My friend
someone who feels as close to me as a sister
lost a pregnancy this week.

And even as I write that, I struggle.

Miscarriage.

I hate that word.

To mis-carry.
As if something was dropped.
As if she failed to hold on.

But she didn’t do anything wrong.

She did everything right.

She loved that child before there was much to see.
She spoke to it in the quiet language of mornings.
She sang to that child.
She talked to it.
She fell asleep with one hand resting on a future she could almost feel.
She woke up already rearranging the world to make space.

And still, in a way that refuses explanation,
the baby did not grow.

And now her life has split.

There is before.
And there is after.

Yesterday belongs to a different world.
A world where the future bent in a certain direction.
Where names hovered just out of reach.
Where ordinary moments carried a quiet electricity.

And now,

something else.

A new horizon.

Heidegger wrote that a horizon is where the unseen comes into view.
He said time itself is a horizon.

If that’s true, then grief is the moment the horizon moves.

The moment you realize you are standing in a different world
without ever having left the room.

Maybe this is what stories have always tried to name.

In the Marvel films, it’s a branching timeline.
A sudden split in the multiverse.

In Shakespeare, it’s Act Two.
The moment when what was foreshadowed finally arrives.
The shot rings out.
The audience goes quiet.
The play cannot go back.

Life, it turns out, has no interest in staying in Act One.

We all have these moments.

Fixed points.

Before this.
After this.

The day everything was one way
and then, without asking permission,
became another.

Maybe that’s what the garden was about.

The Garden of Eden

A story about a world that once held together.

And then didn’t.

A bite.
A realization.
A sudden knowledge of good and bad, loss and longing.

And almost immediately,
hiding.

Fig leaves stitched together in a hurry.
A quiet shame at being seen as we now are:
vulnerable, exposed, changed.

We leave the garden carrying something we didn’t have before.

And we don’t get to go back.

There’s a story from the Buddhist tradition.

A woman named Kisa Gotami loses her child.

She carries his body from house to house,
begging for medicine that might bring him back.

Someone finally sends her to the Buddha.

He tells her,
“I can help, but first, bring me a mustard seed
from a house that has never known death.”

So she goes.

Door to door.

And at every house, the same answer:

Yes, we have mustard seeds.
No, we have not been spared.

Every home carries its own quiet absence.
Every table has felt the missing chair.

She returns empty-handed.

Or maybe not empty.

She returns with the unbearable knowledge
that her grief is not hers alone.

That she has entered a world
where everyone is carrying something.

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This is what happens, I think.

We cross a threshold we never would have chosen.

We lose something we cannot replace.

We become someone we didn’t plan to be.

And slowly,
sometimes reluctantly,
we begin to notice each other.

The way grief makes a kind of underground river between us.

The way suffering, for all its cruelty,
refuses to isolate us completely.

My friend is standing at that horizon now.

The world moves on around her.
Phones buzz.
Coffee is poured.
Conversations keep their easy rhythm.

It feels, somehow, like nothing has changed.

And yet everything has.

She has crossed over.
Into a world where this has happened.
Where this will always have happened.

And none of this makes it better.
None of it explains why.

But maybe, in time, it will make her less alone.

Maybe that is the quiet, stubborn hope.

Not that the world heals cleanly.
Not that the story makes sense.

But that we learn to carry what we cannot fix.

That we walk forward marked and tender.

That somewhere, in the middle of all this breaking,
we recognize each other.

And keep going.

Peace,
Daniel

About the author: Daniel Gutierrez, Ph.D., LPC, CSAC, is a Contemplative Existential Psychotherapist, Mental Health Researcher, Professor & Friend who wants to help carry.

I am writing this on the way home from a silent retreat.

It was… an experience.

The first couple of days, I felt like a mime. Not in a poetic way. More like someone trapped in a glass box, trying to communicate basic human needs with exaggerated gestures and mild panic.

At one point I made prolonged eye contact with someone while holding up a teacup, as if this might somehow form a complete sentence.

It did not.

The entrance into silence was the hardest part.

What I realized pretty quickly is how dependent I am on words.

Not just to communicate, but to establish myself.

To make myself known. To make myself real.

To make myself safe.
Or at least to stop feeling what doesn’t feel safe.

If I can make you smile, laugh, nod, I can locate myself in you. I can make you an ally.

Because if I am not saying anything, if I am not shaping the moment with language, then what, exactly, am I?

—

There’s a line from Thomas Merton:

Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else… for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness.

That last line lingered.

Because sitting in silence long enough, I started to notice something.

A kind of pressure. Quiet, but persistent.

A longing that doesn’t shout, but doesn’t leave either.

Old grief. Restlessness. Loneliness. Questions I’ve been too busy to ask.
Things I’ve kept just below the surface, like they might catch if I let them breathe.

Without words, you can’t redirect yourself as easily. So you begin to feel what has been waiting, without the usual ways of talking your way around it.

The noise got loud.

Meals were the worst. The dining hall sounded like a percussion ensemble no one had rehearsed. Plates clanging. Glasses tapping. The wet, unmistakable intimacy of chewing.

I heard everything.

Until, slowly, I didn’t.

—

The silence got louder.

The noise began to settle, like dirt sinking to the bottom of a pond. At first it was all inner chatter. Old conversations. Rehearsed jokes. Replays of things I wish I had said differently.

At one point I tried to entertain myself by watching people do walking meditation. Slow, deliberate, heel to toe. I turned it into a kind of NASCAR commentary in my head. Two monks approaching each other. The tension building. Surely this would end in the slowest collision in human history.

It did not.

Eventually even that, my clever distraction, fell apart.

The silence caught up to me.

Silence doesn’t explain anything.

It doesn’t justify anything.

It just brings you back.

After a couple of days, something shifted.

The silence didn’t feel empty.

The thoughts didn’t disappear, but they loosened. The urgency softened. My mind stopped chasing and started resting.

I began to notice things.

Light through a window.

The rhythm of my breath.

The strange, quiet miracle of being here at all.

Silence is no longer something you are trying to keep.

It starts to hold you.

It felt like something was there.

Not speaking.

But not gone either.

—

I’ve been reading What Alive Means, where Thomas Ogden builds on Donald Winnicott’s idea that we come to know ourselves by being seen.

An infant looks into the mother’s face.

They see themselves being received.

And in that reception, something begins to form.

A sense of being real.

Sitting there, I kept wondering if silence does something similar.

Not because it reflects anything back in words,

but because it doesn’t rush to define

or distract

or soothe.

Instead, it holds.

And in that holding, something honest begins to emerge.

—

This evening I sat on a balcony with a friend.

The conversation felt like a drink of cold water on a hot day.

We talked about life. About faith. About politics and guitars. He is a loving man. A welcoming soul. Someone who naturally held space.

Too often in my life I find conversations are laced with urgency and competition. Noise.

This one didn’t feel that way.

The conversation grew out of the silence, the way something green pushes up through dirt.

“How are you really doing?” he asked.

I stumbled through an honest exploration.
Until I realized I was starting to talk around it.
So I stopped.

What came out next weren’t words so much as tearful whispers.

I wasn’t doing ok.

Hours later, I keep thinking about that moment.

Something reached toward me from beneath the words.

—

There’s a story told about Thomas Keating.

A monastery catches fire in the middle of the night. Smoke filling the halls. Heat moving through the walls like something alive.

Keating wakes up, realizes what’s happening, and does the only sensible thing.

He jumps out the window.

Lands in the snow. Cold, shocking, immediate. Breath gone, then returned like a second chance.

He’s alive.

And then he looks around.

Other monks are landing too. One by one. Black robes against white ground. A kind of silent snowfall of bodies.

The monastery burning behind them.

And no one says a word.

No one breaks the vow of silence.

Not to warn.

Not to shout.

Not even, apparently, to say, “Hey, the building is on fire.”

I’m sorry, but this story is wild.

A little holy. A little absurd.

When your home is on fire, shouldn’t you break the silence?

Then again…

Maybe the silence saved their lives.
Maybe it helped them hear what mattered.

Maybe some things are meant to burn.

peace,
Daniel

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About the author: Daniel Gutierrez, Ph.D., LPC, CSAC, is a Contemplative Existential Psychotherapist, Mental Health Researcher, Professor & sometimes silent mime

I have a favorite sacred text that isn’t Christian.

Even saying that, I can feel a few people quietly closing the tab.

But stay with me.

The Heart Sutra is only a few lines long. You could read it while your coffee is still too hot to drink. And still, it does something most of us spend a lifetime avoiding.

It loosens the world.

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

At first, it sounds like wordplay. A clever cocktail party koan that leaves you smirking as you stir the olives in your drink.

But if you sit with it, something begins to give.

Your grip softens
on who you take yourself to be,
on what you’re sure is true,
on that quiet, constant need to be right.

On the instinct to sort people into clean categories:
good people and bad people,
us and them.

The sutra goes further:

“No eye, no ear, no nose… no ignorance and no ending of ignorance… no suffering, no cause, no end.”

It doesn’t deny reality.

It softens our attachment to it.

It reminds us that what we cling to - our roles, our judgments, even our enemies - does not stay as fixed as we want it to.

And strangely, that doesn’t lead to indifference.

It leads to compassion.
Because when the boundaries loosen, so does the distance between us.
The person I was so sure about becomes less certain.
The category I placed them in begins to blur.

And in that space, something almost inconvenient appears:

Mercy.

That’s why I love this text.

Not because it makes me feel enlightened, but because it makes it harder to hate cleanly.

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Which brings me to a different kind of sutra.
The one we seem to be writing together.

Our Secretary of War recently said, without hesitation, that it takes money to kill bad people.

That sentence only works if the world is solid.

If “bad people” are clearly identifiable.
If the line between us and them holds still.

But the Heart Sutra whispers something inconvenient:

Are you sure?

Are you sure the line is that clear?
Are we sure we aren’t all standing on both sides of it?
Haven’t we all, in one way or another, fallen short?
Are you sure what feels like certainty isn’t just attachment speaking with confidence?

It doesn’t shout.

It doesn’t argue.

It just keeps loosening the world we try so hard to harden.

And maybe that’s what makes it threatening.

Because a world built on rigid categories like enemies, purity, certainty, cannot hold if things aren’t as solid as we want them to be.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to feel this.

You don’t even have to like it.

But if you find yourself dismissing it because it comes from a tradition you don’t trust, you might try something closer to home:

“Blessed are the merciful…”
“Blessed are the peacemakers…”
“Blessed are the meek…”

Different text.

Same loosening.

Perhaps, the easiest way to see it is to imagine a world governed by its opposite.

The Heart-Less Sutra:

Form is not emptiness.
Form is fixed.

The world is as it should be,
and we are its defenders.

There is no interdependence,
only those who belong
and those who do not.

There is no shared suffering,
only winners and losers.

Compassion is weakness.
Mercy is compromise.

There is no need to listen,
for we already know.

There is no need to grieve,
for nothing has been lost.

There is no need to change,
for we are already right.

And if there is suffering,
it belongs to someone else.

That is.

until it doesn’t.

peace.

About the author: Daniel Gutierrez, Ph.D., LPC, CSAC, is a Contemplative Existential Psychotherapist, Mental Health Researcher, Professor & Full of heart.

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I am, if I’m honest, a compulsive eater. It’s how I soothe. I don’t mean I love good food. I mean there are nights I stand at the sink long after I’m full, eating anyway. Not because I’m hungry. Because something in me wants quiet.

Nothing feels quite like my mother’s kitchen. The smell of her cooking would move through the house and pull me from my room the way cartoons show pies lifting a character into the air.

Garlic warming in oil.
Onions and peppers softening in the pan.
Rice steaming the way only she makes it, each grain separate and soft.
Plantains sizzling at the edge of the stove.

I was not deciding to come to the table.

I was being gathered.

I think I am still looking for that.

Sometimes, late at night, I open the refrigerator and stare. I am not looking for calories. I am looking for relief, for warmth, for a place to rest inside myself. The food works for a moment. Then it does not. So I try again. The body fills. The ache remains.

It took me a long time to realize I was not actually hungry.

I was homesick.

This week I met with a dietitian for the first time. He asked me to log everything I eat. Everything. The instruction sounded simple until I started doing it. Within a day I discovered something embarrassing. I graze constantly. A handful of chips here. A cookie there. Something sweet while walking through the kitchen.

I told him I felt like a junk food raccoon wandering the house and grabbing whatever shiny snack appears.

What surprised me most was not the amount of junk but what happened when I started paying attention. When I actually write down what I eat, something changes. I begin to notice how certain foods leave me sluggish. Others settle me. The body responds differently when I stop grazing and sit down for a meal.

Attention itself begins to change the appetite.
Hunger behaves differently when it is seen.

The experience has made me suspicious of how casually I consume other things too. You start to notice what actually nourishes you and what simply keeps you grazing.

Sometimes we approach God the way a tired person approaches a refrigerator at midnight.

Hoping that something inside will finally satisfy the ache.

I used to think the opposite of hunger was fullness. I do not anymore. The opposite of hunger is not eating. It is forgetting what food is for.

My father used to say, “For the hungry, there is no stale bread.” He never meant that poetically. He meant it literally. When you have known real need, you do not negotiate with nourishment. You receive it.

Many of us are not starving for meaning. We are surrounded by it and still unsatisfied. We sample endlessly and digest little.

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In Buddhist imagination there are beings called hungry ghosts. They have enormous bellies and impossibly tiny mouths. They wander constantly trying to consume, but whatever they swallow turns to ash.

They are not punished. They are trapped in a relationship to desire that makes satisfaction impossible.

There is a form of spirituality like this. Always seeking a truer teacher, a deeper practice, a purer community, yet never nourished because ordinary food does not count as food. Daily prayer feels insufficient. Community feels disappointing. Service feels mundane.

Only intensity feels real.

Spirituality becomes a tasting menu of transcendence. Beautiful. Refined.

Still hungry.

The stomach grows.

The mouth shrinks.

An older story tells of a people in the desert receiving daily bread, enough for the day. Before long they grow tired of it. They want something stronger, something richer, something dramatic. They demand meat.

It is a strange thing to grow tired of bread.

Bread is slow. Ecstasy is immediate. A life trained on stimulation forgets how to recognize sustenance.

Taoist writers once mocked what they called a “fat country,” a people so comfortable they became abstract. They admire wisdom but cannot endure inconvenience. They speak easily about harmony but grow impatient when life asks them to chop wood, carry water, or wait.

Spirituality can drift into this condition. It explains suffering instead of accompanying it. It analyzes love instead of practicing it. It interprets existence instead of participating in it.

When spirituality never gathers wood or prepares a meal, it slowly loses contact with the earth.

It becomes tourism of the sacred.

But there is another reaction as well.

Some people were not overfed. They were malnourished. They were raised on spiritual empty calories. Certainty without humility. Belonging without honesty. Emotion without formation. The sugar rush of camps, altar calls, and immediate answers, but no practices for grief, doubt, patience, or adulthood.

