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I am OPTimist: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Monika Bravo
I am OPTimist. I am not willing to be defined by a few words—what I do is a living journey. I am a multidisciplinary artist, empirical polymath, writer, evolutionary astrologer, libertarian/Bitcoiner. My philosophy integrates Eastern, ancestral, and cosmological traditions with psychological inquiries, praxeology, and Austrian economics, emphasizing liberty, value, resources, and self-worth in the quest for individual and societal service. I create public art commissions and immersive environments, facilitate dialogue, and explore freedom, shadow work, myths, natural law, Bitcoin, and the architecture of time. This podcast is a reflection of my living and individuated journey. If you are curious, there is much more to explore in the About Me section.
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- 1 weeks ago3 min
The witness
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 what actually allows individuals to create different outcomes. I came here to witness. That keeps becoming the position I trust most. I can observe, absorb information, hold a position when necessary, and leave space for things I do not fully understand. The ground has felt unstable lately, and movement has been essential. When I stop, everything comes up. So I move, I observe, and I keep asking what equilibrium actually means when equilibrium itself is a process.At the same time, I was contacted by a major television network about my September 10, 2001 video. I’ve been the custodian of that video for f&cking 25 years, allowing people to publish it, show it, and interview me about it. I agreed to this interview under very specific conditions: they could use a particular excerpt only if the complete artwork was embedded on their website exactly as it exists, with its sound, title, and context intact. The story did not run because they were more interested in protecting themselves from liability than in preserving the rights of an artist who had copyrighted the work, both the images and the music.And that interaction made me realize something very clearly: I no longer have to talk to people about that video or that event. I have done that for 25 years. I have preserved the work, protected its context, answered questions, given interviews, and allowed people access to it. The door has closed. It’s over. Gone. Finito. Bye-bye. I was the custodian of that work, and now custody also means knowing when the work no longer needs to be available to everyone.Some images from my trip:my mind now:Listening to this fabulous episode. I will finish it today before my flight. Refreshing!“Misunderstanding digital reality, maybe the right word is computational reality.As an empirical test of logical statements, if our universe is intelligible and understandable, it needs to pass through the gate of computation to prove that it is logical to actually believe and tell each other ‘true statements.”~ Nicholas Marino 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
- 2 weeks ago18 min
Postmodern Noodle Soup
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 moment, yet I must walk slowly just to make sure that the steps I take are solidly grounded, and where I want to go. The intuition is still the same: being solar, being radiant, being creative. But now with what I have seen, with all the ugliness and anguish, I am more aware that every step I make on a moment to moment basis is defining the shape of the kind of life I am living.I am also conscious of the surface of what I am seeing on the outside that is reflecting what is inside.I am taking my space and my position within the system. Remaining helpful, but not trying to overwrite, to overpower. Being patient, avoiding any urge of control. Being attentive, inquiring into even my place in community.The Mirror of MergingI want to give an example about the way I’ve been relating to relationships in general, and how different they are right now because I am not attaching myself to what it would mean for me to not have those relationships in my life, and what do they mean right now that I’m aware.Throughout my life, whenever I entered a new relationship, it was out of an intense attraction and compulsion, out of an eagerness to merge and to become one with it, to feel transformed by that vitality of it that would last from the beginning until the end. I was never afraid of ending it, but always very concerned about living it fully, fully, because that’s what gave me life. The new awareness is slightly different. I am conscious about the triggers of wanting to merge as one, knowing that with time, that’s going to make me feel resentful and frustrated. Because all I want is to be able to be in true relationship with myself, without the compulsion of the merger, nor the compulsion of fixing, giving, or caring that actually happens at the end of the union when I realize that I have given all to the relationship and am left empty inside.Needs and values have given me leverage over the past ten years since I started becoming conscious of my behavior. Many called that intensity; for me, that was simply my norm until I saw it as a window to explore, and shadow work became a daily practice.In relationships that are being rebirthed again, like the spiral, you do not start where you left off. You start where you are at. If you had left off in a part of the circle and you have already engaged in some reflections and some evolution, you start where you are at. Therefore, because you are in a different place altogether, you can see the difference. If you start in the same place you left, you are going to start reacting out of habit instead of responding from a place of truth.Using inspiration rather than force, using aspiration (breath) rather than fear. I could