Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter http://ezezine.com
Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology Newsletter
"The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one
extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has
continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and
colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with
fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go!" -Annie
Dillard, *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*
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November 29, 2006
My EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES are available for you at
http://RealAstrology.com
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The piece below is excerpted from my book
"PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA:
How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings"
available at http://tinyurl.com/qaj62
or find out more at http://www.freewillastrology.com
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PRAYER FOR YOU
This is a perfect moment. It's a perfect moment because I have been
inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I've been roused to unleash a divinely
greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of you—
even those of you who don't believe in the power of prayer.
And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods ... the God
beyond all Gods ... the Girlfriend of God ... the Teacher of God ... the
Goddess who invented God.
DEAR GODDESS, you who never kill but only change:
I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to
shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads this benediction.
I pray that you will give them what they don't even know they need—not
just the boons they think they want but everything they've always been
afraid to even imagine or ask for.
DEAR GODDESS, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:
Many of the divine chameleons out there don't even know that their souls
will live forever.
So please use your brash magic to help them see that they are all wildly
creative geniuses too big for their own personalities.
Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what
they've been led to believe about themselves, and more exciting than
they can possibly imagine.
Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for
them to be in love with anyone or anything that's no good for them.
O GODDESS, you who give us so much love and pain mixed together that
our morality is always on the verge of collapsing:
I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the dumb
ideas, bad decisions, and nasty conditioning that have ever cursed the
wise and sexy virtuosos out there.
Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung
to them, no matter how long they've suffered from it, and even if they
have become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.
Please conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive
an early warning if they are ever about to act in such a way as to bring
another hex or plague into their lives in the future.
DEAR GODDESS, sweet Goddess, you sly universal virus with no freaking
opinion:
Please help all the personal growth addicts out there to become
disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.
Teach them the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating
self-control.
Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible
to do the totally right thing.
Arouse the Wild Woman within them—even if they're men.
DEAR GODDESS, you pregnant slut who scorns all mediocre longing:
I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate rascals communing with
this prayer to kick their own asses and wash their own brains.
Provoke them to throw away or give away all the things they own that
encourage them to believe that they are better than anyone else.
Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they cannot do and do
not have.
Give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more
interesting problems.
Most of all, Goddess, brainwash them with your freedom so that they
never love their own pain more than anyone else's pain.
O GODDESS, you wildly disciplined, radically curious, shockingly friendly,
fanatically balanced, mysteriously truthful, teasingly healing, lyrically
logical master of rowdy bliss:
Cultivate in yourself a fervent yearning for the intimate companionship of
these budding messiahs. Play with them every day. Answer their
questions. Listen to their stories. Inspire them to love you so much they
lose all their hatred forever.
DEAR GODDESS, you psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our
brains:
Bless the insanely poised creators out there with lucid dreams while they
are wide awake. Provide them with their own spin doctors, and vacuum
cleaners for their magic carpets, and solar-powered sex toys that work
even in the dark.
Give them a knack for avoiding other people's hells, and a thousand masks
that all represent their true feelings, and secret admirers who are not
psychotic stalkers.
Arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or an underground river,
or a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn.
Teach them to be their own prophets and pray to themselves and right
their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and
save their own lives.
DEAR GODDESS, you riotously tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically
sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm
animal bodies:
I pray that you provide all the original sinners out there with a license to
bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart
from the things they love.
Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from
their daring, dramatic, divine desires.
And teach them that they can have anything they want if they'll only ask
for it in an unselfish way.
And now dear God of Gods, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God,
Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close,
trusting that in these mysterious moments you have begun to change
everyone out there in the exact way they've needed to change in order to
become the gorgeous geniuses they were born to be. Amen. Awomen.
P.S. Goddess: And please also give them each an emerald green
parachute, ruby slippers, a canoe covered with jewels, a black-market
orchid and a bouquet of organic broccoli, a donkey clown piñata full of
crickets, a protective gargoyle lifted from the Chartres Cathedral, a guitar
string actually played by Jimi Hendrix, a strawberry chocolate cake baked
in the shape of a question mark, a human DNA map drawn up by the
Human Genome Project, fistfuls of sparklers, a bottle of holy water from
the River Jordan, photos of lightning on a giant poster, a refrigerator
magnet cast in the likeness of the Dalai Lama, and the key of life
accidentally placed inside a box of Cracker Jack.