So they stopped eating.

They deconstructed, which was often necessary. Sometimes the only faithful response to bad food is to stop eating it.

But leaving the table is only the first movement of hunger. Eventually the body still asks to be fed.

They left the table but never found another meal.

Some people binge spirituality.

Some people fast to avoid being poisoned again.

Both remain hungry.

Sometimes this hunger takes a darker form. You can hear it in the strange spiritual appetite for catastrophe. There are always voices insisting that war must come, that violence must escalate, that history needs blood in order for prophecy to be fulfilled.

The destruction itself becomes a kind of spiritual spectacle.

It is another form of junk food.

It tries to dress cruelty in the language of hope.

If spirituality cannot teach us how to remain human in the face of suffering, what exactly is it feeding?

Even if the world were ending tomorrow, it is hard to see how that would lessen our obligation to love one another. If anything, it would intensify it.

I am becoming suspicious of spiritualities that cannot survive ordinary life.

Some float above the world in mystical language. Others live in permanent reaction against the past. One lives on ecstasy. The other lives on negation.

Both share the same assumption.

Real life cannot nourish the soul.

Yet the traditions keep pointing somewhere much less dramatic. Shared meals. Daily prayer. Forgiveness. Work. Care for neighbors. Patience. Grief.

Bread.

A spirituality that avoids bodies and responsibilities becomes escapism. A spirituality defined only by rejection becomes fasting without purpose.

Neither feeds a human life.

What if spirituality is not meant to carry us out of life but to teach us how to receive it?

Not constant insight.

Not constant intensity.

Capacity.

The patience to love imperfect people. The courage to endure ordinary days. The willingness to remain present when life is inconvenient, boring, or painful.

A true spirituality must be edible.

It must touch bone and earth.

My father was right.

For the hungry, there is no stale bread.

The spiritually mature person is not the one who has tasted everything, nor the one who rejects everything.

It is the one who has relearned how to receive nourishment.

Someone who can live an ordinary Tuesday and discover that life itself has begun, quietly, to feed them.

The goal of spirituality is not transcendence.

It is not deconstruction.

It is learning, slowly, how to leave the refrigerator closed
and sit down at the table.

The place where food is shared.
Where someone is cooking.
Where the house begins to smell like garlic and rice again.

The place where hunger is not managed

but welcomed

and fed.

peace.

About the author: Daniel Gutierrez, Ph.D., LPC, CSAC, is a Contemplative Existential Psychotherapist, Mental Health Researcher, Professor & compulsive eater.

There was once a musician named Orpheus whose songs could soften stone and quiet animals. He loved Eurydice.

The myths barely mention their happiness. That feels honest. Joy is rarely archived. It happens in passing. A hand at your back while you rinse a plate. A laugh from the next room. By the time you realize you are inside it, it is already thinning into memory.

Eurydice steps into grass.
A snake strikes.
One breath divides the story into before and after.

Loss is rarely cinematic. It is abrupt. Administrative. A door closes and does not reopen. You feel like you’re in a whole new world, but you haven’t taken a step.

Orpheus does what grieving people do. He refuses the authority of death. He sings until his throat burns. He walks into the underworld with nothing but an instrument pressed against his ribs.

For once, death listens.

She may follow him back to the living.

She will walk behind him, just out of sight.

Do not turn around.

That is the condition.

Trust what you cannot see.

The climb begins.

Stone beneath his palm. Air thinning. A blade of light ahead.

Behind him, silence where her footsteps should be.

He knows the rule. He knows it in his head the way you know not to touch a hot stove.

But knowledge does not override reflex.

This is the part that undoes me.

It is not a dramatic decision. It is not a crisis of belief. It is a twitch. The neck moves before the will does. Like when someone says your name and your body answers before your mind has agreed.

He turns.

For a flicker she is there.

And then she isn’t.

We call this failure. We call it lack of faith.

I don’t think that’s right.

Love wants to see.

Love wants confirmation.

Love wants one more look at what it cannot bear to lose.

I have turned like that.

I leave a job I have outgrown. The future is uncertain but open. Still, I refresh the old inbox. The glow of the screen washes my face at midnight. I reread messages as if they might pull me back into something solid.

I end a relationship that needed to end. We both felt it thinning for months and years. Alone at night, I scroll through old texts. I enlarge a photograph with my fingers as if I could stretch a moment back into permanence.

I prefer the wreckage because at least it is visible.

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Hope asks me to walk toward what I cannot yet prove.
That feels reckless.
That feels arrogant.
Sometimes even selfish.

What if this was as good as it gets?
What if I do not deserve better?

What if the silence behind me is the last real thing I will ever hear?

So I turn.

Not because I lack faith.

Because I am human.

There is another story about turning.

A family fleeing a city cracking apart in flame. Heat at their backs. Smoke in their lungs. A clear command: do not look back. Lot’s wife looks anyway.

She becomes salt.

We call it disobedience. I hear longing. I hear someone who needed to see, just once more, that what she loved had weight. Salt preserves. Salt keeps what would otherwise dissolve. She becomes a pillar of memory.

But pillars cannot walk.

Orpheus turns and loses her again.
Lot’s wife turns and cannot move.

Sometimes when we walk forward, we lose things too.

The familiar warmth of the pillow is gone. The house you once inhabited in your own chest is no longer there. Certain laughter will never happen again in quite the same way. And Eurydice will always be a small weight on your sternum when you pass a snake in the garden.

This is true.

Walking on does not erase loss. It confirms it.

But what we call losing is often integration.

Henri Nouwen once wrote, “The great mystery of the spiritual life is that we do not lose the people we love. They become part of us.”

The past does not vanish. It travels differently. Not a stone you drag behind you. A scar that moves with your skin. A story that hums under your breath without asking to be relived.

I still turn sometimes.

I check the old messages. I rehearse old conversations in the shower, where I am articulate and devastating and always win. I press on the bruise just to feel it answer back.

And sometimes, yes, by turning I lose momentum.

But when I walk forward, I do not lose love.

I lose proximity.

I lose the exact shape of things.

I lose the warmth of the pillow.

Love does not run out.

It changes form.

From touch to memory. From presence to pulse.

Integration is slower than certainty. Certainty can be catalogued. It can be measured in what is no longer there.

Integration builds quietly. Like muscle grown from lifting what once felt unbearable.

Hope is not denial.

Hope is defiance.

Hope refuses to let the past have the final say in who you are.

Hope does not promise reunion.

It does not promise that what you loved will return in its original form.

It promises something harder.

It promises that your capacity to love is larger than any single loss.

That grief may shape you, but it does not own you.

Orpheus loses Eurydice.

But he does not lose his capacity to sing.

Lot’s wife becomes salt.

And even salt keeps memory from dissolving.

We turn because we are human.

But we walk on because something in us still leans toward light.

You will still feel the weight in your chest when the garden rustles.

You will still miss the warmth of the pillow.

You will still turn sometimes.

And you will keep walking anyway.

Because the past is part of you.

It is not the end of you.

peace.

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About the author: Daniel Gutierrez, Ph.D., LPC, CSAC, is a Contemplative Existential Psychotherapist, Mental Health Researcher, Professor & person who sometimes turns

It’s February, so I think I’m legally required to talk about love and relationships.
How about we start with the classic greek tragedy: Echo and Narcissus.

We are usually told this is a story about vanity.
About self-love gone wrong.
A warning tale for people who admire themselves too much.

But that reading is too easy. And frankly, too kind.

If this were simply a story about arrogance, it would give us a villain and a moral. Do not be like Narcissus. Love others more. Put the mirror down.

The myth refuses.

This is not a story about vanity.
It is a story about loneliness.

In the old telling, Echo is cursed to repeat only the last words spoken to her. She cannot initiate. She cannot shape her own meaning. She can only respond.

And yet she loves.

She listens.
She adapts.
She mirrors.

She survives by attunement.

Echo follows Narcissus not to trap him or possess him, but simply to be near. When he speaks, she hears him. When he calls out, she answers with the only language she has left.

Her tragedy is not silence.
It is constraint.

Echo does not lack words.
She lacks permission.

She represents the silenced self.
Those shaped by systems where voice was unsafe.
Those who learned that connection required disappearance.

She learned to listen first.
Then to speak carefully.
And eventually, not at all.

Narcissus, by contrast, speaks constantly. In the myth, he talks to the forest, to the water, to his own reflection. He is surrounded by sound, including his own.

He does not listen because he has never needed to.

He speaks.
He performs.
He is endlessly responsive to himself.

What we miss if we rush to condemn him is this: Narcissus does not reject Echo. He cannot perceive her.

His tragedy is not vanity.
It is captivity.

The world reaches him only after passing through his own image. He confuses reflection with relationship, familiarity with intimacy.

This is where the story begins to feel uncomfortably familiar.

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If Echo and Narcissus lived today, they would not be wandering a forest.
They would be sitting across from each other.

Narcissus would be looking at his phone. Not obsessively. Just constantly. The glow would feel reassuring. Each scroll would offer him back his own thoughts, his own image, his own worth.

Echo would be watching his face.

She would nod at the right moments. Laugh half a beat late. When she spoke, she would listen carefully for his response so she could return it to him, softened, familiar, safe.

He would not be cruel.
He would not even seem distracted.
He would simply be elsewhere.

Echo might text him later, then reread the message three times, wondering if it sounded like too much. When he replied with a thinner version of her own words, she would feel a strange relief.

He heard me.

Narcissus would post something vulnerable. The likes would come quickly. He would feel briefly known.

Echo would be in the room.

If this feels familiar, it’s because many of us have been Echo.
And many of us, if we’re honest, have been Narcissus too.

We are living inside the myth.
I know I am.

I see this all the time in couples work.

One partner so absorbed in their own reflection, their own story, their own wounds, that they cannot see anything in the relationship beyond themselves. Not because they are malicious. Often because they are terrified. Being right feels safer than being open. Certainty feels safer than listening. They want connection, but only on terms that do not require interruption.

They are not unavailable because they don’t care.
They are unavailable because they would rather protect their identity than risk being changed.

And then there is the other partner. The one with Echo’s voice.

So careful. So attuned. So practiced at saying not the true thing, but the pleasing thing. They smooth every edge, soften every sentence, anticipate every reaction. They call it love. Sometimes it is. But over time, something hollows out.

They abandon themselves so thoroughly that they leave their partner with almost nothing to love.

The tragedy is that both believe they are doing what the relationship requires. One by holding tightly to the self. The other by disappearing for the sake of peace. And in different ways, both exit the room.

I see this dynamic beyond the therapy room too.

I see it in society. In how fiercely we protect our identities. How tightly we cling to who we voted for, the tribe we belong to, the story we repeat. How afraid we are of being wrong, or worse, of being exiled.

So we keep talking.
And keep posting.
And keep repeating the safest version of ourselves.

We mirror the narrative around us, even when it no longer fits the suffering in front of us. Even when our well-laid plans stop working. Even when someone nearby is hurting and all we can see is our own reflection.

Not because we are cruel.
Because we are afraid of losing our place.

This is why loneliness keeps rising, even among people with full calendars and busy lives.

Which suggests the problem is not isolation.

We are not alone.
We are unrecognized.

Psychologists have been circling this for years. What protects us from loneliness is not contact, but responsiveness: the felt sense of being seen, understood, answered. Feeling accurately known matters more than proximity or frequency.

Which helps explain something the myth already knew.

Echo had proximity.
Narcissus had attention.

What they lacked was mutual recognition.

We’ve treated loneliness as a logistical problem.
How many friends.
How many interactions.
How much contact.

But love isn’t a numbers game. It’s a meeting.

The philosopher Martin Buber described love not as a feeling but as an I–Thou encounter, where the other is not an object, not a reflection, not an extension of the self, but a presence who can interrupt us.

That interruption is costly.

It requires us to pause our performance.
To risk being changed by what we hear.

Neuroscience backs this up in its own quiet way. When one person consistently attunes while the other remains self-referential, the cost isn’t just emotional. The attuned body carries more stress over time. Love can be present and still quietly drain the one who keeps listening.

Which is why love so often fails even when affection is real.

Love can be present.
And still not land.

The tragedy of Echo and Narcissus is not the absence of love.
It is love with nowhere to land.

Echo fades until only her voice remains.
Narcissus dies reaching for himself.

Both are lonely.
Both are loved.
Neither is met.

The mystic Simone Weil wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is prayer. To attend to another person without consuming them, without using them to stabilize the self, is a spiritual act.

Which means the opposite of loneliness is not company.
It is courage.

The courage to listen without absorbing.
The courage to speak without disappearing.
The courage to notice when love is present but unreachable.

Because some relationships do not fail for lack of affection.
They fail because recognition never arrives.
Because one person keeps echoing.
Because the other never quite looks up from the water.

Echo does not vanish because she is weak.
She vanishes because she stays too long in a place where her voice cannot land.

And there is a quiet dignity in knowing when listening has become erasure.
In knowing when waiting has turned into vanishing.

Leaving, in that sense, is not abandonment.
It is fidelity to the self that still hopes to be met.

The monk Thomas Merton warned that we spend much of our lives clinging to images of ourselves. Love asks us to loosen that grip. To let the other be other. To step out of the pool.

Echo survives not as a body, but as resonance.
She lives wherever someone speaks and waits to be heard.
She lives wherever someone decides that love must be mutual to be real.

The myth does not instruct.
It asks.

Will we keep mistaking reflection for relationship?
Or will we risk the harder work of recognition?

Because love does not begin when someone mirrors us back.
It begins when something unfamiliar reaches us, and we stay.

Or when we realize we cannot,
and choose not to disappear trying.

This is an impromptu essay, written in the long shadow of the Super Bowl. Which is to say, it’s excessive, slightly off-key, and probably unnecessary.

Like most things attached to this night.

I know not everyone loves the halftime show. I know not everyone knows who Bad Bunny is, or why a song in Spanish should command this much attention. That’s fair. I’m not here to argue for fandom. I’m here because one song keeps returning to me, quietly, the way certain things do when they matter more than we expect.

The song is called Baile Inolvidable. The translation is simple enough: the unforgettable dance. On the surface, it sounds like a love song. Maybe it is. But some phrases carry more weight than their definitions. An unforgettable dance isn’t just a good night. It isn’t just chemistry or youth or timing. It’s the kind of joy that lodges itself in the body. The kind that leaves tenderness behind. A sweetness that aches.

When I hear that phrase, I don’t think of nostalgia so much as recognition. Like the song is pointing toward something we’ve all felt but rarely say out loud.

If I’m honest, Bad Bunny isn’t usually my kind of music. I admire him, but I didn’t grow up with his sound. He even remixed Un Verano en Nueva York, and while I smiled at that, my heart still leans toward the old El Gran Combo version. It feels worn-in, like a kitchen table that’s held a thousand conversations. Scratched. Faithful. Still standing.

