Picking Our Battles

A Manifesto of Sacred Discernment

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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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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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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