Our Gorgeous Soul Power

We insist on beauty and truth and love

Reminder: I've written four sets of horoscopes that preview the Big Picture of your life in 2026. Read them here: tinyurl.com/BigPicture2026

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Fighting ICE’s Violence While Preserving Our Gorgeous Soul Power

Thirty-seven-year-old poet and mother of three children Renee Nicole Good was murdered by a masked, cursing ICE agent. It was yet another in a series of tragic atrocities perpetrated by Trumps’ gang of thugs.

It was also a clarification: The masks ICE agents wear aren’t about anonymity but about removing the last vestiges of accountability. They’re the final erasure of the human face from state violence. This is what tyranny looks like when it stops pretending.

Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s the sad and shocking truth.

So how do we fight the escalating brutality without becoming brutalized ourselves? How do we resist the fascist creep without letting it colonize our inner landscape?

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The Insurrectionary’s Paradox

Here’s the challenging practice: We need wrathful compassion, that fierce Buddhist concept where love becomes so intense it manifests as holy rage against those who harm the vulnerable. Not hatred, which damages the hater, but a righteous anger that’s an expression of care extended so far it won’t tolerate cruelty.

We can think of it this way: If someone were beating a child in front of us, our immediate intervention wouldn’t come from hatred of the abuser but from love of the child. The force we would use to stop the violence would be an expression of our care.

This is the alchemy we need now. ICE’s violence against immigrants (and even non-immgrants) demands our intervention because we love what they’re destroying: human dignity, sanctuary, and refuge.

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Practical Insurgency as Self-Care

On our behalf, I’m tempted to ask the question “how do we fight while caring for ourselves?” But that contains a false premise. Done right, the fighting is the self-care. Here’s why:

We stay sane by taking vigorous action. Helplessness is the real psychological poison. Every practical thing we do is an antidote to the corrosive feeling of complicity through inaction: joining rapid response networks, contributing to immigrant defense funds, participating in ICE office disruptions, providing sanctuary, and documenting abuses.

We preserve joy by defending it collectively. The authoritarian gangsters want to steal our capacity for delight, to make us so despairing and exhausted that we forfeit our imagination.

But we refuse. We organize potlucks for undocumented neighbors. We hold dance parties outside detention centers. We make beauty while we make trouble. The exuberance isn’t separate from the resistance; it’s one of the main points of the resistance.

We resist mass hallucination by grounding ourselves in embodied reality. The fascist atrocity project depends on abstractions: immigrants as “invaders” and humans as “illegals.”

We counter this with fierce particularity. We learn the name of every person ICE detains. We tell their specific stories, as in: Renee Nicole Good was an award-winning queer poet who was renowned for her kindness. Her last words on earth, uttered to her killer, were, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

We make the violence concrete and the humanity undeniable. This refusal to let brutality be normalized into abstraction is both activism and meditation.

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Can Our Struggle Be a Form of Play?

The question might ostensibly seem frivolous given the stakes. But consider the possibility that rigid seriousness is just another form of the authoritarian rigidity we’re fighting against. What if we approach resistance with the spirit of serious play—not frivolous, but creative, surprising, and uncontainable?

For example: street theater that mockingly reenacts ICE raids with agents played as cowardly masked thugs. Paint or chalk murals that celebrate immigrants’ contributions, impossible to remove without admitting some fascist is trying to erase these truths. Flash mobs singing lullabies outside detention centers in multiple languages. Memes that make ICE agents’ violence so recognizable as un-American that even moderate citizens recoil.

The playfulness isn’t disrespectful to the horror. It’s a refusal to let the horror dictate the terms of engagement entirely. It keeps our imaginations wild and hungry and free because the authoritarian mind can’t comprehend or predict creative insurgency.

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Constructive Anger, Unconsumed

How do we summon a righteous blend of practical love and constructive anger? Here’s the recipe:

We root the anger in specific compassion. We don’t let it become abstract fury at “the system” or “fascism.” We focus it: The ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good in the face at pointblank range and then cursed her as she died.

Honduran asylum seeker Mirian G. was detained in Texas and held in an ICE-run detention center while her 18‑month‑old son was taken to a separate facility 120 miles away, with no chance to comfort him or say goodbye.

A farmworker in Ventura County, California, Jaime Alanís García / Alanís, died after falling 30 feet from a greenhouse roof while fleeing an ICE raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo on July 10, 2025.

Specificity like this keeps the anger clean, purposeful, and constructive.

And we channel it into action that empower us. Because anger that just churns inside us becomes acid. Whereas we can turn our anger into sacred fuel: Use it to build mutual aid networks, fund legal defense, disrupt deportation operations, create sanctuary spaces.

