I will begin by dismantling the compliment before anyone tries to hand it to me. When I strive to dismantle misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, I’m not merely being kind. When I devote my wild imagination to enhancing and celebrating the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people, my motivation goes way beyond an expression of niceness. Niceness is a thin, well-behaved thing. It’s a way of being pleasant while changing nothing. What I’m doing is more selfish and sacred than that.Here’s my confession: I do this work because I want to live in a gorgeous world, and I have understood for as long as I can remember that I can’t live in a gorgeous world while so much of it is caged.+I was raised, as most straight white men are raised, inside an invisible bargain. The deal went like this: Accept a narrowed life, and in exchange you will be handed a little extra power. If you will only amputate your tenderness, ration your tears, treat your feelings as a security risk, and learn to dominate rather than to commune, then you will be permitted to stand a half-step above the women and the queer and nonbinary people and anyone else the culture diminishes.I saw through it early. As a young man I understood, in my body before I could have argued it, that this was a robbery disguised as a coronation. The patriarchy did its utmost best to train me to devalue the feminine. It also tried to train me to deprecate the feminine in myself, including my own capacity for sensitivity, deep feelings, receptivity, and a sense of wonder.The homophobia that the patriarchy tried to foist on me didn’t merely target other men who love men. It tried to install in me and every boy a low-grade panic that policed every unguarded affection and every place where male love might spill past its assigned borders. I watched it happen to other boys, but luckily it never took hold in me. I simply didn’t buy the fear. I didn’t accept that tenderness between men was a threat to be managed rather than one of the plain glories of being alive.And I could see, even then, where the whole apparatus was headed: toward the lie that the self is a prison sentence rather than a work of art and that a person is stuck being whatever rigid roles they were assigned. I refused to believe that about anyone, which meant I got to refuse to believe it about myself, too.I knew instinctively that every wall I was told to build against someone else’s freedom would turn out to be a wall inside my own imagination. So I refused to build them. And I as I emerged into adulthood, I got loud about it.In the 1970s I turned my rock bands into loudspeakers for a high-intensity feminism and an unapologetic advocacy for gay rights and safety. For a straight white man in those years, this wasn’t a fashionable stance to strike; it was closer to a provocation. I caught a lot of shit for it from men who felt betrayed by a defector, from people who couldn’t fathom why I’d volunteer for a fight that wasn’t, as they saw it, mine to fight. But it was mine. It has always been mine. I wasn’t slumming as an ally. I was refusing to be swindled.
So when I fight for women and LGBTQ+ people, I am also fighting for the exiled parts of myself. This isn’t altruism performing a good deed for the less fortunate. It’s a jailbreak motivated by my clarity that we’re all susceptible to being snared in the same trap.The Indigenous Australian activist Lilla Watson is often credited with a line I have carried for years: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”I take that as scripture. My freedom and everyone else’s are not two freedoms. They are one thing pretending, under duress, to be separate.A culture that despises women is a culture that has declared war on its own source. A culture that persecutes queer and trans and nonbinary people is a culture that has made imagination a crime. I don’t want to be a citizen of that country. Not just because I am virtuous, but because I am greedy for beauty and liberation, and that country is a wasteland.+I will be specific about my winnings, because vague nobility bores me and specificity is a form of respect.When women rise into their full sovereign intelligence—their sublime, unbossed, uncontainable intelligence—the entire world grows smarter, kinder, wilder, and infinitely more interesting.And I get to live in that world. I get to be surrounded by people operating at full power instead of half-throttled by contempt. Who wouldn’t want that? Only a fool volunteers to be the smartest voice in a room emptied of geniuses.When queer, nonbinary, and trans people are free to invent themselves in private and public, they teach the rest of us that we, too, are permitted to be creative authors of our destinies. Every trans person who insists on becoming who they are is informing me that my life isn’t a fixed sentence but a living poem I am allowed to revise. That’s a gift of staggering value.When love is allowed to take whatever shape love takes, the total quantity of love in the culture increases. And love isn’t a scarce resource I have to hoard. It’s a fire that lights other fires without diminishing itself. A society drenched in permitted love is a warmer, wilder, more erotic and more alive place to spend one’s incarnation. This is what I mean by PRONOIA: the hypothesis, always worth testing, that reality is rigged in our favor, and that the liberation of the people I was urged to diminish is not a loss for me but a windfall. Their flourishing is my inheritance.