And yet.

When I see Bad Bunny perform, when I hear the drum, the conga, the güiro, the horns, something in me wakes up. Not preference. Memory. My heart recognizes the rhythm before my mind gets a vote. It’s not cognition so much as re-cognition. A knowing again. The kind that happens in the chest before it reaches the brain.

My body remembers something my tastes never learned how to explain.

That’s what surprises me. The way this music pulls something ancestral without feeling stuck in the past. Fresh, but old. New, but familiar. Maybe that’s why it reaches across generations. Not because it belongs to everyone, but because it remembers something many of us have forgotten.

That feeling carries particular weight for Puerto Ricans, especially those living far from the island. Diaspora sharpens longing. It teaches people how to live with more than one sense of home, and sometimes with the quiet grief of knowing you may never fully return to the place that formed you.

For many Puerto Ricans watching the Super Bowl from the mainland, this song doesn’t just sound good. It sounds like memory. Like cultural muscle memory. A rhythm learned early and carried across water. Into apartments with thin walls. Into cars headed to work before sunrise. Into kitchens where Spanish is spoken softer than it once was.

An unforgettable dance becomes a way of saying: we come from somewhere, even when we’re scattered, even when returning feels complicated or impossible.

But I don’t think this ache belongs only to Puerto Ricans. I think they’re simply naming it clearly.

Beneath the language barrier and cultural specificity, there’s a more universal pull. A longing for a place that feels truer than the one we’re standing in. A sense that we belong to something larger, older, and more whole. A feeling that visits us through music, through story, through moments that feel briefly complete.

The unforgettable dance isn’t about going backward. It’s about remembering what home felt like before we learned to call that desire unrealistic.

That longing shows up in stories we loved before we knew why. Like the moment in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when a small mouse sails east, past the edge of the known world. Reepicheep isn’t running from anything. He’s answering something. When the time comes, he lays down his sword and drifts forward toward a country he’s never seen but somehow knows.

The scene doesn’t feel heroic so much as familiar. We recognize that movement.
The quiet courage of trusting a pull we can’t fully explain.

What undoes me is that Reepicheep doesn’t fight his way home. He releases his way there. He stops defending himself against the world and allows himself to be carried. Which feels, if I’m honest, like faith at its most stripped down. No altar. No certainty. No answers. Just the courage to stop bracing.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks noticed something similar in a very different register. In Awakenings, he writes about patients who, after years of dormancy, briefly awaken and reveal something astonishing. Beneath illness. Beneath time. Beneath adult conditioning. There remains a preserved aliveness.

A childlike self that hasn’t disappeared. It’s waiting.

The body remembers joy. The nervous system remembers wholeness.
Longing isn’t imagination run wild.
It’s memory looking for its address.

That’s why the biblical language no longer sounds abstract to me. The Epistle to the Hebrews describes people of faith as strangers and exiles, those who confess they’re seeking a better country. I used to hear that as a dismissal of this world. Now I hear it as honesty about the ache. A naming of the feeling that this place, as beautiful as it is, doesn’t fully satisfy us.

Not because it’s broken beyond repair, but because it’s incomplete.

Faith, in this sense, isn’t about escaping the earth. It’s about admitting we recognize a music we didn’t invent.

Which brings me back to the dance. To Bad Bunny, on one of the largest stages in the world, offering a song rooted in an island shaped by displacement, resilience, and a joy that refuses to disappear. To Puerto Ricans in the diaspora feeling that rhythm strike somewhere deep. And to the rest of us, whether we know the language or not, sensing something stir anyway.

The unforgettable dance isn’t a performance. It’s participation. It’s the moment when the body says yes before the mind finishes its objections.

Contemplative writer Thomas Merton called this the cosmic dance. The realization that we are already moving within a vast choreography of belonging. That holiness isn’t found by leaving the world, but by learning how to step into its rhythm with attention and humility.

The dance doesn’t erase our wounds. It teaches us how to move with them.

Near the end of his life, Ram Dass offered a sentence that feels less like wisdom and more like recognition: we are just walking each other home. Not leading. Not rescuing. Just walking. Together.

Maybe that’s what the unforgettable dance is really about. Not escape. Not nostalgia. But companionship. A way of recognizing one another by the way we lean toward the same horizon. A way of putting down our swords, even briefly, and trusting the rhythm that keeps pulling us forward.

Even if we don’t know the song’s name.
Even if we’re counting under our breath.
Even if all we can do is keep moving together.

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There’s a British comedy sketch where two Nazi officers are sitting around during the war, bored, making small talk. One of them starts to feel a vague discomfort. Not guilt, exactly. More like the feeling you get when you realize you’ve been sitting on your foot too long and it’s gone numb in a way that feels vaguely ominous.

He looks down at his uniform.

There’s a skull on it.

Not a metaphorical skull. Not a poetic skull. A literal skull. With teeth. Like something you’d find on a pirate flag or a poison bottle or the label of a particularly aggressive household cleaner.

He asks, tentatively, as if the question itself might be treason:

“Are… are we the baddies?”

His friend is offended. Of course they’re not the baddies. They have rules. They have order. They have an ideology. They’re very organized. But then he looks down at his own uniform. Skull. Looks around the room. More skulls. On the hats. On the flags. An entire aesthetic commitment to death.

The realization isn’t explosive. It’s administrative. Slow. Embarrassing. Like discovering you’ve been pronouncing a word wrong for years, only the word is evil.

The joke works because the skulls have been there the whole time.

I laughed the first time I saw it. A real laugh. Then there was a second laugh underneath, colder and quieter, the kind that doesn’t feel very proud of itself.

Because the question isn’t really about Nazis.

It’s about how rarely we ask the question at all.

Hannah Arendt saw this up close when she attended the Nazi trials. What unsettled her wasn’t monstrous rage or theatrical cruelty. It was how ordinary it all was. The men she watched weren’t cackling villains. They were bureaucrats. Dutiful. Mild. People who went home at night and believed they were decent.

She called it the banality of evil.

Not because evil is trivial, but because it so often looks unremarkable once the uniform comes off.

Whenever we watch a movie, read a novel, or hear a parable, it’s striking how easily we know where we stand. We are never the villain. Never the crowd. Never the ones doing harm in good conscience. Even when the story is about repentance, we read it as aspiration instead of diagnosis. Stories are generous that way. They angle the mirror just enough that we mostly see our good side.

But what if the point of the story isn’t to help us identify with the righteous character at all?

When the unease finally creeps in, when something doesn’t quite sit right, there’s a familiar fork in the road.

You can pledge loyalty.

You can explain that it’s more complicated than it looks. That the rules are necessary. That the alternatives would be worse. That you’re just doing your job, just following procedure, just keeping things from falling apart.

Or you can have the much quieter realization that maybe the emperor doesn’t need new clothes.

Maybe the problem isn’t that you’ve misunderstood the uniform.
Maybe the problem is that you’ve been wearing it so long it feels like skin.

I think about how this happens not only in stories, but in real institutions. Real agencies. Real rooms where badges clang softly against desks and the language keeps getting cleaner while the consequences get messier. Places where dignity doesn’t disappear all at once, but leaks out slowly, almost politely.

Meister Eckhart believed that awakening doesn’t begin with moral improvement, but with seeing. With a loosening of our defenses. A willingness to release the stories we use to protect ourselves from what’s already true.

For him, illumination wasn’t about becoming better. It was about becoming less certain. Less armored. Less invested in proving we’re on the right side.

Recognition, when it comes, is often grace before it is change.

The danger is not that we resist transformation.
The danger is that we refuse recognition long enough that we stop being surprised by the harm we cause.

I’m starting to think this is why we avoid so many forms of noticing.

We don’t step on the scale.
We don’t check our blood pressure.
We don’t look too closely at the quiet distance growing in a marriage.

But not all hard truths are accusations.

A marriage falling apart doesn’t mean the people in it are bad.
It means something precious is hurting.

Some realities don’t ask for punishment.
They ask for grief.

Bodies don’t wait for our readiness. Relationships don’t either. And neither does the harm we cause when we don’t want to know we’re causing it.

The tragedy isn’t that we’re flawed.
The tragedy is that we’ve been taught to confuse awareness with damnation.

Thomas Merton warned that much of what we call goodness is really the careful maintenance of a false self. A self that knows how to behave, how to belong, how to avoid embarrassment. A self that is very invested in not being the problem.

The false self loves uniforms.
It loves approval.
It loves being certain it’s not the baddie.

And if I’m honest, the hardest place this shows up for me isn’t institutions or ideologies.

It’s my daughter.

There are mornings when I can tell almost immediately that I’ve done something wrong. I don’t know what it is. That’s part of the problem. But she knows. The evidence is everywhere. Short answers. No eye contact. A silence that feels intentional, almost architectural.

I try to reconstruct the crime. Was it my tone? A joke? A look? Some casual dismissal I didn’t even feel myself making?

By evening, more often than not, she’s fine. Laughing loudly. Sitting close. Asking for money with a confidence that suggests complete emotional recovery.

Which should reassure me.
And does.
Mostly.

But a question lingers underneath the relief.

Do I ever actually learn?

Or do I just wait it out?

Do I notice the skulls? Or do I tell myself this is just how mornings are?

I want to believe I’m not malicious. I want to believe I mean well. I want to believe my intentions should count for something. But intention doesn’t erase impact. And love doesn’t automatically make me safe.

I don’t think I’m addicted to being great.
But I am deeply invested in being good.
Or at least in not being the baddie.

And why wouldn’t I be?

We treat baddies terribly.

We don’t just say they’ve done bad things. We say they are bad. Completely. Permanently. We strip them of complexity and dignity until they stop feeling human at all. They become monsters. Warnings. Shapes we point at so we know where not to stand.

Which makes becoming one of them unthinkable.

And if it’s unthinkable, it’s also unnoticeable. Because if baddies aren’t human, and I am human, then I can’t be one. Not really.

I’m starting to think we’ve handed this story over to shame, the kind that makes us flinch before we’ve finished noticing, reaching first for a villain instead of tending the wound.

But this feels more like a story about humanity.

About learning to notice when I’ve become dangerous without turning myself into a monster. About allowing that holy glimpse of recognition to do its work. About staying with the discomfort long enough for wisdom to grow.

I’m not asking us to decide once and for all who the baddies are.
I’m asking whether we’re willing to notice when we might be becoming them.

Maybe the point isn’t to stop being capable of harm. That feels unrealistic. Possibly inhuman.

Maybe the point is to become just conscious enough of my own wickedness to interrupt it. To apologize without self-defense. To change without theatrics. To offer dignity even while condemning harm.

To love myself regardless of innocence, and still take responsibility.

Because if dignity is only available to the people who never get it wrong, then it was never dignity to begin with.

It was just another uniform.

Every January, the health clubs fill up.

Parking lots that sat half-empty in November suddenly require strategy. Ellipticals that had been quietly preparing for retirement are wiped down with missionary zeal. Everyone is drinking green liquids that look like lawn clippings and cost twelve dollars, because suffering is more credible when it’s expensive.

The health food stores run out of kale.

No one actually likes kale. No one has ever said, after a long and demoralizing day, You know what would heal me right now? Aggressive bitterness. And yet every January, kale becomes sacramental. Proof that we are serious. A leafy receipt for the vow we are renewing with ourselves.

New year.
New you.

Or at least a more disciplined, socially acceptable draft of you.

January does not invent our dissatisfaction. It simply schedules it. It tells us the problem is not that life is fragile, unfair, and finite, but that we have failed to optimize it. With the right plan, the right products, the right grit, we could finally become someone worthy of our own existence.

So we make lists.

Lose weight.
Build muscle.
Get focused.
Read smarter books.
Consume better content.
Become the kind of person who wakes up early and feels good about it.

These lists are rarely gentle. They behave more like compliance officers. They audit our snacks. They monitor our rest. They file reports when we sit still too long without producing anything measurable.

Some people talk about an inner critic. Many of us operate under a full regulatory agency.

Highly credentialed.
Endlessly reviewing.
Never impressed.

What’s remarkable is not how harsh these voices are, but how respectable they sound. They speak fluent productivity. They quote wellness studies. They use words like potential and discipline and maximizing your life, which is a strange phrase when you think about it, given that life eventually ends no matter how well-managed the calendar is.

These voices are familiar because we were trained by them.

Parents. Schools. Churches. Workplaces. Platforms.
A thousand systems gently insisting that love is conditional, rest is suspicious, and stillness must be justified.

I noticed this most clearly at an awards ceremony.

It was legitimate. Prestigious. A room full of applause that sounded expensive. One by one, people stood while their accomplishments were read aloud. Books written. Organizations founded. Influence scaled. Each biography felt like a résumé read at gunpoint.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, something shifted. Gratitude gave way to inventory. My body knew before my mind did. I folded inward. Shrunk. What was meant to say you belong here quietly translated into you should probably be doing more.

No one said this out loud.
The system didn’t need to.
I had already internalized the metrics.

That moment isn’t unusual. It’s the norm.

Grief taught me this first. There are forces in the world that cannot be defeated by force without costing us our own interior ground.

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We celebrate people by proving their usefulness. We praise children for performance. We reward adults for endurance. We admire leaders for domination and call it strength. Then we act surprised when no one knows how to rest without guilt.

What we are really measuring in these moments is not excellence.
It’s permission.

Permission to stop.
Permission to be ordinary.

This is where self-improvement becomes tyrannical.

Not because growth is wrong. But because improvement quietly replaces love. It becomes a way to manage fear. If we are better, faster, leaner, smarter, maybe we won’t have to feel the unease underneath everything. Maybe we can outrun uncertainty. Maybe we can earn safety.

It’s fear wearing a planner.

We recognize this logic easily when it shows up on a world stage. Tyrants never announce themselves as tyrants. They speak of greatness. Of winning. Of being unmatched. They confuse conquest with meaning and call the damage necessary.

It is much harder to recognize the same logic when it lives inside us. When it speaks in our own voice. When we make our lists sincerely, and still feel vaguely accused.

This is the private version of hollow greatness.
The voice that says more where enough once lived.
Better where mercy once softened the edges.
Next where wisdom might have known when to stop.

You can gain the world this way.
Platforms. Praise. Possessions.
And still lose the quiet center where the soul knows when it has enough.

Thomas Merton warned that we spend our lives climbing ladders leaning against the wrong wall. Not because climbing is immoral, but because motion feels safer than meaning. If we keep moving, we don’t have to ask where we’re going.

Improvement is not the enemy.
But improvement without acceptance becomes a form of violence.

If there is such a thing as real greatness, it is likely unimpressive.

It does not dominate.
It does not scale well.
It does not perform for strangers.

It knows when to stop climbing.
It knows how to sit down without collapsing.
It knows how to stay.

Maybe January does not need another list.

Maybe it needs an interruption.

A body leaning back instead of bracing.
A freezer door opened without convening a tribunal.
An award resting on a shelf, no longer proving anything, just collecting dust.