We also tend the opposite pole equally. For every hour of wrathful organizing, we spend time cultivating beauty. We register the power and glory of our loved ones, our creative practices, our moments of sensory pleasure, and our moments of imagining better worlds.

They’re what we’re defending. They keep us from becoming burned-out husks who’ve won some battles but lost our souls.

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Cheerful Buoyancy as Revolutionary Technology

The authoritarian thugs are counting on our despair. Our cheerful buoyancy (which isn’t the same as naive optimism) can disrupt their evil plans. (And yes, they are EVIL.)

So we hold the full weight of the terror, cruelty, and fascist acceleration . . . AND we ALSO experience joy, pleasure, and fun. Because joy, pleasure, and fun aren’t contingent on circumstances being good. They’re our choice to remain alive to beauty even amidst dire situations.

This is embodied spirituality in action. Disembodied spirituality would tell us to transcend the political horror and not let it disturb our inner peace. But a path of embodied spirituality says: No. We feel it all. The rage, the grief, the fear . . . AND the delight, the sensory pleasure, the connection, the hope.

Practical applications:

- Start meetings with a genuinely delightful burst like a poem, a song, or good news

- Build regular sabbath time into our activism (one day a week, no news, no organizing, just pleasure)..

- Practice what adrienne maree brown calls “pleasure activism”—the insistence that what we’re fighting for should be present in how we fight.

- Cultivate absurdist humor about the situation. It’s not dismissive, but recognizes how cartoonishly evil masked federal agents are.

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How Do We Refrain From Being Consumed by Hatred?

Even as we fight against the hatred and danger unleashed by masked bullies perpetrating harm under the aegis of ICE, we remember: Hatred corrodes the hater. It’s a toxin that poisons from within.

The answer isn’t to suppress the rage or pretend we don’t feel it. Instead, we transform rage by grounding it in love: love for the victims, love for the possibility of justice, and love for the world we’re trying to build.

Here’s a practice: When we feel hatred rising toward an ICE agent, a collaborating judge, or a politician enabling this violence, pause, we ask ourselves: What am I really feeling?

Beneath the hatred is often grief. That’s the deeper feeling.

We let ourselves feel that grief all the way down to the bottom of the grief. It connects us to life’s deep sources. And from the grief comes the fierce determination that can sustain a long struggle without consuming us.

This doesn’t mean being soft on perpetrators. It means staying human while fighting inhumane systems.

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Building While Burning

How do we remain dedicated to building beauty and truth and justice and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free?

The key insight: We don’t build these things AFTER we have defeated fascism. We build them as one of the methods of defeating fascism.

Every one of our mutual aid networks is doing prefigurative politics. We are showing what a caring society looks like. Every sanctuary space is a liberated zone. Every community defense training is both practical skill-building and a demonstration that we protect each other, not the corrupt state.

Our art, writing, music, and poetry aren’t separate from the fight. They comprise our consciousness-building infrastructure. They give people the philosophical and imaginative resources to resist authoritarian simplicity with complex, embodied alternatives.

When we write a poem, we’re not escaping the struggle. We’re modeling the attention and beauty and truth-telling the world needs. When we make music, we’re creating the soundtrack for resistance and joy. When we build community, we’re establishing the networks that will sustain us through the fight ahead.

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OUR ALIVENESS IS A THREAT TO THEM

Remember: our aliveness is a threat to them. The autocrats want to turn everyone into fearful, passive, joyless subjects. Every moment we choose vitality, creativity, connection, we are already winning a small battle. We’re proving that their project of domination is incomplete, that something in us remains untamed and unbowed.

So here’s the practice, the working, the way forward:

We wake each morning and feel the full weight of what’s happening. Don’t numb ourselves to the ongoing terror.

Then we choose, deliberately, to also feel joy. Make breakfast with sensuous attention. Notice beauty. Connect with our beloveds.

Let both feelings be true simultaneously. This is embodied spirituality: not transcending the difficulty but fully inhabiting our life within it.

Take action, any action, toward protecting immigrants, disrupting ICE, building sanctuary. Even small actions break the paralysis and feed the soul.

Do it with others. Isolation is the enemy; connection and community are the medicine.

Be creative, surprising, and playful in our methods. The autocrats expect grimness and despair. Give them something they can’t predict or control.

Tend our own beauty and truth and joy as fiercely as we fight for others’. We are what we’re defending.

The fight is long. We must pace ourselves. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

And finally: Our art, our relationships, our pleasures, and our wild imagination aren’t separate from the resistance. They’re the point of it. They’re what makes us dangerous to authoritarianism. We know that life can be beautiful, strange, free, and we won’t forget it, won’t let their brutality have the final word.