be in a room alone with myself. The next test of that is always the room with another person, situation, or thing in it. These mirrors keep on appearing, and now they expand to two floors in Massachusetts of a Judiciary building.Equilibrium, Ethics, & IntegrityI am going to Massachusetts next week. I started a new Public Art Commission. I am excited. It is going to be in a Judiciary building (Regional Justice Center), designing an artwork that envelopes two floors in the waiting area. What moves me is to create an atmosphere where people can have a place of reflection. The building was designed in a way that there’s a lot of light coming from the outside, so it’s not dark.My work, always colorful, uses geometry. The building won’t be finished until 2028, so we still have time, yet the design has started and needs to be completed in one semester before fabrication. The main concept is that equilibrium is a process. Unlike a flat line, equilibrium moves like emotions or wavelengths, having different moments where rhythms create frequency. The frequency is really the relationship between one point and the other that translates into time. So it is through time that one can see emotional waves as clarity.My intent with the commission is to create a space where people can take their time to inquire by looking at beautiful things that reflect on where their lives sit in relation to choices—such as landscapes, old maps, and city shapes embedded in abstract geometric shapes that stem from surveying the local architecture, shaping the idea of what equilibrium could be.Now, if we go deeper into what ethics means to me in relation to morals: I just have to retreat a little bit to first principles as a foundation where humans can stand
- 3 weeks ago10 min
Some Exhaustion Brings Some Closure
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 the meaning and the potentials, which is the reason why I follow the stars, or they follow me, whichever way you want to see it.It’s been building up for a while, and I can really confirm that the release is here. I have felt it tremendously through a feeling of sorrow, loss, endings, and dissolutions. I actually would like to stay with this feeling for a couple of days if I can, because it’s within the space that I have enabled to sense and feel it in my body. I can really look back and say, “Oh my God, this was coming for a while, and it was being built. It had its crescendo, and now it’s just in the pure state of dissolution.” Not everything is going to be washed away, but certainly there was a lot of cleansing in many ways.What I feel, other than the sorrow, is that there was a lot of confusion. There were veils that were taken off, and I could see a lot of ugly things. At the same time, I did not want to feel defeated. I didn’t want to feel depressed, like anything with a D: defeated, depressed, desolated, disillusioned, desperate.I wanted to be able to feel more attentive to this cycle. I can go 18 years ago and tell you what was going on, or even 36 years ago, but I don’t want to do that exercise to try to figure things out. I want to stay here. I want to stay with the uncomfortable feeling that I had, this morning a little bit after the eclipse. I woke up in the middle of the night, and I had sort of apnea. I couldn’t really breathe, so I had to sit down and listen to Gregorian chants, which I will share below. This is the beautiful Psalm 91 sung by monks in Latin. I had to run some errands today. I had to go to town and do some practical things, like a power of attorney kind of document, so I had to go to a different part of town. I don’t drive, so I had to leave the island of Miami Beach and go to an old part of town called Coral Gables. I just did what I had to do and sent these documents to my brother, there are many things that are being finalized in my family, and they have been building up. I didn’t realize how much I had been carrying. Just to put it in perspective, I’m going to say, from the physiological point of view, (German New Medicine which I have spoken a couple of times in this space.) When I did the immersion in Vancouver with Tiziano, when I came back, I started having a terrible, terrible pain on the right side of my neck, it was unbearable, and I had it for many months.Looking at it from a different perspective, I was saying: what is it that I don’t want to see from another point of view? What is it that I’m stuck on that I don’t want to see? I started seeing, “Oh, I have to have more openness. I have to calibrate more,” and I did.Fast forward a few weeks. I was at the big pool in Flamingo park where I sometimes go, and in a clumsy move, I hit my diaphragm and my ribs on the right side. The pain was unbearable. I couldn’t do hypo-pressives. I couldn’t really swim anymore. It was like three weeks of just waiting for it to heal. It’s completely healed right now, that was also a lesson of patience. I was thinking to myself, “What is it that I’m overholding?” The thorax and the diaphragm really help hold the organs in the body. I was feeling, “What is it that I’m holding in my family? What is it that I’m overprotecting that it is not for me to protect?” That was something to look for.The funny one (it’s just not funny, haha, but it’s funny): a few weeks later, It had been raining in Miami for a while, so I couldn’t really sunbathe as much as I like. I decided to take two days off and just go to the beach from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. I don’t use anything on my skin. It’s fine. I’m a carnivore. I don’t ingest any seed oils. I don’t do any creams, so I’m fine without it. I basically overexposed my skin and never felt pain or anything, but within a week or two, I started noticing that I was peeling off, especially on my face. I was like, “Oh no, what does that mean?”The skin is the last surface of the body that meets the environment, and it’s also how we protect ourselves. I was saying, “Oh, this is interesting. I’m also changing skin. I’m changing the way I’m relating to things because I realized that I needed to have a new perspective. I realized that I could not hold and control the outcome of things that were being very difficult within my family. Therefore, I needed to take off my skin and then embrace a new me.”All of these “symptoms” were already in a state of resolution, which means that the conflict was already ca