Not all hunger means we need more.

Some hungers are warnings. Signals that we have mistaken striving for life, improvement for love, and exhaustion for virtue.

That may be the most revealing thing about human nature: we will submit to almost any tyranny if it promises belonging. We will exhaust ourselves trying to earn what should never have been conditional. We will call it discipline because that sounds nobler than fear.

We are not formed by our ideals.
We are formed by what withholds rest.

So long as improvement stands in for love, we will keep mistaking motion for meaning.

The quiet revolution is not self-optimization.
It is permission.

Permission to stop without collapsing.
To be unfinished without panic.
To live a life that does not need to justify itself.

That may be what real greatness looks like.
Unscalable. Unimpressive.
And finally, free.

This isn’t the essay I had planned for this week.

It’s late. I can’t sleep. And when that happens, I usually end up reading the news longer than I should, hoping, foolishly, that something will suddenly make sense.

So this is an extra essay. A middle of the night one. The regularly scheduled piece will still arrive Tuesday morning, as promised. But tonight felt like it needed words before sleep, or silence, could return.

Like many others, I find myself heavy with sadness about where we are as a country. Sad about the erosion of empathy. Sad about how easily compassion gives way to indifference.

Saddest of all is watching communities that once taught me how to care now struggle to recognize harm when it arrives wearing familiar language. Watching institutions formed around truth and love grow comfortable with half truths, distortions, and stories that make cruelty feel necessary or justified. Watching people I once prayed beside, learned from, trusted, now look away without flinching, hands folded, hymns still on their lips.

It’s evil.

Underneath all of this, one question keeps returning.

What do we do with this kind of evil?

I’ve long since let go of the idea that evil looks like a devil with a pitchfork. It doesn’t. It isn’t a monster from the Upside Down, waiting to be vanquished by a last-minute super strategy. Evil today is far less dramatic and far more effective. It wears uniforms. It hides inside policies. It hardens into systems that make harm feel procedural, distant, justified. Less Stranger Things, more corporate suits. Evil is often banal, defended, bureaucratic. It rarely announces itself as cruelty. It calls itself order. Or safety. Or faithfulness.

And still, people are walking.

I keep thinking about the monks moving slowly across this country. Robes dusty. Prayers steady. A dog padding quietly alongside them. No slogans screamed. No fists raised. Just bodies placed deliberately in the path of indifference. A refusal to disappear. A disruption that does not desecrate the soul.

This is not passivity.
It is courage of a different order.

There is an older witness to this way of confronting evil.

Martin de Porres was born to an enslaved African mother and a Spanish father. In the monastery where he lived, he was tolerated but not welcomed. He faced constant racism and humiliation. Some of the monks mocked him. Some tried to provoke him.

When brothers spoke cruelly or spread lies, Martín quietly cleaned their cells. When they were ill, he brought them food. He prayed for them by name.

When asked why he didn’t defend himself, Martín reportedly said, “If I correct them with love, perhaps God will do the rest.”

This was not denial.
It was refusal.

A monk who had been especially cruel later fell gravely ill. Martín cared for him day and night. When the man wept, it was not from pain, but from shame.

Evil often collapses when it is no longer mirrored.
Cruelty loses its footing when it is met with dignity instead of retaliation.
Love exposes what accusation cannot.

Martín does not deny injustice.
He refuses to let it rewrite his soul.

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The same pattern appears in the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She does not appear to the powerful or the credentialed. She appears to Juan Diego, a man the world had already decided did not matter. She speaks his language. She sends him back to be seen again. The miracle is not spectacle, but attention. A refusal to erase.

What unsettles me most is not only what evil does to its victims, but what it asks of the rest of us.

This matters now because evil does not only destroy through violence.
Evil survives through recruitment.

It looks for hosts. It looks for institutions, languages, and traditions it can inhabit without being questioned.

To let evil enter within us, even when it arrives cloaked in righteousness or certainty, is to continue giving it glory. It reshapes us. It trains us to confuse loyalty with silence and belonging with blindness.

I know how easy this is. I feel the pull myself.

The life of Jesus points in the same direction. Again and again, he refuses to return violence for violence. He names injustice without taking up the sword. He walks toward suffering without becoming what oppresses. He does not save the world by killing his enemies, but by refusing to let hatred have the final word.

This is not weakness.
It is moral clarity at great cost.

Across Latino and Latina folk spirituality, evil is often understood not only as harm, but as forgetting. Forgetting names. Forgetting faces. Forgetting that someone is a mother, a poet, a neighbor. Forgetting that dignity precedes legality. Forgetting is how cruelty becomes reasonable.

And the response is almost always the same.
Acompañamiento. Accompaniment.
Ternura. Tenderness.
Presencia fiel. Faithful presence.

Or, as it is often lived rather than explained:

Don’t take my life.
See me.

Which is why remembrance becomes resistance.

This is why a walk for peace is not weakness.
It is not ineffectiveness.
It is a refusal to give evil more territory.

Not softness, but peace.
Not compliance, but presence.
Not forgetting, but remembering.

Good God, this grief is heavy.

Still.

And still, it is good grief if it keeps us human.

Tonight, I am not sleeping because the world feels broken.
But I can rest in knowing that I do not have to let that brokenness take up residence in my soul.

I’ll see you Tuesday.

Before sleep, I want to leave you with a poem by Howard Thurman, Life Goes On. It doesn’t resolve the grief or explain it away. It simply reminds us that beneath the noise, beneath the cruelty, beneath our fear, there is a deeper current still moving. This poem has helped me breathe tonight. Maybe it will help you too.

**If this reflection helped you stay human tonight, feel free to share it with someone who might need it too. You can subscribe here if you’d like to keep walking together. I’ll be back Tuesday morning with a more polished essay.

This summer, I got to know New York from the back of a taxi.

Since COVID, the city has sprouted these little street-side dining huts. They slow traffic to a crawl, but they make the city feel like one long dinner party. As we inch forward, scenes flicker past the window. Couples leaning in close. Friends passing plates. Young adults negotiating over the last mozzarella stick like it matters more than it probably does. Meanwhile, finance guys, the “fin bros,” sit with the focused intensity of a CrossFit class. I imagine them trading investment strategies and confidence in equal measure. I don’t know much about money, but they seem very sure that they do.

In the amber glow of the streetlights, everyone looks animated. Engaged. Almost glamorous.

But do these distant first impressions ever tell us the whole story?
If I had to guess, they don’t. Almost never.

The fin bro is probably more scared than he lets on. About money. About life. About whether he’s enough. The college kid guarding the mozzarella stick might be carrying anxiety so heavy it’s hard to breathe some mornings. And those couples leaning in close? Most of them fight more than they frolic. You just don’t see the arguments from the sidewalk. Or on Instagram.

Showing up, it seems, is one of the bravest things we’re asked to do.

Most of us are afraid. Afraid to be who we really are. We wrestle with our shadow selves, the parts we’d rather not acknowledge, and we get good at the stories we tell to cover them up. As the line between truth and illusion blurs a little more each day, it’s getting harder to know what’s real.

And there’s a cost to all this performance.

We can be surrounded by people, even talking to them, and still feel completely alone. I’ve been in rooms with friends and family who don’t really understand or respect what I do, and with colleagues who only seem to know me by what they need from me. In those spaces, I’ve learned how to go quiet and become useful, dispensing whatever’s required like a vending machine, even when what I want is connection. That’s a kind of loneliness that isn’t cured by company. It’s not just that we’re isolated. It’s that we’re not known. And until we are, no amount of dinner parties, group chats, or shared mozzarella sticks will fill that hollow space.

Which makes this time of year feel especially tender.

December has a way of putting us back in rooms we didn’t choose. Family gatherings. Office parties. Dinners with people we promised we’d call but didn’t. Conversations we’ve been rehearsing since last year. Old dynamics, old jokes, old silences waiting right where we left them.

We arrive carrying quiet questions.
Who will I be tonight.
Who do they need me to be.
Which version of myself is safest to bring through the door.

Sometimes we show up hoping to be seen. Sometimes just hoping not to be noticed too much. Sometimes bracing for the version of ourselves that only appears around certain people. The one we thought we’d outgrown. The one that still flinches. The one that learned how to survive a room by staying small or staying impressive.

Underneath it all is the same ache. To be known without being managed. To be welcomed without having to perform. To sit at a table and not have to explain ourselves into belonging.

This is where Advent keeps surprising me.

Not as a season of answers, but of arrivals. People traveling. People showing up tired. People unsure of how they’ll be received. A holy night marked not by speeches or explanations, but by attention. A child born into borrowed space. Visitors bringing what they have, not what impresses.

Silent Night has always felt strange to me. Not because the world was quiet, but because something true happened without anyone trying to control it. No announcements. No strategies. Just presence. Just listening. Just the kind of silence that makes room instead of filling it.

There are characters who show up in the story, even the ones we added later. A drummer boy with no gift except a rhythm he already knows. Shepherds with more questions than answers. Everyone offering what they have and discovering that it’s enough.

We don’t become ourselves in isolation. We discover who we are when someone sees us and stays. When we are listened to without being fixed. When we’re allowed to show up unfinished.

That feels like the invitation of this season. Not to curate connection, but to risk presence. Not to say the right thing, but to listen long enough for something honest to surface. Not to arrive dazzling or defended, but real.

I don’t know who will show up at all the tables I’ll sit at this year. I don’t always know who will show up in me. But I’m wondering if the work isn’t to arrive with answers, but with attention. To notice who’s there. To let the night be quieter than we expect.

Maybe that’s how connection begins. Not with saying more, but with making room. Not with being impressive, but with being present. Not with fixing the loneliness, but with letting ourselves be known.

One table.
One conversation.
One silent night at a time.

Merry Christmas.

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The Car Line Incantations

I am a parent of two teens, which means that most mornings I get to experience the middle school car line.

From a distance, the car line looks like a well-oiled machine. Cars inch forward like oversized metal gears, turning slowly and methodically, part of some elaborate child-producing apparatus. When the line pauses, doors pop open in near unison. Kids tumble out. Underpaid administrators point and whistle, herding them toward the building with the weary authority of people who have already had this same conversation six hundred times.

From the inside, the experience is different.

Inside the car, the kids grip their seat belts like paratroopers storming a final battlefield. You strap backpacks onto their shoulders and do everything you can to eject them from the vehicle with everything they might need before you pass the drop zone. You grip the steering wheel and steal a glance at the rearview mirror, terrified of being that parent, the one who holds the whole line up because they cannot find a mitten or a permission slip in time.

The radio plays your morning music, but it all sounds muffled, like it is coming from underwater, as you run through the checklist. Lunch box. Water bottle. Homework you signed but did not read. You reach for the thermos they forgot to close. It spills onto your coffee cup. The heater wheezes. The door clangs open.

And then, just before they step out, you catch a glimpse of your child’s face.

Like a military officer tossing a grenade ahead to clear the way for a much smaller soldier, you mutter something stupid.

Make good choices.

As if they were not already planning on that. As if, in that moment, you had somehow foiled their master plan to make terrible ones. Bad choices. Memorable choices. As if they even knew what you meant. As if that sentence could land in any teenage register beyond an eye roll and a limp shrug that says, sure, whatever helps you sleep.

Oh, I have had a lot of these gems over the years.
Be the change. What parent doesn’t quote Ghandi at a child?

Fly your way, not theirs. Still my personal favorite, shamelessly stolen from The Wild Robot. It is a sentence that sounded wise until I heard myself say it out loud and realized it was slightly wrong. Because I did want them to fly with the group sometimes. Especially on field trips. And definitely in science class.

As they got older, and I slowly accepted how useless all of this was, the sayings got stranger. More specific. More honest.

Don’t eat off the floor.
Don’t bring a raccoon home.
Don’t punch anyone. Well, unless they are a Nazi.
Even Captain America punched Nazis.

We toss these lines like charms. Half joke. Half prayer. A rattling little necklace of sayings we hope might wrap around our kids as they step into the day. They sound foolish even as we say them. Our kids roll their eyes or pretend they did not hear.

Existential scholars suggest that when we are confronted with uncertainty we cannot control, we reach for meaning instead. Not because it fixes anything, but because it lets us stay present without going numb. These little phrases are not instructions. They are acts of resistance against the scary unknown. Not because silence is dangerous, or mystery is something to be solved, but because fear thrives when we let it mute our voices.

And maybe none of it matters. Maybe none of it sticks.

Or maybe, we can hope that years from now, they will remember the way our voices wobbled with a kind of desperate love for them.

Words From Heaven?

As I read the Advent story in Luke, I keep noticing how often words are given to people who probably do not fully understand them. Not because they are confused or unfaithful, but because love can be clear long before its consequences are.

Shepherds.
Mary.
Joseph.

All of them receive sentences heavy with promise and fear, spoken out of desperate love. They knew something holy was being asked of them. They just could not have known the shape it would take.

The shepherds did not expect a manger.
Mary could not have imagined that the child she was teaching to walk would one day be nailed to a cross and somehow live again. That she would name him, and that name would be spoken in beautiful ways and also used to justify terrible things.

Their journey was not a car line. It was the fleeing of state-sponsored violence. It was moving from place to place, knocking on doors, looking for somewhere, anywhere, that might say yes. Instead, the incantation they kept hearing was no, as in, there is no room for you here.

Not the spell of protection we try to place on our kids when we push them out into the world. This was a spell of limitation.

There is no room for you who are in need.
There is no room for you who are most vulnerable.

The heavens sing for you, but I have no room for you.

One of the mystics said that God is always coming to us disguised as our own lives. Which makes me wonder what we do when our lives arrive inconvenient, crying, undocumented, and in need of shelter.

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Words That Make Room?

Meister Eckhart warned that if Christ is not born again in us now, then his first birth does not save us from much. I hear that and wonder, if he were born today, would there be any room. If the heavens sang again about a miraculous new life, would we stop long enough to listen, or would we shrug and say we are full.

If life calls us to more, can we make space?

I think I know the answer to that.
I see it in the news.
I see it in the way we talk.
We can.
I am just not sure we would.

I picture Mary and Joseph walking across the desert with their newborn, nothing but starlight, sand, and the pounding fear of not knowing where they will sleep. Every door answering their knock with the same cold phrase. No room here.

What do you say to a child when the world keeps saying that. What kind of sentence can hold hope together when every inn is already full.

Psychologists who study human fear say there are a few fundamental terrors we all share. Death. Isolation. Freedom. The threat that none of this means anything at all. Standing at a closed door with a child in your arms manages to gather all of them at once.

And then my mind jumps to the border. An immigrant mother clutching her toddler, rehearsing whatever threadbare blessings she can muster. Or a documented family, perfectly legal, still bracing under the weight of suspicion, sirens, paperwork, and the low, constant hum of state-sponsored fear.

Words of Hope?

What good are our little incantations then.

Maybe not much.
Maybe everything.