The masked ICE agents think the masks make them powerful. But we see through them to the cowardice, the complicity, and the abandonment of humanity. And we will fight them with everything we have: rage and love, seriousness and play, practical solidarity and wild imagination.

Because the fight itself is how we stay human while they choose to be monsters.

This is a shorter version of a longer essay. To read the whole thing, go here: tinyurl.com/OurAlivenessIsThreatening

To read a companion essay, “The Demise of MAGA,” go here: tinyurl.com/DemiseOfMAGA

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DREAM AND SCHEME ABOUT YOUR LONG-RANGE FUTURE

with my 3-part EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES for the Coming Year: RealAstrology.com

What new influences are headed your way in 2026? What fresh resources can you draw on? How can you conspire with life to create the best possible future for yourself?

This week, my EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES feature Part 3 of the long-range, in-depth explorations of your destiny in 2026. Part 1 and Part 2 of your Big-Picture Predictions are also still available.

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes, go to RealAstrology.com

Register and/or log in through the main page, then under “Select Reading to Play,” click on “Part 3” of the “Long-Term Prediction for 2026.”

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The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $7 per sign. (You can get discounts for purchasing larger token packages.) Each forecast is 8 to 11 minutes long.

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Poster is my Latino Muslim Unity

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WE REMEMBER EVERYONE

Written by @latinomuslimunity: In the past year, over 32 people have lost their lives through ICE enforcement, either in detention, during raids, or while being pursued. They were not criminals. They were parents, children, workers, and neighbors—human beings who were terrorized, hunted, and taken by a system that treats our lives as disposable.

Here are just a few of their names:

Silverio Villegas González (38) — Franklin Park, IL. Silverio, a father of two and cook, was shot and killed by ICE at a checkpoint after dropping his children at school.

Keith Porter (43) — Inglewood, CA. Keith was killed outside his apartment after being shot by an off-duty ICE officer following a New Year’s Eve celebration.

Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez (52) — Monrovia, CA. A Guatemalan day laborer, he was chased to death by ICE and struck by a vehicle while fleeing for his life.

Jaime Alanís (57) — Oxnard / Camarillo, CA. Jaime, a farmworker, was fatally injured during a large-scale ICE raid at his workplace.

Jocelyn Rojo Carranza (11) — Gainesville, TX. Jocelyn died by suicide after enduring bullying and threats by classmates that ICE would take her parents — a child lost to the fear and trauma created by immigration terror.

ICE terror is real.

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My linktree is here: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of January 15

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Sandcastles are good reminders of how temporary everything is. We build them on the damp edge of the shore after the tide recedes, and then they crumble when the sea rolls back a few hours later. Let’s make the sandcastle your power symbol for the months ahead. In doing so, I don’t mean to imply that your certainties will be demolished. Rather, it’s my way of urging you to enjoy and capitalize on the ever-changing nature of all things. In fact, I believe that knack should be one of your specialties in the coming months. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh told us, we should be grateful for impermanence, because it keeps every possibility alive.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): During World War II, the United States faced a natural rubber shortage and funded research into synthetic substitutes. The effort was partly successful, but there were also failed experiments. Among these was a substance that later became a popular toy named Silly Putty. It sold millions of units and made its marketer wealthy. I suspect a metaphorically similar breakthrough is looming for you, Aquarius: an unplanned discovery that holds unforeseen value. You may soon have your own “Silly Putty moment”—an invention, idea, or situation that is technically a detour from your original goal but still delivers a gift. So keep your curiosity loose and your judgment soft. Don’t dismiss the byproducts of your efforts. Some diversions may reveal themselves to be the magic you didn’t realize you needed.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): I suggest you try an “as-if” exercise, Pisces. Here’s what I propose: Enjoy a five-day period visualizing what your life would be like if you stopped saving yourself for a mythical future—including both the positive and negative aspects. Instead, envision yourself spending the coming months doing exactly what you yearn to do most, gleefully and intensely pursuing your sweetest dreams and prime mission. During this sabbatical, you will refrain from invoking excuses about why you can’t follow your bliss. You will assume that you are attuned with the heart of creation. You will act as if you are a joy specialist who adores your life.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Japanese Zen master Hakuin (1686–1769) painted with astonishing vigor well into his eighties. When asked his secret, he said he treated each brushstroke as if it were his first. He approached the ink and paper with a beginner’s inspired innocence. I propose that you adopt a version of Hakuin’s practice. Dive into your familiar routines with virgin eyes. Allow your expertise to be influenced by surprise. As for the mastery you have earned, may I suggest you use it as a launching pad for enthusiastic amateurism? Being skilled is wonderful. Being skilled and willing to experiment like a newcomer? That’s the high art of perpetual combustion, an Aries specialty.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In 1971, NASA’s Apollo 15 mission delivered a new asset to the moon: the Lunar Roving Vehicle. This battery-powered “moon buggy” enabled astronauts to explore farther from their landing site than ever before. They gathered a record haul of rock and soil samples and a deeper understanding of the lunar surface. I think you Bulls would be wise to get your own equivalent of that moon buggy. The apt metaphor here is enhancing your ability to extend your reach and explore beyond the familiar. In the coming weeks, I hope you will seek access to tools, allies, and freedoms that expand your range. Use them to push into new territory and scout around for intriguing valuables.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Are you ready to unveil the half-hidden, half-beautiful truths you have been keeping tucked away? I think you are. You might shake, sweat, and second-guess yourself right up until the moment the pivotal moment arrives. But then, I predict, you will zone in on how best to carry out your sublime assignment. The perilous blessings or radiant burdens you’ve been hoarding like secret treasures will finally spill out of you in just the right ways.