- Aug 22, 202620 min
Mesmerizing
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 be dreaming awake. I would see colors, listen to sounds, and be mesmerized by the stimuli that my senses were perceiving, but was that real, or was that something I was making up? Fast forward many, many years, now I feel that this is how inspiration lands: it lands because I hear something, I see something, I am stimulated by my senses, or even better, by my emotional body. The senses are trying to translate into a form, to a shape, to a sentence, to an idea, into something that must make sense.I like this liminal space that we are in right now in the collective, where most of the things that are revealed are possibly waking more people up. The conspiracy theorist already knew this because we were able to sense these anomalies. We were able to trust our bodies with the knowledge of what really was going to hurt us or not.As an artist, I work not with less is more, but I start with more is more. The more, the merrier. I get stimulated by music or landscape or even just words and ideas, and then I go through a whole journey of accumulation of these, gathering them either printed on the wall or in places that I can have a distance and observe them. This practice is super important, not only in art but in life. The accumulation of stimuli can sometimes distort what we see, our perception. If our perception is distorted, then the narratives we create can have severe consequences.What happens when I can no longer create that distance?“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and HellThese times and in the next 18 months, we have the possibility to really grasp beyond this timeline that you perceive as reality. Like Ulysses in The Odyssey, who gets lured by the sirens, it is not his sexual appetite that moves him, but the appetite for knowledge, for knowing what is real in that moment. We all get lured by fantastic shapes, by possibilities of self-glory, by being loved by someone or a whole group of people. In reality, can we really see ourselves? How is our reality mesmerized or not?Odysseus gives me another question: can I listen to the song without surrendering the direction of the vessel? was the danger the song itself? if not, the danger appears when the lure smashes the direction with a false sense of authority.Let us explore the word “mesmerizing.” Etymologically, mesmerism takes its name from Franz Anton Mesmer. He believed that an invisible, universal force could operate through and between bodies, something he called animal magnetism. What passes between a body and an image, between one person and another, between memory and perception, that gives something enough force to enthrall us?I love this word because, throughout my artwork, I have been told many times by my commissioners, clients, and the public that my work has this capacity to mesmerize, to hypnotize, leading directly to Hypnos, sleep. I keep returning to this language throughout this inquiry: dreaming awake, waking up, illusion, delusion, awakening from a dream. Perhaps mesmerization exists somewhere along that threshold, where I am awake enough to perceive and still capable of dreaming what I perceive into another form.In a way, I see myself as mysterious at times because I do not even understand the definition of how I am seen or how I see myself. Depending on the perspective, I could see myself more as a logical intellectual wanting to find out the meaning of things, or sometimes as the loopy, foggy persona that wants to keep things in the mystery because it is a safe place to be. Now, it is neither one nor the other, because I have not been going back and forth. I have been integrating how these qualities served different purposes.I will zoom out a little bit so you can connect to what I am saying. If you zoom out in your life, let us say one month, one year, one decade, and possibly more, and you go back to what was motivating you in your childhood to be curious and fascinated by how reality worked, find yourself in the room when you were a child and see what you were surrounded by:-Did you have musical instruments?-Did you have posters of people that you loved, movies?-Did you have a rack of books?-Did you have a space in the garage that had many tools or vehicles?-Were you always o
- Aug 15, 202615 min
Shattering reality meets consensus
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 oneself:Where do I stand in my value?What am I consenting to?I’m going to explore a little bit the recent ingress of the North Node in Aquarius, with Pluto in Aquarius, and the South Node and Sun and Jupiter in Leo squaring Chiron in Taurus. This choreography has been creating both a crisis and a tough confrontation that is so welcome in the collective at many levels. I’m going to choose one subject very specifically, but this also applies to any other subject in your life. I’m going to be speaking of consensus, bitcoin, money, value, but you could take this apart and put health, medicine, Pharma. You could also write schooling, academics, herd mentality, and r3tardation, because I can give you examples today of many things that are happening that are shattering reality. I’m just going to give some hints so you can identify the same ideas also personally, because it all depends if you’re going through this on a personal level. Even