I am OPTimist

I have been thinking very much about value because we are about to enter yet another Venus retrograde in Scorpio. Venus retrogrades about every 1.6 years, and over eight years it returns to more or less the same area of the zodiac. Looking backward through 2018, 2010, 2002, 1994, and so on, I wanted to see where I was, what I was doing, what I was committing myself to, and especially what I though...

We are right at that point of equal night, equal day, the equinox. The cycle reaches the opposite point from its beginning. What initiated six months ago now exists in relationship to something outside of myself, in relationship to the other. Six months ago was the I AM moment. The beginning. Awareness. Instinct. Emergence. This year that equinox came with Saturn and Neptune together in Aries, alr...

I’m in Framingham, Massachusetts, researching a public artwork called Equilibrium Is a Process , which will take another three years to complete. I’ve spent the week talking to judges, chief magistrates, probation officers, curators, architects, engineers, masons, Uber drivers, and people across the community. The whole week has been about systems, behavior, accountability, trauma, justice, and wh...

Eclipsisms What are we discerning now? Can you reflect on it and see the truth? Oh my god. I did not think I could have survived the tornado of what the eclipsisms was. But here I am, integrating, seeing the same things from a different perspective. Allowing my body to take shape and to speak to me how to integrate what I have been able to witness and where I am going right now. It is an exciting...

Hey everybody, the Lunar Eclipse was last night, around 12 hours ago, and I had been anticipating this for a while. The good thing about being an astrologer is that nothing comes as a surprise, but even if you know the relationship between the planets, their archetypes, and the power that they have, you cannot really predict. The whole scope is not about prediction, but it’s about understanding th...

What does it make it? Mesmerizing, as soon as there is some light integrating the realm of fantasy, imagination, even of god, with the realm of touching, grounding, earthing, the material that leads us to take action to decide. At times, the decisions can be very blurry, or they cannot be absolutely defined. Since I was little, I was always wanting to stay in this liminal place where I could still...

The first of the two eclipses of the season just passed, and I have decided not to talk about it without feeling it. There's something quite clear for me: reality has been shattering. It's been broken into many, many different crystals, and each crystal projects its own perspective, its own possible reality that can materialize. Now, there are two things that are very important to question in ones...

What organizes human life? What preserves agency in an age of increasing entropy? How does a human being create order without surrendering freedom? When there is entropy, we create a system. We create an alignment. Order Order requires deliberate, sustained effort. Entropy is the tendency for structure to dissolve when that effort is absent. Let's say that it operates in different contexts. In phy...

Note: I know I said I was taking a break from writing about astrology, but this is too significant to pass over. So here it goes. The shift is full on. On February 20, when Saturn and Neptune met at 0° Aries, I wrote an article exploring why that conjunction marked the beginning of a new cycle. Looking back six months later, I find those observations even more relevant as the nodal axis shifts int...

Hey, I sat down and I wrote two articles a few days apart. Just when I was going to start recording, I’m like, “Mmm, this doesn’t feel right because there’s something that has shifted in me. Every time I want to say something, do something, or create an awareness of the relationship I’m having with the thing, situation, or person, I’m asking the same question: -Is this solar? -Is this coming from...

BE BOLD 7/13/2025 I just woke up, but I have this sense that things are moving underneath and between. Whatever calm I thought that was, there is some turbulence underneath. One that shows me that indeed things are different, and more undulation calls me to surge again. This is between the real waves of the ocean hitting, the long ocean swell that leads me to adapt, to calibrate. Some of the tides...

“In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.” -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities I woke up this morning with the word contingency in my mind. So after breathing a littl...

BUILD ONCE, OWN FOREVER I am very excited to launch this today. It came to me unexpectedly, and now that I think about it, I have been building toward this for a while. THE SCOPE This is a highly selective study group (or a self-study, or 1:1 option) of two to five people who want to build a local database and dashboard that runs entirely on their own hardware. This architecture operates on a low-...

In 1976, I came to the United States of America to spend the summer. The funny part is that my mom, after my father died, decided to hire a Catholic nun from the United States. When I said “hire,” she actually sought an agency to see if there was a nun that could come and live in our house so we could practice English while my mother was working and would help us with our homework. Alas, that didn...

I What we inherit from our family is not only material. It is the nervous system, the fear, the patterns carried in the body across generations. Giving the body enough space to feel them, making a different movement, and finding the order of love is how we begin to receive. II When I am sleeping, I am not in my body. When I wake, I land softly. Looking around. Breathing. Feeling. Being. I know I h...

There is a figure in Buddhist cosmology called the hungry ghost. It has a vast, distended stomach and a throat so narrow that nothing can pass through. It is always reaching, as it has never felt fed. I did not know for a long time that I had organized a significant portion of my relational life around that figure. This time the story shows the same wound from a different angle, the degree itself...

There is a sense of freedom that connects everything that I create, which mirrors how I think, and what emerges belongs to me, running on my machine, answering to no one else. My telos is a local operating system that reflects my intelligence, my synthesis, my accumulated understanding across every domain I work in, maintained by my own hands. My methodology is low time preference applied to infra...

Hi. I can’t believe how fast this year is flying. We reached the solstice. I am very happy to share that I am relaunching my website. This is a soft launch, because I still have to update a lot of projects, and I will do that in due time, without going into crazy crisis mode. I wanted this to come from a very personal place. I started designing websites back in the 90s, learning code and creating...

Another improvised rant Have a great week 😍 listening to 👇 * This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.monikabravo.blog/subscribe

This week, a fast recorded message, impromptu, unedited, with real life background noise. Such is life! Beautiful & messy. —//- I forgot to mention the north node is in gate 55 and Venus now on gate 39 create the channel of emoting- play your favorite songs loud and allow the body to provoke deep emotions either dance or cry or both lol. Jin shin Jyutsu chart. Monika Bravo I AM OPtimist îs a FREE...

There is a big silence between words because there is a lot of space in my emotional body. I do not want to talk about it. I want to feel it. I am in reset. Calibration mode. Feeling a shift. Now understanding more this period we are in, which is not about waiting but about small movements with purpose. The energy is moving, and when the energy moves, everything else comes along. A smooth surface...

Do you know the difference between a sacrifice and an offering? I think we have gone a little bit cuckoo with the word sacrifice. You know, in essence, it comes from the word sacred, but it has been devoid of an important part of that sacredness that is transformational. Therefore it is lacking in full meaning. Sacrifice is the action of consecrating. So what is it that one is consecrating without...

One of the things that I am deeply in contemplation about is what identity really means. Do I need to identify as a person? As my gender? As my vocation? Just as a human being? Or as a polymath that has so many different variations depending on which angle I am willing to serve and to express in that given moment. "I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that wou...

"Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." ~Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Worth without witness... is that what value really is? Fire, then form. To go forth in trust, things I left behind. The uncomfortable angle of a quincunx is a pressure that is nameless. The space is generated to tweak slowly. Fearless in a d...

What has initiated has been taking shape as it grounds. This is Taurus season. Full moon in Scorpio on May 1st, a lunation as when I was born 62 years ago, happy solar return to me. Living with a Scorpio moon in my 9th house has made me seek for deep truth, only to realize after a long journey, that it emanates from within. There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes with understanding tha...