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LET’S IMAGINE WHAT INTERESTING STORIES AND MYSTERIES MIGHT BE COMING YOUR WAY IN THE YEAR AHEAD

Who do you want to become in 2026? Where do you want to go and what do you want to do? Would you like some inspiration as you muse and wonder about your upcoming adventures?

In this week’s EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, I offer you Part 3 of MY long-term, in-depth exploration of your destiny in the coming year.

Part 1 and Part 2 are still available.

To listen to your BIG PICTURE horoscopes online, go to

https://RealAstrology.com

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The cost for the Expanded Audio Horoscopes is $7 per sign if you purchase 7 tokens for $7. (You can get discounts for purchasing larger token packages.)

Each forecast is 8 to 11 minutes long.

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CANCER (June 21-July 22): A hermit crab finds a new shell not because the old one was bad, but because the creature grew. A similar urge stirs in you now: an instinct to relocate your sensitivity and tenderness into roomier housing. You don’t have to abandon your favorite people or situations. Just ripen and update your containers so your emotional intelligence can flourish even more. Maybe revise your work rhythms. Dream up new bedtime stories. Be braver in declaring your needs. Your ongoing transformations could be a bit bumpy, but mostly healing and cherished. Give them the spaciousness they require.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Poet Jack Gilbert wrote, “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure but not delight.” Here’s what I think he meant: Pleasure is easy to access, available in many transactions. But delight requires courage. We must be undefended enough to be astonished and elated. Here’s the potential glitch for you Leos: You sometimes feel inclined to perform your joy; you make your happiness into entertainment for others to be inspired by. But true delight is riskier and more real. It comes when you forget to curate yourself because you’re too enchanted to remember you’re being watched. Your next assignment: Conjure up three moments of private delight that no one but you will see.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Many of you are renowned for your precision, but that’s just half the story. The more complete truth is that when you are most robust, you’re a connoisseur of refinement. Your careful edits can transmute muddles into medicines. Your subtle fixes may catalyze major corrections. Here’s my bold declaration: You are now at the height of your Virgo powers. I hope you wield them with utter flair and finesse. Make everything you touch better than it was before you touched it.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Some astrologers work without ever glancing at the night sky. Their bond with the planets lives mostly through abstract ideas. To balance that approach, Daniel Giamario developed a more hands-on approach to astrology. In his retreats, students trek into wild country, far from city lights, and spend the dark hours watching the dance of the heavenly bodies. He teaches that cosmic energies can be sensed through our beautiful bodies as much as they can be understood by our fine minds. In the weeks ahead, I invite you to infuse all your explorations with that spirit. Learn through direct encounters, not just through concepts and recycled reports.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): English is my first language. I love how its wild, hybrid, restless qualities enable me to express myself. I never grow weary of exploring its limits and discovering new ways to use it with flair and care. But I am also very grateful that my horoscopes are translated into Italian, French, Japanese, and Spanish. I am supremely blessed to have editors who turn my idiosyncratic prose into language that non-English speakers can enjoy. It’s one of the great gifts that life has given me. In the coming months, Scorpio, I will be wishing and expecting a similar bonus for you: help and support in expanding your ability to reach further in your self-expression.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Your intrepid spirit is most likely to find exciting adventures if it’s exquisitely prepared. While I love your daring spontaneity and experimental expansiveness, I hope that in the coming weeks, you will work hard to support them with good planning and rigorous foresight. Be imaginative and disciplined, wild and calculating, irrepressible and solidly responsible. If you heed my advice, you could break your previous records for making marvelous discoveries in the frontiers. PS: Treat wonder like a muscle. Flex it daily—with gratitude.

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