wash your own brain.
If I am elected, there will be a new bill of rights. And the first amendment will be: "Your daily wage is directly tied to the beauty and truth and love you provide." And yes, the first new amendment will rhyme.
If I am elected, I will show you why it's crucial for the future of daffodils and sea urchins and rhinoceroses and coral reefs that well-paid women fill at least 65 percent of all jobs everywhere for the next 222 years.
If I am elected, when news anchors report tragedies to their audiences, they will be authorized, they will be mandated, to break down and cry and let their emotions show. No more poker faces when I am elected.
Bravo
Viva
Whoopee
Eureka
Hallelujah
Abracadabra
If I am elected, I will create a new cabinet-level department, The Intimate Incandescent Indigenous Intrigue of Freaky Teasers and Creature Teachers.
And for my Cabinet, I will hire witches and wizards and shamans who will cast inside-out, upside-down, death-and-resurrection spells on the corporate criminals who have been torturing the earth's beloved plants and animals.
If I am elected, we will add an eleventh commandment to the standard ten: "Thou shalt not bore God and thou shalt not bore Goddess."
If I am elected, the word "asshole" will be used as a term of endearment rather than abuse.
If I am elected, I will prove to you why we should be totally opposed to all duality.
If I am elected, I will launch a crusade to wipe out a covert form of terrorism — a crime against humanity that I call the genocide of the imagination. I think you know what that is, even though you may have never heard the term.
The genocide of the imagination is the ruthless, relentless, high-tech invasion, colonization, paralyzation, and desecration of our sacred imaginations: our primary magical power, our main tool for creating the world we want and love.
Now excuse me for a moment while I sing a brief medicine song.
This language prevents crime.
This engineering moves us to sing.
These advertisements make us smart.
This rhythm frees all prisoners of childhood.
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Dear friends, if I am elected, there will be legal highs, not legal lows; mystical science and erudite horoscopes. Meditation will be taught in schools. There'll be eight billion different golden rules.
Compassion will be an aphrodisiac. And you and I will grow up to be pyrokleptomaniacs — with a compulsion to steal fire from the fraudulent gods.
If I am elected, we will transform our form of government into a magical realist democracy, where millions can vote for ecstasy. April Fool's will come once a week. Plutocracy will be a felony.
If I am elected, there will be 77 genders that can all fuck each other. The moon will be your father; the sun will be your mother.
Glory
Shalom
One love
Emancipation
Sanctification
Abracadbra
If I am elected, I will halt all exports of F-15 jet fighter planes, M1 Abrams battle tanks, and Apache attack helicopters — I will halt all exports of those monstrosities to Saudi Arabia, Narnia, Iraq, Hogwarts, the United Arab Emirates, Middle Earth, as well as to every other realm that is in danger of being demonically possessed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin and its gangster flunkeys at the Pentagon.
If I am elected, I will confiscate the ill-gotten, tax-free loot that multinational narcissism dealers and Fortune 500 robber barons have stashed in offshore banks, and I will use the liberated cash to finance generous reparations, exaltations, consecrations, and vacations for Native Americans and African Americans.
If I am corrected, reflected, connected, and elected, I will buy all the Pizza Huts in the world
and convert them into a global network of menstrual huts — Moon Lodges — where for a few days each month, every one of us, men and women alike, can resign from the crazy-making 9-5.
We'll drop out and slow down, break trance and dive down into eternal time.
Where we can sleep nine hours every night
and practice our lucid dreams; wear wildflower crowns and jewelry and underwear made of mushrooms and moss and river rocks.
Think with our hearts and feel with our heads;
study the difference between stupid, boring, useless pain and smart, fascinating, useful pain
until we get it right.
Aha
Yaya
Amen
Oooo aloha
Transfiguration
Abracadabra
If I am elected, you will be elected, too.
I will be the Sublime Synergizer of the United Snakes of the Blooming HahHa. And so will you!
If we are elected — if you and I are elected — we will be Singing Commanders of Forbidden Sacraments and Taboo Justice.
We will be Transgressive Storytellers in Charge of Renegade Bliss and Blasphemous Reverence.
We will be Animistic Activists Perpetrating Voracious Empathy and Wildcat Healing.
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If you would like to see me present a short version of my “If I Am Elected” message, check out this video of me performing at The Strand bookstore in New York: https://tinyurl.com/RobStrand
My daughter Zoe Brezsny also read her poetry during the show at The Strand. Her presentation begins at 2:35 into the video.