Maybe hope is always spoken in situations where it looks useless. Hope does not eliminate the unknown. It just refuses to let fear have the last word.

Maybe every parent, ancient, exhausted, holy, terrified, has whispered some version of this. I know the world says there is no room for you, but I am making a room anyway. I am making room with my breath. With my voice. With whatever scraps I can carry.

The car line rolls forward. Another morning. Another small human stepping into the cold, tugging their backpack up like a shield. I roll down the window and offer my silly benediction, my cracked little charm.

It is not much.

But it is the best spell I know.

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I. Flickering Into the Day

This morning I stood in my kitchen longer than the coffee required. The light above me hadn’t committed to the day either. It hovered the way December light does like someone lingering in the doorway unsure whether to stay. Flickering and buzzing, the light and I entered that between-state, that almost-here, almost-ready place. I lingered, not wanting to move on, until the deadlines finally tugged me forward.

It still surprises me how much effort it takes to arrive anywhere, even in your own life. The body shows up first. The mind wanders in later, carrying whatever negotiations it has for the day. The heart usually stumbles in last, bleary-eyed, wearing yesterday’s clothes, with all the mental clarity of a freshman who discovered a box of cannabis gummies five minutes before philosophy class.

II. The Self in Motion

Psychologists say the self isn’t a fixed point but a continual process of becoming, a series of micro-arrivals that rarely sync up. I once read identity described as “perpetual threshold-crossing,” which felt dramatic until I realized how often my inner world feels like a small airport with endless delays. Some mornings it feels as if I am running border control inside my own chest, each part of me waiting in a different line. If I must live with these borders, I hope I can manage them with kindness, even when the parts of me look like strangers.

III. The Small, Quiet Courage of Arrival

Maybe that is why arrival takes courage, not the heroic kind, but the quiet willingness to cross those inner borders labeled Not Yet, Too Much, Come Back Later and step into the moment anyway.

To arrive can feel like leaving something behind, or like something has left you. That can be terrifying and, in many ways, true. Yet to dwell only on that fear is to miss the fact that arrival also opens you to new possibility. You do not end with less. You have not been abandoned.

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IV. The Myth of the Final Version

Lately I have been wondering if the real trouble is that we expect wherever we arrive to be final. We treat life like a destination we keep failing to reach, the right job, the right marriage, the right bank account, the right version of ourselves. But life keeps unfolding. One day you are broke. The next day you have enough. The day after that you are wondering if “enough” is enough. Everything keeps shifting, roles, desires, identities, the way your heart handles hope.

Adults are just children who have learned to pretend these transitions are normal. We convince ourselves we can predict them. But we cannot control the future, and like Bruno in Encanto or the witches in Macbeth, our forecasts are always a little off.

So, what if we dropped the constant evaluation?

What if we stopped trying to figure it out?

What if we stopped grading ourselves on stability and trusted that we are always changing, always growing, always arriving?

What if the goal was not to nail down a final self but to make room for the next one to be born? To be born again. To surrender ourselves to that unfolding.

V. A Place for New Beginnings

The Advent story hums under all this, a couple on the road, closed doors, a borrowed room, a birth that came whether anyone was ready or not. What moves me is not the miracle. It is the human ache beneath it, the search for a place where a new beginning can breathe.

Modern migrants know this in their bones. We can learn from them. And in quieter ways, we know this too. We are all wandering toward some kind of safety, a place of rest. We are all hoping to find a space, externally or internally, where the newest and most tender part of us can emerge without getting trampled.

So this morning, watching the light inch across the counter, I felt something loosen. Maybe courage is not a single decisive arrival. Maybe it is the soft, ongoing willingness to keep showing up to our unfinished becoming without demanding that it look stable or impressive, and instead engage in the spiritual tasks of letting yourself be remade.

Maybe that is what Advent is beneath all the pageantry, the daily, sometimes hourly, act of finding room to be born again. Not in a grand spiritual way, but in the small human sense:
a little more honest,
a little more awake,
a little more willing to cross another invisible threshold inside ourselves.

In this way, maybe Advent is less a season and more of a posture, the steady practice of clearing a little space inside ourselves so something new can draw its first breath.

“The soul is a river of compassion that freezes when we stop seeing ourselves in one another.” — Pádraig Ó Tuama

I. Just (ICE)

The glass is half full. The glass is half empty.
Most days, I’m not sure there is a glass on the table.

Lately life feels frosted over.
No warmth.
No welcome.

Just the hollow clink of ice on whatever vessel this is we’re calling a nation.

How did we get so cold?
Cold policies. Cold language.
Cold rooms where a mother signs a paper she cannot read
while her child learns the word detained before beloved.

Somewhere along the way we stopped offering water to the stranger
and started building freezers for their bodies.

And we told ourselves it was law.
We told ourselves it was safety.
We told ourselves it was necessary.

We said it was just. as in, fair.
We said it was ICE. as in, the rules.
We said it was just ICE. As in, not my problem.

Worst of all we said it was Justice.
as if that word hadn’t frozen on our tongue long before we spoke it.

II. The Freezer Door

This cold front didn’t slip in by accident. It was built. It was manufactured.
Sheet by sheet.
Policy by Policy.
Until the temperature dropped below human dignity.
below the threshold where skin goes numb and stories go quiet.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement system is the largest immigration detention network in the world, confining nearly 300,000 people each year (Harvard Law Review, 2025).

At any given moment tens of thousands are held in hundreds of facilities. One national study found more than 630 sites used by ICE in a single year, many privately operated and many far from any family support (American Immigration Council, 2025).

A 2025 JAMA Network Open study found:

• 49 percent reported poor or fair health.

• 37 percent had a diagnosed mental illness.

• 59 percent showed symptoms of PTSD (Saadi et al., 2025).

Statistics can only measure what people have already endured. But they cannot count the quiet tremor in a child’s chest when a door slams down the hall.

And the cold spreads outward.

In a study my colleague and I conducted, fear of deportation was linked with heightened distress, anxiety, depression, and substance use. Maybe this isn’t surprising, but let’s take note that the fear doesn’t stop at the border or the jail gate; it seeps into kitchens and classrooms. Families living in the shadow of deportation report strained parent-child communication, role reversals, and conflict born of constant vigilance. The impact is felt not only by undocumented individuals but also by U.S. citizens in mixed-status families, children who carry their parents’ fear like a second skin.

In fact, even people who supposedly have “nothing to worry about”—U.S. citizens, long-time residents, folks with every document in order—are lying awake at night, wondering if they might be mistaken for someone else. Profiled. Misread. Pulled into a system that doesn’t always bother to check the name it’s holding. Mistaken identity and wrongful detention are not rare. Investigations estimate that between 1 and 4 percent of detainees are U.S. citizens or lawful residents wrongly processed (Duke Law, 2022).

Stories from the Ice

• In Alabama a U.S. citizen construction worker was wrongfully detained twice in workplace raids. He is now suing immigration authorities (PBS NewsHour, 2025).

• More than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents, many reporting being kicked, dragged, or jailed for days despite showing proof of citizenship (ProPublica via OPB, 2025).

• Pregnant and postpartum women in ICE custody have been denied prenatal care, shackled during transport, and given inadequate food and medical attention despite official directives against such detention (ACLU, 2025).

These are not outliers. They are part of the architecture of frost.

We tell ourselves it is law. It is safety. It is justice.
But the record shows confusion, harm, and quiet devastation.
Justice delayed. Rights blurred. Lives frozen.

III. My Name, My Place, My Turn to Care

Let’s name the obvious: my last name is Gutierrez. I am a Latino. And like our Super Bowl halftime star Bad Bunny, I am Puerto Rican.

Being Puerto Rican means coming from the island that gave you Jennifer Lopez, parades so loud they shake loose your cynicism, and after Hurricane María, the unforgettable moment when we all learned FEMA apparently thinks “disaster relief” means throwing paper towels into the crowd like we’re at a junior high pep rally.

For those who do not know, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It is also, depending on who you ask, still a colony. That longer conversation will come another day. The point is: I’m a Latino U.S. citizen. And yet, because of racial profiling and stereotyping, this story hits close to home. I get nervous. My body remembers things the law says I shouldn’t have to fear.

But why should that matter?
If we’re all waiting for harm to reach our own doorstep before we feel outraged, then we’ve already lost the plot.
If I wait for the knock, I’ve already failed.
The door is already iced over.

We must move past the cold.
So, how do we stop shrugging and saying, “It’s just politics”?
How do we stop pretending that anything outside our backyard isn’t our concern?

Because here’s what’s real: the mother in that detention room might be your neighbor’s sister. The man on that bus might be the one who trims your garden on weekends
.
Every face carries a story.

IV. The Revolution of Tenderness

When I think about those faces, I remember the mystics
not the ones floating in clouds,
but the ones with dirt under their nails
and a stubborn tenderness for the world.

I picture a child’s hand pressed to cold glass,
leaving a small print that softens into morning light.
I hear ice cracking off windshields outside an ICE detention center
a sound like something trying to break free.

And in that cracking, I hear Gustavo Gutiérrez,
who taught that theology begins not in heaven
but in the cry of the poor, and
that liberation is less an idea
and more a turning toward each other
until no one is left invisible.

Ernesto Cardenal called it the revolution of tenderness, where the holiness of God hides in the worn hands of a farmer or the small cell of a prisoner.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote that the search for truth is not the privilege of men or saints but of anyone who loves the world enough to listen.

Teresa of Ávila insisted that the divine has no body now but ours, no hands but ours, no eyes but ours to see the suffering.

Poet Ada Limón reminds us that joy is not the absence of pain but the muscle that keeps working anyway.

What I hear them all saying is that:

Every face in that detention center is the face of God.
Every person on that bus is God in disguise,
Every one of them carrying a fragment of liberation meant for all of us.

Liberation is not the victory of one group over another.
It is the thaw, the slow melting work that begins in our own hands.
It is justice refilled with water.

If I wait until it reaches my door I have already failed.
The call is not to be safe. The call is to be human.

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V. How to Melt the Ice

Some call empathy a liability.
Power often labels compassion as weakness.
And lately we’ve had commentators talking as if tenderness were the soft spot where all the trouble leaks in.

But look around. In this particular storm, tenderness might be the least demonic thing happening.

The world does not freeze by accident. It freezes by habit, by the quiet shrug of “that’s just how it is.” So the question is not how to build stronger walls. The question is how to melt.

How do we stand with the marginalized until, as Father Greg Boyle says, “the margins disappear”?

How do we let go of the idea that cruelty is inevitable, that bureaucracy absolves the soul?

If you believe this is just the way things are,
then fine.
Let it be.
But do not look away.
Don’t you dare look away.

Look at every face.
Every person beaten, wronged, detained, dismissed.

See your mother there.
See your brother,
your child,
your lover,
your God.

Hold that image until the frost begins to tremble.

Because it is not just them.
It is not just ICE.
It is not justice.
It is you, and me, and God.
And the melting begins exactly there
where our eyes stay open,
and our palms thaw the world inch by inch.

Notes

1. American Civil Liberties Union. (2025, October). Pregnant and postpartum women face neglect and abuse in ICE detention. https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/pregnant-and-postpartum-women-face-neglect-and-abuse-in-ice-detention

2. American Immigration Council. (2025). The landscape of immigration detention in the United States. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/the_landscape_of_immigration_detention_in_the_united_states.pdf

3. Boyle, G. F. (2010). Tattoos on the heart: The power of boundless compassion. Free Press.

4. EMP Law Firm. (2025, October). Can a U.S. citizen be detained by ICE? https://emplawfirm.com/can-a-us-citizen-be-detained-by-ice/

5. Gutiérrez, D., & Silverio, N. (2025). Fear of deportation and Latine mental health: A rapid review of recent literature [Manuscript under review].

6. Gutiérrez, G. (1973). A theology of liberation: History, politics, and salvation (C. Inda & J. Eagleson, Trans.). Orbis Books. (Original work published 1971)

7. Harvard Law Review. (2025). The law and lawlessness of U.S. immigration detention. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-138/the-law-and-lawlessness-of-u-s-immigration-detention

8. Limón, A. (2022). The hurting kind. Milkweed Editions.

9. OPB / ProPublica. (2025, October). More than 170 U.S. citizens held by ICE. https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/16/immigration-ice-arrests-propublica-white-house-deportation-immigrants-sweep/

10. PBS NewsHour. (2025, October 1). U.S. citizen wrongfully detained twice in Alabama workplace raids sues immigration authorities. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-citizen-wrongfully-detained-twice-in-alabama-workplace-raids-sues-immigration-authorities

11. Saadi, A., et al. (2025). Duration in immigration detention and health harms. JAMA Network Open. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2829506

12. The Guardian. (2025, September). Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-criminal-record-ice-detention

13. Yale Law School. (2025, January 17). Students document reports of abuse at immigration detention center. https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/students-document-reports-abuse-immigration-detention-center

I. The Broken Cup

I recently heard a story about Benedict of Nursia.
Benedict, the father of the Benedictine order, once blessed a cup, and it shattered.

The monks had poisoned it. They were tired of his rules, his quiet holiness, the way his calm made their restlessness unbearable. They had wanted a saint, but not one who actually expected them to change. So they slipped the poison in, hoping, maybe, to silence the mirror.

When he lifted the chalice and made the sign of the cross, the cup cracked clean through, the sound of pottery giving way like a small thunderclap in the room. Benedict looked at them, eyes steady, and asked why they had done it. Then he forgave them and walked out the door.

Outside, the air smelled of clay and rain, the world waiting unbroken.

No drama. No curses. Just a man choosing honesty over belonging.

I can’t imagine a more fitting image for that moment in life when you know something big needs to change.

When the systems you tried so hard to protect have become broken, toxic, and dangerous.

When the cup itself cracks, and you know it is time to pour yourself out and start again.

It is a sad day when you realize you can’t even trust the monks, when the rules you followed for so long don’t work anymore.
But, it’s also a life-saving day.

II. The Ache of the Changed One

That crack of pottery still rings in other rooms I’ve sat in - counseling rooms, churches, and kitchens, to name a few.

Someone comes home from rehab luminous and raw, like they have met their own soul in the mirror for the first time. The family greets them with hugs and casseroles, but beneath the welcome there is a hum of anxiety. Who are you now? And what does that make the rest of us?

Within weeks, the old patterns start creeping back.
Dad leaves beer in the fridge “for guests.”
Mom says, “You used to be more fun.”
It is not cruelty; it is homeostasis, the system trying to pull itself back to the shape it knows.
Regardless, it feels like sabotage.

It happens in other sanctuaries too.
A woman sits through one more sermon laced with political slogans and feels her faith split in her chest. She walks out, not because she has lost belief, but because belief itself demanded honesty.

She stands in the parking lot outside the church, the smell of coffee and perfume leaking from the sanctuary, and realizes she’ll never come back.