+I want to be clear that I’m not offering to save anyone. The white male savior is one of patriarchy’s favorite cartoon characters, and I have no interest in auditioning for the role. Women don’t need me to rescue them from a burning building; they need me to stop stacking the kindling and, more often, to shut up and hand them the water and get out of the doorway.My job isn’t to lead the parade. My job is to be a fierce and joyful accomplice, to spend my inherited advantages recklessly and gladly, in service of a world where such advantages no longer exist.And I want to do it while fully embodied and incarnate, not as a bloodless moral position but as a visceral delight. Too much allyship is performed with a long, grave face, as though justice were a grim tax we pay to feel clean.I reject that funeral. The dismantling of misogyny and homophobia and transphobia isn’t a chore. It’s one of the most thrilling collaborative art projects our species has ever attempted: the reinvention of what a human being is allowed to be.+So yes, when I do this work I’m serving the higher good of my culture. A culture that liberates its women becomes more intelligent. A culture that honors its queer, nonbinary, and trans citizens becomes more imaginatively courageous and more capable of transformation. A culture that lets love run free becomes more beautiful. These aren’t sacrifices I make on the altar of goodness. They are the conditions of a life I actually want to live.I fight misogyny and homophobia and transphobia the way a person trapped in a stale room throws open every window. It’s not out of duty to the wind, but out of hunger for air.Call it selfish, then. I’ll accept the charge and raise the stakes: It’s the most enlightened selfishness I know. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s. And I have come, exuberantly and greedily and for the rest of my life, to work together.
For anyone counting who’s missing Someone is going to read my essay above and feel a sting: Why only these groups? Where is everyone else?The answer is built into the argument itself.I wrote about misogyny and homophobia and transphobia because those are prohibitions I felt pressing on my own life, and the freedoms I had to win for myself before I could recognize them in anyone else. This essay is the map of one particular jailbreak, mine. I won’t pretend I’ve made every escape or know every prison from the inside.But the thesis doesn’t halt at the borders of my biography. It can’t. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s isn’t a slogan I get to apply selectively. If it’s true, it’s true all the way down.So I’ll say more of it plainly.A culture that brutalizes Black people is at war with its own genius.A culture that works to erase Indigenous peoples is trying to amputate its own oldest memory and its deepest knowledge of how to actually live on this land.A culture that treats immigrants as invaders is starving itself of the exact hunger and nerve and reinvention that keep a nation alive.A culture that scorns its Latina and Latino people is spurning the very warmth and boldness it needs and secretly hungers for. A culture that demeans and diminishes its disabled people is throwing away its hardest-won wisdom about adaptation. A culture that punishes the poor is criminalizing a wound it inflicted in the first place. A culture that treats the homeless as inconvenient scenery to be cleared away is refusing to look at its own failure. A culture that pathologizes neurodivergent minds is narrowing the range of the ways it’s allowed to think. A culture at war with certain bodies that don’t match absurdly narrow beauty standards is at war with the fact of embodiment itself.Each of those cruelties impoverishes the world I have to live in. Each of those liberations is, by the same greedy logic, my inheritance too.I don’t say all of it every time I say any of it because no single essay can carry the whole weight of everything that needs undoing. But I will never pretend the wrong I named is the only wrong, or that the freedom I’m this greedy for has a color, a border, or a limit.The invitation is identical for all of it: not to help from a safe distance, but to work together, because we have always been in this together.