though it’s personal, there’s always going to be a reflection of how you relate to the collective in your community.A shared field held together by independent nodes.Consensus belongs to the Aquarian realm when we understand it as a coordination among sovereign individuals. Yet, consensus itself is not automatically Aquarian. It can also become conformity, ideologically captured, or the unconscious rule of the group.In Latin, Consentire means to feel together, to agree to share a perception, and in Bitcoin, consensus has an even more precise meaning. Each participant independently verifies the same rules. No central authority declares what is true. Agreement emerges through verification. But when consensus acts through mandates, imposing itself against property rights and the body, it turns against the individual it was meant to protect.Is consensus something that belongs to the realm of the collective, to the shared field held by many, or does it always risk breaking into a single voice, a single decree standing in for everyone?I feel the pull of the future, the pull of my own sovereignty, my own singular frame, and I have to ask which one is actually mine to protect.A rupture is occurring now, just watch how the earth is shaking around the globe realigning tectonic plates via volcanic eruptions and earthquakes across many continents.I observe this shattering landing directly inside the values Bitcoin was built to protect. When value is held within the relationship, it becomes the meeting point where giving and receiving are embraced. Together they press against a shared intelligence I am watching form in real time, a pattern moving through the network I am part of. This pressure could be the crisis that creates an opening, that confronts my chance to relate to consensus as liberation, the way the world met it as submission six years ago. I know I did not allow the pressure to give in.I am looking at the chart of Bitcoin and its transits right now. I observe where its value is stored, and I ask whether the structure holding it is proven or only assumed. Harmony and relationship meet strategy and clear sight at its very root, and I know peace cannot be bought by giving up the principles that built it.I observe the original emotional image still alive in that chart, the first impulse, the memory of direct action, independence, self custody, the beginning of something that asked no permission from anyone. I watch that territory being claimed again by the collective mind, institutions, labor, infrastructure, hierarchy, regulation, the machinery required to keep something running. I ask whether the commitment behind it still holds together, or whether a shadow has fallen over its purpose while everyone waited for someone else to guard it.The most important thing here is not what other people are doing, but how I am revaluing my own commitment to what Bitcoin really is. Bitcoin does not move forward or backward until the individual takes responsibility for where they are standing. What is money? How am I taking care of my own needs?What just happened > a shattering reality is revealed I watch every actor arrive on stage now, the miners, the developers, the custodians, the corporations, the governments, the influencers, the guardians, each one declaring themselves the keeper of what Bitcoin was originally for. I ask myself if I am one of them, performing guardianship instead of practicing it.Can the individual remain sovereign whil
- Aug 2, 202616 min
Choose Life: Entropy,Order,& Alignment
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.OrderOrder 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 physics, it is a natural tendency of energy to become more dispersed and less available to do work. In some other kind of information theory, entropy is the uncertainty or unpredictability. In living systems, entropy is the drift towards disorder unless energy is continually invested to maintain organization. In human action, entropy is the gradual decay of coherence, relationships, habits, institutions, or knowledge when they are no longer cultivated. So a concise pairing could be: Order is the sustained investment of energy into coherent structure. Entropy is the spontaneous drift away from that structure. Or in a more philosophical form, order is maintained. Entropy is what happens by default. This distinction is important because entropy is not "evil" or a force with intentions. It describes the statistical tendency of systems to move toward more probable, less constrained states, and less energy and information are continuously applied.Order demands continuous energyI would say still that entropy is one of the most misunderstood concepts in science. Often translated as disorder, chaos, randomness, they don't really describe it in a useful way so it describes the tendency of systems to move toward states that require less organization, left on its own. A garden becomes overgrown. A house gathers dust. A language changes. A body weakens. A civilization loses coherence. Nothing has to attack these systems. The absence of sustained work is enough. Every organized system requires a continuous investment of energy to preserve its structure. A living cell constantly repairs itself, the immune system patrols the body, muscle strengthening only through repeated use, memory requires reinforcement, trust requires action, freedom requires responsibility. Therefore it is an ongoing process, not a static condition. Life itself is an extraordinary example of this principle because every organism exports entropy into its surroundings while maintaining an internal state of remarkable organization. We eat, we breathe, we repair, we eliminate waste, we sleep and move because remaining alive is an active process rather than a passive one. From a psychological perspective health is the body's continuous capacity to