A friendship fades when every joke lands like a bruise.
You’re tired of feeling like love should hurt this much.

An adult child drives away from the family home, grieving what still lives there but can’t breathe there anymore.

And lately, I have seen it in politics too, the quiet betrayal of conscience.
Someone who spent decades believing in a movement built on mercy and fairness suddenly sees it turning inward, protecting power instead of feeding the poor. Guarding the table instead of setting more places at it. The slogans still sound righteous, but the fruit has soured. And there you are, realizing that the country or the party you once loved is asking you to betray the very values that made you join.

In every case there is real loss. The loss of friendship, of community, of a place called home. And, each loss comes with a dose of intense grief and a holy loneliness.

The physics of the situation seem clear. One person chooses what is real, and everyone else feels the ground tilt. It would be simpler if we just suppressed our feelings and stuck with the usual. What the crowd finds acceptable.
Nonetheless, the chalice breaks and the truth spills out.
You feel betrayed.

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III. The Anatomy of Betrayal

Betrayal is not a single event. It is a slow rearranging of trust in the body.
The heart still wants to believe the old story while the conscience whispers, you can’t go back there.

At first, you tell yourself it is just a misunderstanding.
The church didn’t really mean that sermon.
Your friend was only joking.
Your family isn’t trying to guilt you; they are just worried.
Your political home isn’t corrupt, just “complicated.”

The seduction of the other side is always coated in nostalgia, the ache to belong somewhere that once felt like home.

But the body knows first.
Your stomach tightens when they say you’ve changed.
Your shoulders rise when someone jokes about “those people.”
There is a tiny moment of nausea when you realize they would rather keep the peace than face what is real.
You don’t hate them. You just can’t pretend anymore.

That is the hardest part. Betrayal isn’t only what they do to you; it is what you feel tempted to do to yourself.
To soften your convictions.
To laugh when it isn’t funny.
To sip from the cup you already know is poisoned, just to keep everyone comfortable.

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.”
— Rollo May

It’s easier to betray yourself quietly than to live with the noise of disapproval.

Stillness.

But every small betrayal leaves a taste, metallic, like the rim of a broken cup.

And you start to realize that peace built on self-abandonment isn’t peace at all.
It is paralysis dressed as belonging.

Real change, the kind that costs you community, carries a grief all its own.
You lose not only people, but the version of yourself who once fit so easily among them.
There is a mourning that comes with every boundary, a kind of holy loneliness.

Yet in that emptiness, a strange clarity arrives.
You begin to hear the faint crack of the chalice again, not as punishment, but as permission.
Permission to stop drinking what is killing you.
Permission to bless what is real, even when it breaks the room.
Permission to stand up from the cup, let it shatter, and walk away.
No drama. No curse. Just a value-driven choice.

IV. The Blessing and the Crack

Benedict’s story ends not with triumph but with silence, a man walking into the wilderness to start again.
He walked until the sound of the bells was gone, until the wind spoke like a psalm through the olive trees.
Every honest blessing has that wilderness attached.
When you bless what is real—sobriety, conscience, justice, love—something false will shatter.
You walk away lightheaded, as if you’ve just stood up too fast.
The sound is frightening, but it is also holy.

To bless is to refuse the seduction of pretending.

We mistake betrayal for the end of belonging.
But maybe belonging is what is being remade,
from the comfort of being accepted to the courage of being seen.

Because after every metamorphosis, there is a moment when the butterfly looks back at the caterpillars, still chewing, still warm in their shared leaf, and knows she can’t stay.
Not because she is better than them, but because her body will not let her crawl anymore.

Wings change what gravity means.

Meister Eckhart said, “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
Maybe the sound of the cup cracking is that hand erasing making room for what can finally be true.

Every value worth living for will one day ask you to choose between comfort and truth.
And when the cup cracks, may you hear in that sound not failure,
but the mercy of things finally coming apart in the right direction.

As we sit with the mess—the shattered pieces and the smell of wet clay—
may we keep practicing deep listening and quiet contemplation.
The fractures you fear may have saved your life.

“Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions,
and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”
— St. Benedict of Nursia

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I have this dream that sneaks up on me some nights. My father and I are walking through the garden behind his old house, sunlight puddling on the leaves, the lawn perfectly manicured. He cuts a stalk of sugarcane, peels it with his pocketknife, and hands me a piece. We chew and talk. The air smells like wet soil and sweetness. We walk softly. Every now and then, I glance over to catch his eyes, to make sure he knows I’m listening. He turns every plant into a lesson, and every walk into a small pilgrimage.

It’s peaceful. So peaceful I almost don’t trust it. Because it wasn’t always like that. We did go on walks. He did hand me sugarcane. The earth did smell that sweet. But more often, I walked with a clenched fist. I was angry on the outside, afraid beneath it, hungry for something I couldn’t name.

I held tightly to a resentment I’ve since forgotten, a kind of confusion, a hunger for something he couldn’t give. I’ve come to learn it wasn’t his fault. Now that he’s gone, the fist has changed shape. I still feel it tightening, only now it’s grasping at the memory itself, afraid that if I open my hand, he’ll vanish. Or worse, maybe one of the other memories will seep in.

His anger, that look of disappointment. My chest still speeds up just thinking about it.

Or maybe something even less forgiving, what if my mind brings back the hospice days? The smell. The look on his face. His bald head. The weakness in his arms. Even then, a trace of sweetness and the faint scent of sugar on his breath, though he hadn’t eaten for days.

His touch was tender and fragile, like he was already halfway gone. I remember standing there, feeling hopeless, wishing I could bring him back, and knowing I couldn’t.

Prayer confused me then, but I remember praying anyway. I stood in the backyard, right next to that sugarcane, and said “What you must do, do it quickly.” I realize now that was more of a command than a prayer. I am grateful God complied.

I don’t think I can go back there again. I need those days to stay gone.

Meister Eckhart once wrote:

“Whatever we cling to, we make small. Whatever we let go, we let become infinite.”

If that’s true, then maybe my father and I are both still trapped in the garden.
A garden isn’t a bad place to linger, but love ripens only when we let it fall back to the earth.

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The Polished Past

I can understand why we’d rather not see things as they are.

Psychologists call this idealization, the mind’s way of preserving attachment by editing memory. Studies show that after loss, we tend to remember relationships in gentler tones. It’s a kindness of the brain, a bias that keeps us feeling safe and still connected.

But it also keeps us stuck.
Each time I replay the sugarcane dream, I’m holding on to what was supposed to be rather than what was. Eckhart might say I’m turning memory into a possession, making it too small to contain God.

Maybe that is the deeper trouble. The impulse to possess, our need to hold people, stories, even the sacred itself, is the quietest enemy of the soul. What was meant to pass through, we keep trying to keep. Even the sacred. Especially the sacred.

Because we idealize more than our memories and more than people.
We idealize jobs, convincing ourselves that the one we left was the one that got away, forgetting the inbox dread and Sunday-night ache.
We idealize relationships, polishing the highlight reel while skipping the lonely silence in between.
And we idealize our own stories.
We script ourselves as the Christ of our personal gospels—the misunderstood savior, the one who sees clearly while everyone else plays the fool. But if we looked closer, we might realize our lives align more with the Pharisees who feared change, or the Roman soldiers trying to keep order or simply follow along.

Theologians call it spiritual inflation. Psychologists call it self-enhancement bias. Either way, it’s our refusal to admit we’re mixed creatures. We want purity more than paradox. And when the myth of perfection collapses, we swing to its opposite.

The Scum of the Earth Reflex

If I can’t be the saint, I’ll be the scum of the earth.
If I can’t be the healer, I’ll be the wound.

That’s my specialty. I can turn on myself faster than anyone I know.
Self-criticism feels like control. If I punish myself first, maybe I won’t be caught off guard again. But all it really does is deepen the despair.

Eckhart would say that’s another form of attachment, not to pleasure but to guilt.
We cling to self-hatred because at least it feels like something solid and justifiable.
Mercy, by contrast, feels like falling through air.

He once wrote, “Some people want to see God as they see a cow, for the milk and cheese they can get. But the soul that loves God for God’s sake lets God be God.”

Even if the word God doesn’t sit easily with us, the point still lands.
Most of us keep a clenched fist around whatever that word means, whether it is a Father, a mystery, or a story we can’t quite shake. We grip our definitions the way a child grips a toy, afraid that if we loosen our hold, the whole thing will disappear.

But maybe what vanishes isn’t God at all. Maybe it’s just the smallness of our idea.
Letting go is refusing both the hero story and the villain story.
It is unclenching the fist and allowing life, call it God, call it love, call it what you will, to be itself even in the mess.

The Body Remembers

Research on rumination and grief shows that idealized or vilified memories keep the nervous system in threat mode. The brain replays the loss as if it’s still happening. The body keeps releasing cortisol for a danger long gone.

Letting go isn’t erasing the past. It’s integrating it.
When we can name what happened without polishing or punishing it, the nervous system finally gets the message: we’re safe now.
Truth quiets the storm.

The Contemplative Way

Contemplative practice is the art of letting what arises, arise, and letting it pass.
This is Eckhart’s gelassenheit, his “letting-be.”

In silence, memories float up like bubbles in deep water.
We watch them shimmer and burst.
We stop gripping the garden, the job, the story, the identity.
Slowly, we trust that what falls away was never meant to stay.

And here’s the small miracle: the energy once trapped in grasping becomes compassion. I find myself softer with strangers, more patient with the people I once blamed. I’m more aware of the present moment and the fragility of relationships. The tenderness I kept for him begins to spill into everything else.

We begin to bless what once broke us, not because it was right, but because we’re finally free enough not to need it to be wrong.

Back to the Garden

I still dream of that garden. My father still peels the sugarcane, still hands me a piece.

Now, when I wake, I try not to hold him there. Sometimes my hand still closes before I even notice. Then I breathe and open it again. I let him go into the mystery that holds us both.

The sweetness is still real, even when it dissolves.
Maybe that’s what Eckhart meant:
letting go doesn’t end love. It makes it infinite.

And maybe Nouwen was right too. He wrote that as long as our hands are clenched, we cannot receive anything new.

So I open my hand. The sugarcane slips through.
The sweetness is finally free to dissolve into everything.

Closing Prayer Meditation

Here is a prayer I often turn to because it steadies my shaking hands.

Dear God,
I am so afraid to open my clenched fists!
Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?
Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?
Please help me to gradually open my hands
and to discover that I am not what I own,
but what you want to give me.”

―Henri J.M. Nouwen,The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life

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References (for readers who like footnotes with their gardens):

Boelen, P. A., & van den Bout, J. (2005). Complicated grief, depression, and anxiety as distinct postloss syndromes: A confirmatory factor analysis study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 162(11), 2175–2177. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.162.11.2175

Eckhart, M. (1981). The complete mystical works of Meister Eckhart (M. O’C. Walshe, Trans.). Crossroad. (Original works 13th–14th centuries)

Fraley, R. C., & Shaver, P. R. (1998). Loss and bereavement: Attachment theory and recent controversies concerning “grief work.” In J. H. Harvey (Ed.), Perspectives on loss: Toward an integrative framework (pp. 277–300). Taylor & Francis.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2000). The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109(3), 504–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.109.3.504

Sedikides, C., & Gregg, A. P. (2008). Self-enhancement: Food for thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(2), 102–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2008.00068.x

Beep. Beep. Beep.
The register scans your almond milk, your toothpaste, the protein bars you will forget by Tuesday.

The sound is steady, impersonal. The familiar music of purchase.

Do I really need all these Cheez-Its? Beep.

Another box of paper towels? Didn’t I just buy these? How many spills can one family possibly anticipate?
Beep.

What vegetable is that again? Arugula? Do I even know how to cook arugula, or am I just trying to look like someone who eats arugula?
Beep.

The woman ahead of me has thirty-six cans of sparkling water. I applaud her hydration plans. The guy behind me is buying beef jerky and incense. What hippie keto party is he going to? Everyone’s cart looks like a personality test we did not mean to take.

Beep.

The beeping grows louder. It’s so defining. It’s like I’m always either buying something, wanting to buy something, or worried about not being able to buy something.
Beep.

Somewhere mid-cart, the beeps begin to feel like a heartbeat.
A hospital monitor.
Beep. Beep. Beep…

If you listen closely, the register is announcing something about your aliveness—or your quiet dying.

Every item—batteries, berries, bread—is another small jolt of proof that you’re here, still moving through the world.

But maybe it is the opposite. Maybe the beeps are not telling us we are alive. Maybe they are counting us down.

“If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?”

— Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?

The Noise We Mistake for Life

I catch myself doing it all the time: filling the cart, filling the calendar, filling the air with sound.

A podcast on the drive. News alerts at checkout. A playlist called Morning Motivation streaming into my skull before the second coffee.

There seems to always be a soundtrack demanding I perform: the earnest shopper, the busy citizen, the aspiring sage who reads Merton during coffee breaks.

Noise feels like proof of life.

Speaking of Merton -

“Our being is silent, but our existence is noisy. It is in silence that we find life.”— Thomas Merton, The Springs of Contemplation

I tell myself I am comfortable with silence, but there are days when the loneliness seeps in and I fear that silence might mean I have disappeared. If there isn’t a soundtrack, how do I perform?

What’s the soundtrack of your life?

Is it a war march, a marketing jingle, a lullaby you forgot the words to?

We live in a culture where noise = life, having = life, performing = life. We call it “wanting more out of life,” but usually it’s just more in life—more objects, opinions, hustle.
More. More. More.
Beep. Beep. Beep.

What if the deeper invitation, the one our bodies and souls are starving for, is less?

The Gospel of Less

Most religions tell some version of the same story — the gospel of less.
Different languages, same invitation: to set down what we clutch so that life can hold us again.

Buddha called it non-attachment. The Hindus call it vairāgya, acting without clinging to results. In Islam, it’s zuhd—the simplicity that keeps the heart soft to God. The Taoists talk about wu wei, the way of doing less so that life can move through you. And Judaism builds it right into the week: Sabbath, a holy un-doing, a pause from proving and producing.

And then there’s the Christian story of the rich young ruler.
He’s not a villain. He’s earnest, devout, probably better behaved than most of us. He wants eternal life. He’s done everything right.

Jesus looks at him—Mark says, “and loves him”—and then offers the invitation no one wants: “Go, sell what you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Not because wealth is evil, but because attachment is. Jesus doesn’t shame ambition; he redefines abundance.

Maybe holiness begins right here, in the checkout line, when we notice what we reach for without hunger.

The treasure isn’t in the having.
It’s in the letting go.
It’s in the leaving.

You lack one thing: less.

Meister Eckhart’s Counterbeat

Meister Eckhart, the 13th-century mystic, called detachment—abegescheidenheit—“the supreme virtue.”

He wrote that a detached soul “should be as free as a mountain of lead, unmoved by a breeze.” For him, freedom wasn’t getting what you want; it was no longer needing to.