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Archaeologists studying ancient wells have discovered that some weren’t finished in a single effort. Communities might dig to the current water table, use the well for years, then probe further down when water levels dropped or needs increased. This is a useful metaphor for you, Aries. As of yet, you don’t have the ability or tools to reach the deepest layers you aspire to reach. My counsel is to go as far as you can now and gather what you find there. Later, when you’re readier, you will build on what has come before.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The doom-and-gloom wing of astrology is exhausting. The superstition that Mercury retrograde causes scrambled messages and dire mix-ups is dull and misguided. The planet’s apparent backward motion, which is happening right now, shows up about three times every year like clockwork. It’s perfectly normal! In my view, Mercury retrograde isn’t threatening unless you obsess on the idea that it is, in which case, yes, your payment might go astray, and a friend may misunderstand you. But if cultivating relaxed clarity is more fun and productive for you than coping with fearful tension, treat the time between now and July 23 as a rich opportunity to refine, deepen and upgrade how you communicate.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You Gemini readers have decreed that I must halt all musings about maddening, riddle-drenched ambiguity. You’ve delivered the message to me that you’re tired of wrestling with enigmas wrapped in paradoxes. Straightforward, plainspoken factualness is what you want. Well, OK. (Please remember that I don’t make this stuff up; I simply channel cosmic omens.) Maybe I’ll start obeying your orders next time. But first, I will advise you: 1. Unexpected gifts are coming from people and situations in transition. 2. Tough but friendly interventions will nudge you toward healthy course corrections. 3. Mysterious assistance is on its way.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): There are phases when the cosmic energies and I urge you to put others first—even tend to their pain before you tend to your own. But this isn’t one of those times. Right now, sacrificing yourself for the sake of others would obstruct the flow of righteous grace into your life. So then what is the most soul-honoring path available? Here’s what I think: Summon your inventive brilliance and use it to imagine generous ways to care for yourself. Shower yourself with gifts, treats and blessings that delight you. Take the loving care you so deftly pour into other people and lavish it wholeheartedly on yourself.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Most fields of human endeavor work like this: A few people are truly brilliant, a handful are actively harmful, and the majority fall somewhere between “not great” and “pretty good.” That’s true whether you’re talking about engineers, doctors, poets or astrologers. So it’s inadvisable to assume a physician is wise about your well-being just because they’ve logged fifteen years on the job, or to trust your life direction to the first astrologer whose promotion catches your eye. In the coming weeks, dear Leo, discernment like this matters even more than usual. Let your natural hopefulness be balanced by sharp, thoughtful judgment. Don’t just challenge obvious authority. Put every so-called fact, spin, assumption and official line under your own clear-eyed review.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Architects designing spaces for collective use try to balance two human needs: to see expansively and also have safe places to retreat. Too much exposure creates anxiety; too much enclosure brings claustrophobia. The ideal is to provide both shelter and spaciousness. Let’s use this theme as a metaphor for your life during the coming months. You’ll be wise to create an equilibrium between engagement and privacy, between vastness and protection. Make it easy for yourself to observe the larger scene and also withdraw when needed.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Self-proclaimed “skeptics” love to sneer at astrologers, as if pondering what lies ahead were a violation of scientific purity. And yet economists, sports analysts, trend watchers and political commentators churn out shaky predictions every day. Honestly, those professionals of probability often create more confusion than those of us who read the heavens. Take weather forecasters, for instance: From Europe to Japan, their models routinely miss sudden floods and twisters and trigger more than a few false alarms. But do the debunkers brand them as charlatans? Of course not. Forgive the outburst, but I’m building to a key foresight: Every forecast, projection or vision that crosses your path over the next month will miss the mark—except for this one. So free yourself of their meddling.