preserve coherence while adapting to change.Aging may be understood as the gradual accumulation of entropy that eventually exceeds the body’s repair mechanism. Entropy appears whenever attention fragments. Relationships deteriorate through neglect more often than through conflict. Skills disappear when they’re not practiced. Values become slogans when they’re no longer embodied. Spiritually entropy invites another question.IntervalsGurdjieff described this exact same phenomenon. A line moving straight ahead eventually loses power. The entire system implodes. He mapped this process using musical scales. The half-step intervals like mi–fa and ti–do act as cosmic speed bumps. Momentum stalls at these points; evolution stops, decay sets in immediately; a deliberate shock changes the outcome. External effort forces the system onto a higher level. Conscious action overrides automatic decline. Chaos, entropy, and what Gurdjieff called the interval are not interruptions to life. They are moments in which our existing organization is no longer sufficient. They invite observation, calibration, adaptation, and choice. Crisis then becomes more than disruption, it becomes the threshold through which a new alignment can emerge.Objective ViewEvolutionary astrology offers another way of observing entropy. The sky reveals a quality of a moment in time. It provides a symbolic language through which we can observe recurring development patterns, both individually and collectively, and whether they are in resonance or dissonance according to the relationship they establish between them and between who is observing them. The recent Full moon across Leo and Aquarius illuminated precisely this tension. The Sun and Jupiter in Leo brought attention to the individual, the identity, creative expression, and sovereignty, and the capacity to radiate from one's own center. Opposing them was Pluto and the moon in Aquarius, exposing the forces reshaping the collective institutions, network systems of belonging, and the structures through which society organizes itself. It was creating a T-square with Chir
- Jul 27, 20268 min
Standing in Your Own Place
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 into Aquarius and Leo. “Coherence is the internal harmony of all parts moving together without fragmentation, and alignment is the intentional positioning of that integrated system along a chosen axis of meaning, timing, and direction.”From January 2025 until July 26, 2026, we had the North Node oriented toward surrendering, toward accepting. What were we accepting? The things we were discerning, editing out of our lives because they were no longer making sense. That was the main concept of the North Node in Pisces and the South Node in Virgo.The nodal signs describe the collective evolutionary direction. They reveal the telos of the evolutionary process: what has become familiar and what now seeks development. The planetary rulers show how the process is being carried. They reveal the mechanics through which that evolutionary intent unfolds.Now the nodes have turned. Until the spring of 2028, the North Node is in Aquarius and the South Node is in Leo. The last time this happened was from the end of 2007 through the spring of 2009. We have to remember what was happening in our lives then and find the correlations between that time and now. Life is a spiral. We never repeat ourselves unless we fail to see the connections.The Aquarius North Node can make you more aloof, more objective. It can make you disembodied, dissociated, disconnected. At the same time, it can make you capable of seeing across timelines because it sees the whole. The Leo South Node can make you more drama-driven, more self-centered, more tyrannical. It is about integrating both.The Moon symbolizes the ego, our sense of identity. It describes the emotional lens through which we react to and eventually learn to respond to reality. Leo, ruled by the Sun, describes how identity validates itself through its own creativity simply by being the Sun. The Sun does not look at itself in the mirror. The Sun radiates life. It is about how you integrate your solar self, how you have been able to validate yourself through what you naturally create and what you genuinely do well.When you come back into the collective, how can you be seen as yourself and not as a poor replica of someone else? How does your uniqueness contribute to the good of humankind? It is about finding that synthesis.Saturn and Neptune in Aries work together with this nodal shift. Neptune dissolves the familiar identity. Saturn builds the structure through which a more authentic one can emerge. Carl Jung called this individuation.The individual participates in the collective by enacting himself. Aquarius becomes the field of participation. Leo becomes the source of creative radiance.Their synthesis allows individuality to become a conscious contribution to the whole.Perhaps this is why we are witnessing so many ideological realignments. People gather around ideas, identities, and movements while the deeper work asks each person to stand in their own place.The collective changes when individuals stand in their own place and contribute from their own center.Last but not least, this week’s Full Moon at 6° Aquarius, where my Ascendant is 😊, becomes the first one under the new Aquarius–Leo nodal axis. It is the first clear expression of the cycle that has just begun, one that will reshape us both collectively and personally. It also falls on the very degree where the solar eclipse of January 26, 2028, will conjoin Pluto, making it one of the defining signatures of this entire cycle. The last time eclipses in Aquarius and Leo aligned with Pluto was in 1785. We are witnessing the beginning of a much larger chapter. Pay attention to what becomes visible now. These are the opening notes of a story that will continue unfolding over the next eighteen months.The rulers of the Full Moon are also the rulers of the nodal axis. They carry the same evolutionary narrative, allowing us to glimpse where this cycle is leading.This full Moon conjoins Pluto in Aquarius, illuminating the emotional patterns, psychic entanglements, and collective allegiances that have quietly shaped our perception of reality. Across the sky, the Sun conjoins Jupiter in Leo, expanding the invitation to stand in your own creative authority. Authority arises from knowing who you are and expressing it through your own nature