Eckhart’s paradox is radical: Once a person has let go of himself, then he has really let go.
The shedding isn’t just of stuff but of identity because the self that must always prove, perform, and possess.

Detachment isn’t numbness. It’s spaciousness—the room where God can breathe again.

Across centuries, mystics have been humming the same quiet tune.
It’s hidden in John of the Cross “the dark night.”
tucked away in Thomas Merton’s “hidden wholeness.”
and in what Simone Weil called pure attention “prayer.”

All of them whisper the same refrain:
Less, less, less.

The Science of Less

Modern psychology agrees with the mystics.

A 2021 review of 23 studies found a consistent link between voluntary simplicity—intentionally reducing consumption or commitment, and higher well-being (Hook et al., Journal of Positive Psychology). People who live with less report less anxiety and more meaning.

There’s a caveat, though: simplicity heals only when it’s chosen, not forced. Poverty imposed by injustice doesn’t sanctify; it wounds. The research shows minimalism helps most when the letting-go is internally motivated, when you give up not because you must, but because you’re free to.

Maybe that’s the real test of freedom—not just how we simplify our lives, but how we imagine strength itself. Because even our faith traditions get noisy. The urge to prove, to defend, to win—it sneaks into our prayers and our politics just the same.

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The Warrior Ethos Soundtrack

Another soundtrack blares across American Christianity: the warrior march.
“Take back the nation.”
“Reclaim the culture.”
“Stand firm.”

The metaphors of conquest and dominance have become the chorus of Christian nationalism—empire logic wrapped in worship lyrics.

The irony is painful. The Christ who refused the sword, who rode a donkey instead of a warhorse, has been repackaged as a general in a culture war.

But what if the opposite of “Onward Christian Soldier” isn’t cowardice: it’s surrender?
Not resignation, but radical relinquishment. The mystics would call that freedom, and I think Jesus would recognize that a lot more than this “so-called” warrior ethos soundtrack.

The revolution we need might not be a flag to wave, but a sword to lay down.

How tragic it is that they who have nothing to express are continually expressing themselves, like nervous gunners, firing burst after burst of ammunition into the dark, where there is no enemy…. They confound their lives with noise. They stun their own ears with meaningless words, never discovering that their hearts are rooted in a silence that is not death but life. They chatter themselves to death, fearing life as if it were death.

—Thomas Merton

So, enough already with this noise that calls itself courage—this drumming of shields where hearts should be listening. Maybe the real bravery now is to lower the flag, unclench the fist, and move with the kind of strength that heals instead of conquers.

Silence as a Heartbeat

In my own life, transformation hasn’t come through victories but vanishings.
The job that ended.
The prayer that dried up.
The moment I could no longer perform my way into worth.

Each one felt like a small death.
Each one cracked me open to something truer.

So I ask again:
What’s the soundtrack of your life?
Do you know how it sounds when the register stops, when the heart monitor goes flat?

It’s terrifying at first, but underneath the silence, something gentler appears:

The sound of being itself.

The Pulse of Enough

Maybe the gospel we need isn’t “more.”
It’s “enough.”

Meister Eckhart said: “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.”
That’s not just theology; it’s medicine.

Beep. Beep. Beep.
The cart is empty now. The monitor is quiet.

At first, it feels like loss.
Then you realize: this isn’t death.
It’s the sound of being alive.

If you found a bit of yourself in these words, consider sharing or subscribing. That’s how this work finds its people.

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I’ve long felt that mystics, comedians, and psychotherapists are three variations of the same calling. They point toward what is hidden, offering whatever mystery they have managed to untangle for our good, and in doing so they wake us. Comedians wake us with laughter. Sometimes their words sting, sometimes they simply surprise, but the best of them help us grow and keep us safe. They are alarms in the dark, like a smoke detector flashing relentlessly in a room thick with fumes—unyielding, urgent, impossible to dismiss. As the air grows heavy and the fire presses in, their warnings shake us from our haze, breaking through the comfort we cling to and propelling us into the hard clarity we would rather resist but desperately need to rattle us awake.

That is why it matters when the alarms are silenced. When Jimmy Kimmel is suspended for a monologue, or when Jon Stewart’s show ends amid disputes about what topics are safe to cover, or when Stephen Colbert faces calls for cancellation over political satire, these are not just media squabbles. They aren’t just the latest signs of a crumbling democracy. They are spiritual dangers. These are the jesters in the king’s court, the prophets with microphones instead of scrolls. They go where the rest of us cannot, naming truths too heavy for polite conversation. Their superpower is to get us laughing and in an instant pivot us from haha to aha, and just like that we have a new way of seeing the world. When they are gagged, we are not just losing jokes. We are losing one of the last cultural spaces where hypocrisy can be mocked, illusions dismantled, and power forced to squirm.

Take the topic of race in America. Nowhere has this prophetic role been more vital. Race in America has always needed prophets. Not the ones in suits at podiums, but the ones in smoky clubs, hot lights in their eyes, with a crowd hungry for laughter and truth. While politicians polished promises and pundits spun sugar into narrative, comics stood up and said the things everyone else swallowed.

The language wasn’t polite. Sometimes it was jagged, offensive even. But truth rarely arrives in polite packaging. Jesus himself called the religious elite a “brood of vipers.” Not because he enjoyed the sting of cruelty, but because sometimes only venom cuts through the armor of denial.

On that note, can you imagine Jesus as a stand-up comic? It would be divine. (Sorry.)

See?!? That’s why we need the greats. Richard Pryor stood at the edge of his pain and turned it into laughter, naming police brutality when few dared. His “police chokehold” routine in Live in Concert (1979) was more than a joke; it was a lament, a howl disguised as humor. Pryor forced America to see what it refused to see: a country so callous it could weigh lives differently based on skin color. Chris Rock continued that legacy, carving America’s racial contradictions into unforgettable soundbites attacking racial injustice in ways that cut like a mystic’s koans disguised as comedy (Bring the Pain, 1996; Tamborine, 2018). And perhaps the most searing moment in recent years, Dave Chappelle’s 8:46 (2020), where he dropped comedy altogether to deliver something closer to a sermon, grief-soaked truth-telling in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In many ways, Dave is still carrying the torch Richard Pryor lit decades ago, and the fact that it still burns so hot is less a tribute to comedy than an indictment of our refusal to learn.

And then there is George Carlin.

If Chappelle’s lament was a sermon, Carlin’s fury was demolition.

If Pryor turned pain into laughter, Carlin turned anger into clarity. He was not just making us laugh, he was detonating illusions. His famous “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” routine was never really about profanity, it was about power. Who gets to decide which words are allowed? Who decides what can be spoken out loud and what must remain unspoken? Carlin was not obsessed with swear words, he was obsessed with the machinery of censorship itself, with the absurdity of a culture that polices syllables while letting violence and corruption run unchecked. He was the demolition crew, tearing down the polite facades so we could see the scaffolding of control underneath.

That fight is not relic or nostalgia, it is here. As a professor, my forbidden list now includes not Carlin’s seven, but words like “culture,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “equity.” The only thing dirty about these words is the attempt to censor them. There is nothing more offensive than the fact that we can no longer talk about racism and discrimination without someone slapping a hand over our mouths. Carlin showed us the absurdity of banning curse words while letting cruelty run free. Today we are banning the very words that could help us name and heal our cruelty.

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If Carlin’s stage was a wrecking ball, Jon Stewart’s desk was a scalpel. With a wry smile and raised eyebrow, he sliced through political spin night after night, cutting until the absurdity lay bare. He didn’t pretend to be neutral; he pretended to be human in a media landscape that had forgotten how. Stephen Colbert, in his early Colbert Report years, took that scalpel and turned it into satire as high-wire mysticism, inhabiting a blustering pundit so perfectly that the real pundits sometimes missed the joke. Later, as a late-night host, he carried the torch with warmth and wit, showing that truth could still sneak into millions of living rooms through a monologue. And even Jimmy Kimmel, who began with pure comedy, has had moments when laughter cracked into lament: tears in his eyes after the Las Vegas shooting, or his raw advocacy for children’s health care, reminding us that comedians don’t just deliver punchlines; sometimes they carry our collective grief when we cannot bear to speak it ourselves. Night after night, the blue glow of late-night televisions became its own kind of town square, where jokes doubled as news bulletins.

They didn’t try to win arguments. They tried to help us see the absurdity—and laugh, even if the laugh caught in our throats. They weren’t offering talking points. They were offering themselves. Their humanity.

These hosts are not perfect prophets, no prophet ever is, but in a culture where politicians rehearse lies and corporations script narratives, it matters that we still have public jesters with enough reach, wit, and courage to tell a bit of the truth.

The mystic’s job, whether cloaked in robes or wrapped in profanity, has always been to drag hidden truths into the light. Meister Eckhart risked charges of heresy to talk about a God found in silence rather than cathedrals. James Baldwin, who called himself a witness, insisted that America could not heal until it faced its lies. Carl Jung, sitting with patients in Zurich, warned that the greatest danger was not neurosis but unconsciousness, the things we refuse to see about ourselves. Different uniforms, same vocation, they were all trying to unmask illusions before the illusions killed us.

Which is why the gagging of comedians, or mystics, or therapists, is never just about controlling a few voices. It is about keeping the rest of us from waking up. When the jesters are silenced, the whole kingdom dozes off. And history has never been kind to kingdoms that sleep through their alarms. The silence may begin with a late-night monologue cut short, but it ends with an entire people forgetting how to laugh, how to grieve, and how to tell the truth out loud. This is how kingdoms, nations, and our communities die: silence.

So maybe the first rebellion is as small as it is holy: to laugh when the world wants us hushed, to speak when silence feels safer, to resist the sleep history keeps warning us about. Because the question isn’t only whether comedians will be silenced. It’s whether we will. Each of us carries a little stage, a little microphone. Maybe not with hot lights and a crowd, maybe just at the dinner table, in a boardroom, or on a walk with a friend. The call is the same: don’t let that stage go quiet. Listen for the prophets in our midst—especially the ones who arrive with punchlines—and let their courage summon our own. Laugh. Lament. Tell the truth. Wake somebody up.

And so, may we not be silent.
May we have the courage to listen when voices rise with laughter and lament.
May we laugh when laughter feels dangerous.
May we grieve when grief feels inconvenient.
May we tell the truth, even when it trembles in our throats.
And may we find the courage to speak now, before someone decides our words are too dangerous to be spoken.

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I went back and re-watched Dave Chappelle’s 8:46 while writing this, and it still reverberates with the same raw power it carried the first time I saw it. It’s free on youtube. Viewer discretion advised.

Also, consider subscribing, hitting like, and/or posting a comment- maybe share your favorite bit of comedy with us? :)

You hear it before you see it. The rails rattling, the metal screaming, the gut-deep vibration of something too heavy to stop. The trolley is coming.

Here’s the situation: Ahead are five people tied to the tracks. To your left: a lever. If you pull it, the trolley will swerve to a side track where one person is tied. Five or one, one or five. Do you pull the lever?

Congratulations. You’ve just been cast in Philosophy 101’s favorite horror story: the trolley problem.

Pull the lever, one dies.
Do nothing, five die.
Math disguised as morality.

The answer might seem obvious: from a utilitarian point of view, you save five, lose one. But what if that one was your grandma? Not the mean one who scolded you for not wearing the bunny suit she bought you last Christmas. The sweet grandma. The one who smelled like potpourri, attic dust, and a hint of baby powder. The one who always had hard candy in her purse. You didn’t care that the candy was a few holidays past its prime and covered in pocket lint. It was the thought that counted, and she always had sweet thoughts.

Do you actually want to kill sweet grandma?!?

Surely you’d rather flatten the five strangers. For all you know they’re racist scoundrels, thieves, or CrossFit guys trying to sell you on macros. Let the trolley have them. Unless, of course, they’re Girl Scouts—mean Girl Scouts—threatening to break your legs if you don’t buy Thin Mints. Tiny but tough.

Would you run over mean Girl Scouts to save grandma?

Choices are messy. Even the word decide shares its root with homicide and suicide. It means to kill. Decisions kill, and in some cases, decisions kill grandmas.

Regardless of the situation, the bottom line is that if you’ve ever stood in front of a real-life lever, you know it isn’t the numbers that keep you awake at night. The Trolley Experiment is clever as a classroom puzzle, but life is rarely that tidy. Most days the tracks are foggy, the ropes invisible, and the lever sticky with somebody else’s sweaty fingerprints.

And the whole time you’re thinking: Why isn’t anyone asking about the psychopath tying people to the tracks?

That’s the trick of the trolley problem. It shrinks reality into a false binary, and you’ve met this trick before. Many of us grew up in households fluent in those binaries. The world was always wheat or chaff, sheep or goats, innocent or dirty. Sorting was our spiritual sport. Sermons promised clarity: who’s in, who’s out, what’s saved, what’s damned. Only later did we realize it was more complicated. It was easy to condemn someone to hell while ignoring their humanity and your own shadow. But we are much more complicated than a duality. And a life of sorting always leaves half of life out. You amputate parts of yourself and shrink the world you live in.

I don’t believe life was meant to be lived this way. I agree with Fr. Richard Rohr: everything belongs.

Which brings me to Kirk. And not just the one you’re thinking of from all the non-stop news coverage. I’m talking about all Kirks, but especially Captain James T. Kirk.

In Star Trek, Captain Kirk hated losing. In the academy he was faced with the Kobayashi Maru. It sounds like the most delicious sushi at a Japanese steakhouse but really it isn’t. It was a simulation where the whole point was to teach humility. The Starfleet cadet faces a no-win scenario, lives are lost no matter what choice you make. It was a real-life trolley experiment, but with a starship, which makes it cooler. In the end, you’re supposed to sit with the defeat, to learn that command means carrying death on your shoulders.

But Kirk didn’t settle for a lever. He chose to re-write the program. He hacked the system so the no-win scenario became winnable. When accused of cheating, he smirked: “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

May we all have the faith of the good Captain Kirk.

If you watch the news, it seems all we have left in this world are no-win scenarios. The way stories are framed, we’re always standing at a lever. Here are your tracks, here are your victims, here is your impossible choice. One side is saintly, one side monstrous. Do you mourn or condemn? Do you side with compassion or with order? Do you pull or not pull? Saint or villain? With us or against us? Do you mourn him, or condemn him?

We have to learn to hack the system because this lever is garbage and reality is bigger and more beautiful.

As Howard Thurman said, “the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields.” Which is to say that even by the tracks: a violet opens its purple mouth in the ditch. The sun paints gold across your kitchen table while you argue with the news. A friend holds your hand at the hospital, and you realize tenderness still exists in this bruised world. These aren’t decorations. They’re sacraments. They remind us life is worth saving, even when it looks unsalvageable.

And perhaps this is worth remembering when thinking about all Kirks.

You can mourn without canonizing. You can critique without dehumanizing. You can grieve a death and still argue fiercely with the world that person represented.