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DAVID BOWIE AND I
Little over seven years ago, one of my great muses left this world: David Bowie.
Here’s a link to an excerpt from my book The Televisionary Oracle, which captures some of my early experience with Bowie:
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BIDDING ADIEU TO DAVID CROSBY
People started telling me and warning me that I should and must cut my long hair when I was 15 years old, like my high school baseball coach and literally thousands of others.
Dour advice on how I should sculpt my physical appearance continued to assail me for many years.
Because of the way I styled my hair, I was threatened, berated, shouted at, spit at, had bottles thrown at me and knives pulled on me, was not waited on in restaurants, denied jobs, kicked off the baseball team, hated on by the parents of women I dated, and experienced many other challenging actions.
Not recently, thank Goddess.
So "Almost Cut My Hair" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young has always been an anthem. And I have never stopped wearing my hair long.
here the band doing a live version of the song: https://tinyurl.com/4pfz3sht
PS: My hair is as long now as it was in this photo from years ago, though it's grayer: https://tinyurl.com/7mban72e
PPS: The traumatic discrimination I experienced has been nowhere near what non-white, non-male, non-hetero people have gone through, but it has given me a taste of it.
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KINDNESS — by Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
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Every person is unique and autonomous and actually, considered independently, the greatest artwork of all time.
—novelist Thomas Bernhard
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TENDER RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MEN FRIENDS
Man friendships during the 19th century were marked by an intense bond and filled with deeply held feeling and sentimentality.
Man friendships in many instances had a similar intensity as romantic relationships between men and women.
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In the Arab world, affection among men is common, and without sexual connotation. "Holding hands is the warmest expression of affection between men," said Samir Khalaf, a sociology professor at American University of Beirut in Lebanon. https://tinyurl.com/38duahr4
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In Arab countries, North Africa, some parts of Asia and traditionally in some Mediterranean and Southern European cultures (especially in Sicily), males also hold hands for friendship and as a sign of respect. https://tinyurl.com/2ukejekv
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning January 26
Copyright 2023 by Rob Brezsny
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) was nominated nine times for the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature, but never won. He almost broke through in the last year of his life, but French author Albert Camus beat him by one vote. Camus said Kazantzakis was "a hundred times more" deserving of the award than himself. I will make a wild prediction about you in the coming months, Aquarius. If there has been anything about your destiny that resembles Kazantzakis's, chances are good that it will finally shift. Are you ready to embrace the gratification and responsibility of prime appreciation?
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Piscean educator Parker Palmer has a crucial message for you to meditate on in the coming weeks. Read it tenderly, please. Make it your homing signal. He said, "Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one's self. It is not about the absence of other people—it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other."
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Noah Webster ((1758–1843) worked for years to create the first definitive American dictionary. It became a cornucopia of revelation for poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). She said that for many years it was her "only companion." One biographer wrote, "The dictionary was no mere reference book to her; she read it as a priest his breviary—over and over, page by page, with utter absorption." Now would be a favorable time for you to get intimate with a comparable mother lode, Aries. I would love to see you find or identify a resource that will continually inspire you for the rest of 2023.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity." So declared Taurus philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his book *Philosophical Investigations*. Luckily for you Tauruses, you have a natural knack for making sure that important things don't get buried or neglected, no matter how simple and familiar they are. And you'll be exceptionally skilled at this superpower during the next four weeks. I hope you will be gracious as you wield it to enhance the lives of everyone you care about. All of us non-Bulls will benefit from the nudges you offer as we make our course corrections.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Poet Carolyn Kizer said the main subject of her work was this: "You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing." I agree with her. The people we encounter and the influences they exert make it hard to stay fixed in our attitudes and behavior. And the people we know well have even more profound transformative effects. I encourage you to celebrate this truth in the coming weeks. Thrive on it. Be extra hungry for and appreciative of all the prods you get to transcend who you used to be and become who you need to be.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): If you have any interest in temporarily impersonating a Scorpio, the coming weeks will be a favorable time to play around. Encounters with good, spooky magic will be available. More easily than usual, you could enjoy altered states that tickle your soul with provocative insights. Are you curious about the mysteries of intense, almost obsessive passion? Have you wondered if there might be ways to deal creatively and constructively with your personal darkness? All these perks could be yours—and more. Here's another exotic pleasure you may want to explore: that half-forbidden zone where dazzling heights overlap with the churning depths. You are hereby invited to tap into the erotic pleasures of spiritual experiments and the spiritual pleasures of erotic experiments.