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To read other news and features from my book, go here:
http://snipurl.com/l9o3
You can buy the book here:
AMAZON
http://snipurl.com/krjj
BARNES & NOBLE
http://snipurl.com/krjn
POWELLS
http://snipurl.com/123ln
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OTHER PRONOIA RESOURCES:
MUSIC
The Idan Raichel Project
"While headlines are dominated by news of conflict in the Middle East, an
Israeli musical collaborative looks beyond intercultural differences and
celebrates the value of diversity. It blends traditional Ethiopian folk music,
Arabic poetry, Yemenite chants, Biblical psalms and Caribbean rhythms."
http://tinyurl.com/wlvm6
ART
Four Centuries of Erotic Art from Japan
Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Avenue, New York
http://tinyurl.com/yzbupj
PROPHECY
Brilliant Scientific Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years
http://tinyurl.com/yacele
(Note: I endorse these because I like them. They're not advertisements,
and I get no kickbacks.)
Please tell me your own personal nominations for PRONOIA RESOURCES.
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week beginning November 30
Copyright 2006 by Rob Brezsny
http://www.freewillastrology.com
Grammar key: Asterisks equal *italics*
ARIES (March 21-April 19): "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom," wrote
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. That's vividly true for you right
now, Aries. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you'll
thrive on the whirling gaga that overwhelms you as you play in vast, open
spaces. Your best decisions will arise as your mind is boggled and wobbled
by liberating dramas. So let's celebrate the disorientation you're feeling,
and do everything we can to make sure that more is on its way.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I know how you're feeling, Taurus. I've done
time in the same psychic prison you're trapped in. Because of my
exemplary behavior while incarcerated, luckily, I was freed well in advance
of my scheduled release date. Would you like to know what I did to win
my early release? Four things: (1) I took responsibility for the ways I had
perpetuated my own suffering. (2) I practiced feeling grateful for the
lessons my pain had taught me. (3) I thought deeply about the actions I
could take to atone for how I had hurt other people. (4) I vowed to use
the shame I felt as a motivation to become smarter and kinder and wilder.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Does one of your pretty good relationships
need a boost? Does one of your challenging partnerships need some
slack? If so, I'd like to help. Here's my offer. I'll perform a healing
ceremony for a relationship of your choice. In return for doing you this
favor, all I ask is that you, too, carry out a ritual in behalf of the same
relationship. Think of it as being akin to a "matching funds" grant: I'll help
you if you help yourself. It is the perfect astrological moment to do this--
to make splashy gestures that invoke blessings for relationships that are
in need of a shift. Now send me a brief description of the relationship
you'd like me to shower some magic on. Write to uaregod@comcast.net. I
won't be able to write back, but I will definitely carry out a ritual for you.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): "They might be small, spiky, and spineless,
but they're still family." So begins a *National Geographic* story about
sea urchins, creatures that biologists now know have far more in common
with humans than anyone realized. (They share 7,077 genes with us, and
are actually on the same branch of the evolutionary tree of life.) Let that
opening sentence be your motto during the coming week, Cancerian, as
you adjust your attitude towards not only the runts and outcasts of your
tribe, but also towards the parts of yourself that you tend to neglect and
underestimate. Now say this: "They might be small, spiky, and spineless,
but they're still family."
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I hope that one day you will learn how to give all
the extraordinary love you have to offer. Another one of my greatest
desires for you is that you will cultivate, earn, and seize all the freedom
you need in order to become yourself completely. To my great pleasure,
you've recently begun to tune in to the possibility that these two goals
might be extremely fun for you. During the coming weeks their hold on
your imagination should heat up considerably. In 2007, I hope they'll
become your modus operandi, your Weltanschauung, and your raison
d'être.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In one of Aesop's fables, a donkey becomes
enamored of the crickets' serenades. Longing to produce the same sound
himself, he goes to a cricket for advice. "What kind of food gives you that
sweet-sounding voice?" he asks. The cricket says, "My food is the air and
the dew." The donkey then begins a new diet, hoping that by eating
nothing but air and dew he too will be able to make beautiful, whirring
melodies. It doesn't happen, of course. The donkey merely starves. Let
this be your teaching story for the coming week, Virgo. Sing your own
song with your own voice, whether that sounds like a hee-haw or a
warble. And get the exact nurturing that will help you sing your own song
with your own voice, not the nurturing that helps others sing their special
tunes.