And you don’t have to do any of this.

Years of programming make this hard to see. But there is still the question: where is the backdoor, the hack, the code we can rewrite?

I believe the answer is in a non-dual view of the world.

Fr. Richard defines non-dual thinking as the grace to hold opposites together without collapsing them into winners and losers. He often uses the wheat-and-chaff image from Christian scripture, not as a sorting of good people vs. bad people, but as interior realities. Each of us carries both wheat and chaff, truth and illusion, love and fear. The fire that “burns the chaff” is not punishment but liberation, a burning away of what is false so that what is true can remain. Dualistic stories (light/dark, wheat/chaff, sheep/goats) are a necessary starting point, Rohr says, but the goal is to move beyond rigid binaries into seeing the sacred in all things.

To realize that everything belongs. Even wheat. Even chaff. Even our enemies. Even the parts of ourselves that tremble at the lever. Everything.

But to be clear, belonging does not mean blessing. It does not mean that violence, hatred, or cruelty are good. It means refusing to run to our camps, our quick binaries of saint or villain, blessing or cursing. Belonging is about staying in the tension long enough to be changed by it.

So if you hated everything Charlie Kirk stood for, you may still grieve for a wife who lost her husband and children who lost their dad. And if you loved him, you may resist canonizing him and instead face the tragedy of gun violence that stole your hero. In both cases, the tension itself belongs — not to excuse, not to divide, but to invite us into a deeper love, even for our enemies.

And maybe holding that tension moves us to see the wider picture. To notice the children shot in Colorado that very same day. To remember the long line of schoolchildren killed in classrooms across this country. To recall former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived her shooting and has carried that scar into a public cry for change. Belonging means refusing to look away. It presses us to widen our grief until it includes the ones we disagree with, the ones we never knew, and the ones we still have time to save.

A non-dual view of the world hacks the system by resisting the violence we do when we try to create a false binary and calculate life (and lives) as units. That cost is incalculable. Suffering, trauma, impossible choices, guilt: none can be contained in categories or balanced in an equation. If we try to calculate, we remain trapped in despair or self-justification. This is the violence of abstraction. If we are always evaluating and looking for the “right” answer we lose out on love, on union, on wholeness, and on the possibilities for real change.

The lever is not the whole story.

Nonduality is considered an operating system upgrade, a rewiring of perception where heart is over head and instead of standing outside reality, sorting it into piles, you experience from within the wholeness. We can get to this non-dual place through contemplative practice: Meditation, Centering prayer, mindfulness, breath prayer, whatever name you give it, they train the heart to slip out of the binary script.

When you notice the mind running, release it, return to silence, again and again. You will soon realize you are not pulling levers automatically anymore. You are rewriting the code. You are choosing a contemplative path where wisdom arises not through calculation, but through union with Love, Compassion, Awareness itself.

Psychological research shows this repeatedly. Contemplative practice is transformative. It helps open up pathways. It gives us hope in these hopeless no-win situations.

Contemplative practice makes us more hopeful. It opens the imagination to see paths where none seemed possible, and gives us the courage to walk them. Hope steadies us in no-win moments, helping us rise when life knocks us down. But hope is not just abstract psychology. It is nourished by beauty. Because beauty is what keeps hope from withering. A non-dual contemplative way of looking at the world opens the pathways to beauty, to hope, to resilience, and even to mercy and self-forgiveness.

The trolley will keep coming. Life will keep handing us levers. But we are not doomed to play the game as written. We can practice non-dual seeing. We can hack the simulation through meditation. We can cling to beauty as the proof that hope is not naïve. Sometimes levers must be pulled, but let that be our choice, not our impulse. Let us see ourselves, and the situation as it is, and choose who we will be as we pull the lever. Let us pull the lever knowing we are not perfect, and we need mercy, and we need self-compassion and maybe forgiveness. And let us choose to offer the same to the world: being compassionate, keeping people accountable, saving lives, loving well, suffering wisely, holding this pain without letting it break us.

And if all else fails, we can borrow a little from Captain Kirk: a smirk at the false binary, a refusal of the no-win scenario, and the stubborn belief that, even in the middle of screeching metal and impossible choices, everything belongs.

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Courage will now be your best defence against the storm that is at hand-—that and such hope as I bring.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

The last two essays I wrote were about courage, which means I’m now legally obligated to write a third one, because everyone knows once you’ve got two, you’ve stumbled into a trilogy. And with trilogies, the pressure is real. The third one is supposed to tie it all together, the moment where every thread gets pulled tight. But if we’re honest, it’s usually the second act that outshines the rest.

The Empire Strikes Back gave us the greatest plot twist of all time, and The Two Towers gave us Helm’s Deep—a battle so epic it permanently raised the bar for cinematic battles. Second installments get to deepen the darkness and sharpen the stakes. The third installment isn’t just another chapter; it’s the one that either ties the thread or sags into a limp epilogue nobody asked for.

That’s the pressure of a trilogy: to stop winking and finally go for the heart.

So, let’s go for the heart.

The courage story we have been telling is the story of us. Many of us have been running scared, hiding behind facades, aching to know what is ours to do yet shrinking from it. The weight of it all leaves us hollow.

From that hollow place, we often reach for outrage, a kind of pseudo-courage, because real courage feels too far away.

Still, as Tolkien wrote, courage is found in unlikely places.

Which is why, as the curtain rises on this third act, the cast of our battle stands revealed.

First comes you, the courageous reader. Bruised, heart pounding, gripping a chipped IKEA sword that wobbles in your hand but gleams all the same. Stomach growling from a mixture of fear and not enough protein this morning. Your heart thumps with rage and anticipation, waiting to exhale.

And across the field: your red-hat Sauron. Not only a man, but a weather system, stitched together from fear, division, despair.

His weapons? Fear and Shame. Shame and Fear. Old as empires, quick as breath, aimed straight at the heart.

He hurls them like fireballs, shrinks hearts with them, builds armies with them. Shame and fear settle into a body before the mind can name the ache.

But since this is the trilogy capstone, let’s be even more clear.

Shame and Fear are timeless tools, sharpened and wielded anew by President Donald J. Trump, who bends them into words, stretching crime statistics until they loom like monsters at the edge of the bed.

But the numbers themselves tell a quieter story.

In 1980, when cassette tapes rattled in glove compartments and payphones swallowed quarters, the U.S. murder rate stood at 10.2 per 100,000.

By 2015—after the screech of dial-up had given way to glowing screens in every palm—that number had been cut in half, down to 4.9.

Even in 2020, masked faces at grocery stores, fear thick in the air, the rate rose only to 7.8—still below the blood-soaked peaks of the early eighties.

And today? The FBI says murders fell nearly 15% in 2024. Mid-2025 city data shows another 17% decline.

Which is to say: the statistics keep whispering, keep lowering their voices, while fear keeps shouting through a bullhorn.

And it works because fear has never needed truth. Fear only needs repetition. Fear only needs your nervous system.

Shame moves quieter, but its blade is just as sharp.

Shame slithers into language — animals, rapists, bad hombres. Not spoken for clarity, but for scorch. Words that redraw human faces into caricatures, shadows stripped of tenderness.

I never thought I would hear political leaders ridicule empathy, but here we are. Compassion has been rebranded as a toxin, the supposed poison of America. The translation is chilling: if you care, you are the problem. As if our first duty is to numb the heart before making any decision, as if a callous choice is safer than a compassionate one. Some call this guarding against “untethered empathy,” but the answer is not to banish the heart. The answer is to be in relationship with it, listening without being swallowed and letting tenderness steady us instead of distort us.

Without that steadying force of tenderness and empathy, the tactics collapse into grotesque comedy. Caught in a lie, he insults the one who noticed. Unmasked, he shames the witness for seeing. Straight out of The Emperor Has No Clothes.
Only here, when we point out the nakedness, he doesn’t blush. He pivots, sneering: You’re the filthy ones. You’re obsessed with my naked orange body.

And for that, I apologize. Truly. You did not ask to picture Donald J. Trump’s unclothed body this morning. Some horrors belong in Mordor.

Analysts call it the “firehose of falsehood.” I think it’s a flood: a torrent of lies, high-pressure, unrelenting. Sprayed across every surface until our shoes squelch and our skin puckers and we begin to forget what dry ground feels like.

And the effect is devastating. Soaked long enough in contradiction, a people may decide that truth itself cannot be known. And when nothing can be trusted, when even reality feels slippery, discourse dies.

Yet even in that silence, when fear and shame sound loudest, a person can still remember the feel of steady ground beneath their feet, can still choose to listen for the quieter voice of the heart. We can still reach for each other.

In the sensory ruin of shame and fear, the flood washes away the footholds of communal reality. We forget, even as alarms ring across our screens, that we are fragile, mortal, tethered to each other by breath. This is a dangerous condition. If we forget each other, if we give up on ourselves, all that remains is conformity to the insidious. Love gets scrambled. Kindness disappears. Hope vanishes. And cowardice keeps us alive just long enough to become the villain, shouting our own set of lies to the enemy, to our families, to ourselves.

But despair is never the whole story.

Even in ruins, an ember smolders, small, stubborn, carrying the memory of fire, the promise of dawn.

To win this battle, we must remember the words of James Finley: that we not play the cynic, and that we keep faith with the sincerity of our awakened hearts.

Which is exactly what courage itself has been whispering all along.
The word comes from the Latin cor: the heart.

Many mistake courage for fearlessness, but it’s not. It is staying true to your heart even when fear rattles your armor.

The opposite of courage is not fear.
The opposite of courage is conformity.

Courage invites you to stop hiding in the crowd. To stop running from the monsters. To step out into the light and live faithfully, not conforming to the pattern of this world. So, when the world is spewing forth toxic lies about who we are and how we should be, we must summon courage to push back, because when we are flooded with shame, we reinforce our conformity.

Shame tells us there is something inherently wrong with us. It scolds us for thinking critically, for daring to imagine differently, and it corners us until we surrender hope.

Shame kills courage, not with a single blow, but with patient precision. It’s an assassin moving freely because no one names the bodies it leaves behind.

We’ve trained ourselves to wield shame like a teaching tool. We call it toughness. We tell boys to man up. We reward men who sneer at tenderness. We warn women that vulnerability is weakness. We build classrooms, churches, boardrooms, even families, on ridicule, mockery, and “walking it off.” Then we baptize it as strength.

But it isn’t strength. It’s shame in armor strutting around like it’s courage.

Steve Magness names it clearly: real toughness “is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action”

Psychology backs this: narcissism, the chest-thumping need to look invulnerable, is rooted in shame. Jung called shame “a soul-eating emotion.” Rollo May, in The Courage to Create, insisted that the only path forward is to face our anxiety, not mask it. Brené Brown says it even sharper: “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”

Which means our cultural idol of toughness is no virtue at all. It is only shame dressed up in armor, strutting about as if it were courage.

And shame, always, everywhere, kills courage.

So the question comes: what will you carry into this battle?

Finley whispers: I will not play the cynic. I will not break faith with my awakened heart.

May insists: The opposite of courage is not cowardice—it is conformity.

And O’Donohue, always blessing, always singing, prays: May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love.

Your armor isn’t fearlessness. It’s fidelity.
Your sword isn’t bravado. It’s authenticity.

Courage is refusing to laugh at cruelty. Refusing to bow to shame. Refusing to silence your heart.

And courage spreads. Like a battle cry across the ramparts, one act of defiance against shame can rouse an army. Social psychology confirms it: when even one person resists group conformity, the spell cracks. Helm’s Deep turns. And the thing about Helm’s Deep is it changed how we imagine battles, not just brute-force victory, but survival as hope carried through the night. Dawn glimmers.

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So… picture this: you on the wall, palms sweating, knees unsteady, wishing you had packed a sandwich because battles are long and blood sugar is real. Your heart drums too fast in your chest. Shame-boulders slam into the stone.

Across the field, the voice roars: You’re not enough. Run. Toughen up. Conform.

And something quieter rises. Not a shout, not even words at first. More like breath. More like the pulse in your wrists. And then, almost ridiculously, like a whisper passed from one stubborn soul to another: Hold.

Shame only wins if you hand it the keys to your heart. And a faithful heart, trembling though it is, does not yield.

Dictators, narcissists, patriarchs—all rely on the same spell: convince you that tenderness is weakness, that kindness is failure, that shame is the glue holding society together.

But psychology, neuroscience, and the mystics converge here: a shamed people cannot heal. A courageous people can.

Fear and shame are cheap weapons. They flare hot, fast, and leave nothing but ash. But courage is stubborn. Heart-rooted. Human.

And here’s the final twist of the trilogy: courage does not slay the dragon in one blow. It keeps you standing long enough for dawn to break.

The credits may roll, but the story goes on — and it begins again each time you choose the heart. Each act of faithfulness, each refusal of shame, is how the spell is broken.

Courage does not make you invincible. It makes you human. It makes you tender. It makes you true.

And once you are faithful to that heart, the night cannot last.

Dawn glimmers.

Hope rises.

Love endures.

Roll Credits

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Closing Meditation

But trilogies are never really the end. After the credits roll, we stumble into the next morning.

In the shadowed hours, one of the poems I return to is Howard Thurman’s Life Goes On. He writes of the earth steadying itself, of life persisting even through endings—that ache and assurance in the same breath. I keep it close the way you might keep a candle stub in your pocket—small, ordinary, but ready to be lit when the night deepens. I offer it here as a meditation. Life Goes On

Notes & Sources

• FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics data confirm homicide rates today remain well below the 1980 peak of 10.2 per 100,000, despite recent spikes. Murders declined nearly 15% in 2024 and another 17% in early 2025 (BJS, 2010; FBI, 2024; Council on Criminal Justice, 2023).

• RAND researchers coined the term “firehose of falsehood” for high-volume, contradictory propaganda (Paul & Matthews, 2016).

• Scholars warn such tactics foster cynicism, eroding the possibility of shared truth (Yablokov, 2015).

• Elon Musk, in a February 2025 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” describing it as a civilizational flaw ripe for exploitation (The Guardian, 2025; Inkstick Media, 2025).

• Christian nationalist writers such as Joe Rigney have likewise branded “untethered empathy” as a sin, framing it as manipulative rather than virtuous (Vox, 2023).

• James Finley counsels: “I will not play the cynic. I will not break faith with my awakened heart” (The Healing Path, 2023).

• Rollo May: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity” (Man’s Search for Himself, 1953/2009).

• Carl Jung called shame “a soul-eating emotion” (Collected Works, 1954/1989).

• Brené Brown: “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change” (Daring Greatly, 2012).

• Steve Magness contrasts false toughness with the real thing: the capacity to stay present with discomfort (Do Hard Things, 2022).

• John O’Donohue blesses us: “May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love” (To Bless the Space Between Us, 2008).

• Solomon Asch’s classic conformity experiments show how even one dissenter breaks the spell (Scientific American, 1955).