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Ethnobotanists describe how certain Indigenous traditions work with “teacher plants.” These are flora that offer not only physical benefits but spiritual instruction. They include psychoactive substances, but also ordinary plants approached with extraordinary attention. In the spirit of reinventing your education, Scorpio, I invite you to expand your understanding of who and what your teachers are. What ordinary elements of your daily life might offer wisdom if you engage them with deep respect? What situations at the edges of your awareness could bring lessons that enrich your perspectives? Now is an excellent time to seek new apprenticeships.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Western science and Western religions may disagree about how the universe began, but both place its birth in the distant past. Tantra and other spiritual paths, by contrast, propose that the universe is born afresh in every instant through the sacred, erotic interplay of God and Goddess. When humans approach love-making as an experimental sacrament, these traditions suggest, we can tune in to the union of those primordial forces and, in a sense, take part in the continual creation of existence. So, are you ready for a bit of world-making erotic play? The current astrological indicators say yes, you are.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): A common obstacle to healthy intimacy is the belief that a beloved ally should automatically know what you need, without you saying a word. I used to suffer from this delusion myself and worked hard to dissolve it. I no longer unconsciously assume that my companions are so attuned to me that they can always intuit my desires. But I know this bad idea feels romantic to many people, even though it can sabotage even the most promising bond. In the weeks ahead, Capricorn, I invite you to starve this fantasy. Your intimate world is ripe for a fresh infusion of lucid, straightforward honesty.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Your next few weeks will be sponsored by CoffeeBeer, the paradoxical elixir that both pumps up your energy and decompresses your defenses. You will be an exemplary role model for this innovative product because you will epitomize what occurs when a sensitive soul gets excited and mellows out at the same time. I also expect you will soon be exploring intriguing opportunities that become available to you because of your supercharged calm. Fortunately, you don’t need to drink actual coffee and beer together to make this happen. The cosmic forces will be conspiring to help you.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Finish this sentence, Pisces: “The one thing that really keeps me from being myself is _______.” Is it someone’s opinion, an old story about who you are, a fear of loss, a habit of over-pleasing, a secret shame or a belief that you’re “too much” or “not enough”? Whatever first pops into your mind is probably closest to the truth. Here’s your next step: Loosen the grip of this stressor by even just twenty percent. I bet your real self will feel relaxed enough to bloom more fully.
Homework: We’re halfway through 2026. How are your big projects progressing? tinyurl.com/zzz333xxx333
. . . but not without shadow Rob Brezsny Jun 9, 2026
I’ve been an astrologer since I began studying astrology at Goddard College at age 19.But I’ve never been a traditional astrologer. I love the ancient art too much to keep peddling its most fearful inheritances. Over the centuries, astrology has absorbed a heavy cargo of dread, including curses, afflictions, exiles, and warnings of cosmic bad luck.I’ve spent years reading the same sky that the dread-ridden practitioners read, and I’ve arrived at different conclusions about what it’s trying to tell us.On this Freedom from Fear holiday, I will offer disclaimers to refute the doom-mongering and uphold the zoom-and-boom approach to living our magical lives.
1. I don’t use any version of astrology that claims some planets and some houses are “malefic.” There are no villains in the solar system. There is no celestial body whose essential job is to ambush or ruin you.So, for example, Saturn isn’t a hooded executioner; it teaches discipline, patient structure, the dignity of limits. Mars isn’t a brute; it grants courage, drive, and the holy capacity to fight for what we love.To brand a planet or a house as evil is to misread the gift inside the intense packaging.Read more about my understanding of Saturn: tinyurl.com/BlessingsOfSaturnRead more about my understanding of Mars: tinyurl.com/MarsWithinUs
2. I don’t believe that planets are in “detriment” or “fall” in particular signs. The notion that a planet is crippled, demoted, or exiled simply because of which signs it happens to occupy strikes me as an astrological caste system: as if Venus in Scorpio were a broken instrument, or the Moon in Capricorn a wounded animal. I know people with Venus in Scorpio and Moon in Capricorn, and I guarantee you that those placements don’t hobble or torment them.No to all that noise. In fact, I relish the hypothesis that every placement is a particular intelligence—a specific flavor of power, a distinctive way of getting things done—not a defect to apologize for.