- Jul 25, 20268 min
Four Questions and a Nap
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 my heart? Does this need to be spoken? Does this need to be published?It’s not that I became a doubtful person, but right now I’m confronting a reality that my identity has shifted or is in the process of transformation. Therefore, I’m also taking time to realize how it is that I want to encounter the other.So instead of publishing what I wrote about economics, or God only knows what I was talking about (even the Nodal Shift this weekend, any the major thing, or anything astrologically that’s going on, or what’s going on with Bitcoin), do I want to write about that? Even if I have a lot to say, do I actually want to engage with it this way? That was a question. And the answer, after a long nap because I’m very tired these days, was no. So here I am writing about not publishing what I’ve written.My first piece that I wrote was about economics, and it was very different. It was stating positions and asking the reader to agree or disagree with them, or build an argument to be defended or to be let go.This time around, it’s not an argument about anything. It’s just barely an observation of a shift, and so by observing is what’s becoming the content. It is enacting the very question that it poses rather than answering it from the outside.The four questions that I posted, I feel, really come from a place where I am being loyal to myself. These are not rhetorical questions. Each one is doing something different, and together they’re tracing a real sequence of discernment rather than the four ways of saying the same thing in the way triadic a naphora often uses. As it ends, it holds without resolving. I do not arrive at a lesson about the voice or timing. I arrive at the fact that I took a nap because of fatigue, and then the piece is naming its own existence as a result of what is not.I must say that I arrived at the declaration too fast about identity shifting, because it is something that is coming from something that I’ve been experiencing, but I have not been able to convey. Again, as I listened to it and I reread it, I say, “Hey, Monika, hold on. I don’t want to sound absolute. I don’t want to have the last word.” This is part of this new relationship to how I relate to my needs, how I listen to them, and how I become aware if what I’m doing is a performance or is something that is genuine and coming from my heart. My body speaks to me these days, and it basically supports the direction.The second article was about the Nodal Change, and I will or will not eventually make a comment about it. For now, I prefer to live those changes, to embody them, to enact another perspective, to be able to turn my neck in a way that I haven’t been able to since I came from Vancouver. As I’ve been releasing and receiving, releasing, receiving. Anyway, that’s my poem of the day, and I will leave with words of gratitude.AfterwardWhen the outside turns very noisy, turn to ancestral wisdom. The Greeks endowed the West with a marvelous mythology and culture. They set up the principles of how man acts.Below, two excerpts from my new book, The Art of Synthesis and the Architecture of My Value. L3, The Radiography of Culture. 2026. I am designing it now and will drop it after eclipse season.On repeat, just dropped: 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
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A practical guide for creatives to build a sustainable practice through interviews and strategies from artists and makers.
Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement
Explores the science behind lasting self-improvement through psychology, neuroscience, and timeless wisdom traditions.
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About I am OPTimist
I am OPTimist. I am not willing to be defined by a few words—what I do is a living journey. I am a multidisciplinary artist, empirical polymath, writer, evolutionary astrologer, libertarian/Bitcoiner. My philosophy integrates Eastern, ancestral, and cosmological traditions with psychological inquiries, praxeology, and Austrian economics, emphasizing liberty, value, resources, and self-worth in the quest for individual and societal service. I create public art commissions and immersive environments, facilitate dialogue, and explore freedom, shadow work, myths, natural law, Bitcoin, and the architecture of time. This podcast is a reflection of my living and individuated journey. If you are curious, there is much more to explore in the About Me section.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's I am OPTimist daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of I am OPTimist as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
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When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
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How often does I am OPTimist release new episodes?
I am OPTimist publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does I am OPTimist cover?
I am OPTimist covers topics including Arts, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality, Visual Arts. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
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