* * *
My EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES are weekly spoken-word reports on
your destiny. They're three to four minutes long, and are available at
http://realastrology.com. The cost is $6 per reading, or $20 if you buy
four readings, and $60 if you buy 16 readings.
The audio horoscopes are also available by phone at 1-877-873-4888 or
1-900-950-7700 for $1.99 per minute.
My DAILY TEXT MESSAGE HOROSCOPES are short, sweet bursts of
illumination delivered seven days a week to your cell phone or other
mobile device. You can sign up for them at http://realastrology.com. The
cost is $6.99 per week (billed monthly), or $4.99 per week (billed
monthly) if you choose to automatically renew your account.
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LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): As a general rule, standing your ground and
dealing squarely with a problem is the best policy. But for you right now,
escape is a viable option. In fact, I think that running away is actually
preferable. All I ask, though, is that you choose a specific place to flee to,
so that you're not just running *from* something but also running
*toward* something. As long as you're driven solely by a big NO, in other
words, dashing around will weaken you and aggravate the problem you're
dodging. But if you're also motivated by a vivid YES, you'll find the
strength and wisdom to make all the right moves.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): *Earth Island Journal* says scientists have
discovered natural ways to clean up old munitions sites. If you plant
periwinkle and parrot-feather plants in soil that's been bombed with TNT,
they'll soak up and neutralize the noxious stuff. Likewise, pondweed
absorbs and transforms nitroglycerin in land where explosives have been
detonated. I urge you to find the metaphorical equivalents of periwinkle,
pondweed, and parrot-feather plants this week, Scorpio. It's a perfect
moment to detoxify the places in your life where past battles left behind
toxic debris.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): On Jupiter's moon Europa, there is an
absolutely straight narrow line about 125 miles long. NASA'S photos show
it clearly. Commenting on this improbably regular feature, renowned
author and inventor Arthur C. Clarke says he finds it hard not to conclude
that it was constructed by intelligent life. "I'm beginning to think the
unthinkable," he writes. Make that sentence your watchword in the
coming week, Sagittarius. Be ready to imagine the unimaginable, see the
unseeable, and think the unthinkable. And I mean that you should do that
with the most optimistic attitude possible. According to my reading of
the astrological omens, the almost unbelievable prospects coming into
your sphere are interesting and invigorating.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): As I see your situation, it's like you're
acting famished even though the cupboards are stocked with goodies.
You're pining and moaning to be close to a treasure that's right next to
you. You've got 98 out the 100 things you need, and yet you just can't
stop obsessing on the two that are missing. If I'm wrong about this,
Capricorn, just ignore what I'm saying and rejoin me next week. But if you
suspect I may be on to something, please act fast to purge your
delusions.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): This week I propose that you feel gratitude
for every person who has ever told you that you were inadequate, that
there was something wrong with you, that you would never amount to
anything. You might even carry out a little ceremony in which you bow
down to an altar containing their photos or slips of paper on which their
names are written. And why am I suggesting this? Because those jerks
helped motivate you to become as cool as you are. And if I'm reading the
omens correctly, it's time to summon a huge new burst of creative
energy as you disprove their misbegotten ideas about you even more
completely.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Why do cigarette-makers put ammonia in
their product? For the same reason that drug addicts use ammonia to
turn cocaine into crack: It helps render the nicotine and cocaine into a
gas, making it easier for the lungs to absorb them, and dramatically
amplifying the high. I hope you can find a healthy, legal, and metaphorical
equivalent to this process in the coming weeks, Pisces. You have both a
poetic license and an astrological mandate to squeeze at least three times
more fun and insight out of every single thing you do. It's the Intensity
Season.
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HOMEWORK:
What thing do you desperately want that would also benefit other
people?Tell me all about it by going to http://www.RealAstrology.com
and clicking on "Email Rob."
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WANT TO GET YOUR CHART DONE?
I'm not doing charts these days. In addition to writing my weekly column
and expanded audio horoscopes, I'm also working on a CD and promoting
my new book.
But I can recommend a colleague whose astro-aesthetics closely match
my own. She's RO LOUGHRAN.
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.
Ro is based in California, but can do phone consultations and otherwise
work with you regardless of geographic boundaries.
Ro's website is at
http://www.yoursouljourney.com/
She can also be reached at roloughran@comcast.net
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I totally respect your privacy. I'll never sell or give away your address to
anyone.
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Contents of the Free Will Astrology Newsletter are Copyright
2006 Rob Brezsny
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