3. I don’t regard planetary retrogrades as inherently problematic. Mercury retrograde, in particular, has become pop culture’s favorite scapegoat, blamed for every dropped call and missed text.But a retrograde isn’t a malfunction. It’s a different mode: a turning-inward, a season for review, revision, recapitulation, and second looks. The backward-seeming motion isn’t the universe glitching. It’s the universe inviting us to circle back and finish what we left unfinished.My understanding of Mercury Retrograde: tinyurl.com/RetrogradeMercuryRead more about retrograde planets in general: https://tinyurl.com/y89kuwa6
4. I don’t think we should do anything differently when the moon is “void of course.” I won’t tiptoe through my life, postpone my decisions, or hold my breath because tradition warns that “nothing will come of” what I begin during those hours.I start my projects whenever the spirit moves me. The cosmos isn’t waiting to penalize my timing.Read more about my understanding: tinyurl.com/PraiseMoonVoidOfCourse
5. I don’t treat the aspects of square and opposition as being inherently negative and troublesome. The so-called “hard aspects” are engines of growth, not glitches in the wiring. Tension isn’t the enemy of a vivid life; it’s one of its primary creative forces.A square denotes friction that strikes a spark. An opposition is the dynamic, generative tug between two truths that both deserve to be honored. Smooth and easy is lovely, but it’s less likely to make us braver, deeper, or more alive.
6. I don’t believe that solar or lunar eclipses portend peril or distress. Eclipses are thresholds, hinges, and dramatic punctuation marks in the ongoing narrative of our lives.They’re portals: moments when energies can be released and new modes born. To greet them with anxiety is to mistake intensity for worrisome twists.More about my understanding of eclipses: tinyurl.com/EclipsesAreInvitations
When I periodically lay out my approach to astrology on social media, some readers are alarmed, even angry, as if they imagine I’m a first-class spiritual bypasser. One sneered, “So you practice astrology that strips away negative aspects and shadow?”That’s a big, unjustified leap from what I actually say.The answer is no, I’m not stripping away shadow. I’m not saying everything that ever happens is cheerful, positive, and easy. What I’m refusing is far more specific: the assignment of fixed, fatalistic, fear-based verdicts to the phenomena of the sky. I’m questioning the medieval bookkeeping that decides in advance which configurations are curses and which are blessings, before we’ve even had the chance to live them.Shadow is real. Difficulty is real. Grief, loss, struggle, and the long dark passages of a human life are real, all worthy of our intense attention. As a chaos magician and dreamworker, I am on intimate terms with what’s unresolved, wounded, and not-yet-redeemed. I work with the shadow every single day and have for years. It’s one of my deepest callings. It’s an important reason why I am such a diligent dreamworker.The difference is this: I don’t believe the shadow is a punishment handed down by malefic planets. I believe it’s raw material: teachings that invite us to grow into a more beautiful and resilient version of ourselves. The squares that grind against us and the transits that jolt us out of our habits are the curriculum. They’re not sentences pronounced by a hostile universeTo strip away shadow would commit the grave error of toxic positivity. I have zero interest in that. PRONOIA—my conviction that the whole of creation is conspiring to move us in the direction of liberation—isn’t the denial of pain. It’s the radical trust that even our pain is conspiring to liberate us.
So here’s the core of how I practice:All omens deserve to be interpreted in ways that provide guidance and teaching. All configurations deserve to be read as messages about how to live more skillfully, love more fiercely, and wake up more fully: including the comfortable and the uncomfortable aspects, the flowing trines and the disruptive squares, the new moons and the eclipses.All omens are revelations about how to successfully wrangle with our problems, perpetrate liberation, ameliorate suffering, find redemption, and perform the tricky maneuvers and ingenious tweaks that enable us to slip free of our mind-forged manacles and discover the deeper meanings beneath our experiences.Those manacles, as William Blake understood, are often forged in our own imaginations. They are made of our fears, inherited superstitions, and half-conscious agreements about what we’re allowed to become.And astrology at its best is a locksmith’s art, not a fortune-teller’s racket. It hands us the picks and shims and skeleton keys. It shows us where the lock is, and how the mechanism turns.An omen isn’t a verdict handed down from on high. It doesn’t tell us what will be done to us. It’s an invitation that reveals what might be done by us and through us and with us if we’re cunning and brave and generous enough to read it as a teaching rather than a threat.I read the same sky every other astrologer reads. I refuse to read it as a rap sheet. To me, it’s a love letter that includes, among its tender passages, the hard and holy lessons we need to learn.