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EXPLORING THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LONG-RANGE FUTURE
Would you like some inspiration as you muse and wonder about your upcoming adventures in 2023?
You can still listen to my long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in the coming months. Each report in the three-part series is 7 to 13 minutes long.
To hear these three-part, in-depth reports, go here: https://RealAstrology.com
Register and/or log in through the main page, click "Play Readings", and then select "Part 1" or “Part 2” or “Part 3” of the "Long Term Prediction for 2023."
The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $7 per sign. (You can get discounts for multiple purchases.)
A new short-range forecast for this week is also available.
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"The best part about your audio horoscopes is that they pat me on the head and kick me in the ass at the same time."
—Rita L., San Diego
"Your audio oracles go beyond helping me find the truth -- they inspire me to find the WILD truth."
—Patrick K., Montreal
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LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The circle can and will be complete—if you're willing to let it find its own way of completing itself. But I'm a bit worried that an outdated part of you may cling to the hope of a perfection that's neither desirable nor possible. To that outdated part of you, I say this: Trust that the Future You will thrive on the seeming imperfections that arise. Trust that the imperfections will be like the lead that the Future You will alchemically transmute into gold. The completed circle can't be and shouldn't be immaculate and flawless.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Shakespeare's work has been translated from his native English into many languages. But the books of Virgo detective novelist Agatha Christie have been translated far more than the Bard’s. (More info: https://tinyurl.com/ChristieTranslations.) Let's make Christie your inspirational role model for the next four weeks. In my astrological estimation, you will have an extraordinary capacity to communicate with a wide variety of people. Your ability to serve as a mediator and go-between and translator will be at a peak. Use your superpower wisely and with glee!
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Libran musician Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was a prolific and influential genius who created and played music with deep feeling. He was also physically attractive and charismatic. When he performed, some people in the audience swooned and sighed loudly as they threw their clothes and jewelry on stage. But there was another side of Liszt. He was a generous and attentive teacher for hundreds of piano students, and always offered his lessons free of charge. He also served as a mentor and benefactor for many renowned composers, including Wagner, Chopin, and Berlioz. I propose we make Liszt your inspirational role model for the next 11 months. May he rouse you to express yourself with flair and excellence, even as you shower your blessings on worthy recipients.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): This may risk being controversial, but in the coming weeks, I'm giving you cosmic authorization to engage in what might appear to be cultural appropriation. Blame it on the planets! They are telling me that to expand your mind and heart in just the right ways, you should seek inspiration and teaching from an array of cultures and traditions. So I encourage you to listen to West African music and read Chinese poetry in translation and gaze at the art of Indigenous Australians. Sing Kabbalistic songs and say Lakota prayers and intone Buddhist chants. These are just suggestions. I will leave it to your imagination as you absorb a host of fascinating influences that amaze and delight and educate you.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): "All the world's a stage," Shakespeare wrote, "and all the men and women merely players." That's always true, but it will be even more intensely accurate for you in the coming weeks. High-level pretending and performing will be happening. The plot twists may revolve around clandestine machinations and secret agendas. It will be vital for you to listen for what people are NOT saying as well as the hidden and symbolic meanings behind what they are saying. But beyond all those cautionary reminders, I predict the stories you witness and are part of will often be interesting and fun.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In this horoscope, I offer you wisdom from Capricorn storyteller Michael Meade. It’s a rousing meditation for you in the coming months. Here's Meade: "The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars; it wants to burn and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius." For your homework, Capricorn, write a page of ideas about what your genius consists of. Throughout 2023, I believe you will express your unique talents and blessings and gifts more than you ever have before.
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Homework: What is the best, most healing lie you could tell? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
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Kick Your Own Ass
YOU HAVE MY VOTE DEAR SAGE OF INFINITE COLLECTIVE, ILLUMINATED, BRILLIANT, TRANSPARENT NOTHINGNESS. I CHOOSE TO HOP, SKIP, DIVE, FLY, FLOAT AND JUMP WITH YOU THROUGH THE LIGHT FANTASTIC. AHOY MATTIE. I LOVE YOU ROB. THANK YOU.
YESSSS…I truly vote for YOU and ALL!!!
🤍🕊️♾️♾️♾️