Today, I’m grateful for all the readers and subscribers who make it possible for me to live the kind of life I want to live. I don’t work for a big media company. I don’t enjoy to status of a global brand. I live by my wits and my labor and by my own rules – and that is a miracle.

So thank for you for making this possible. Without your support and encouragement – and your criticism! – I couldn’t do any of this. It takes a village to publish a newsletter. There’s a community here, and I expect that community to grow as we face trying times ahead. 

For now, I want to share with you an excerpt of a book I came across. It’s not about politics, but this passage captures the essence of my politics, which is to say, the reason why I write and try so hard to communicate with people about things that matter to everyone. 

Written and edited by Andrew Harvey, and published in 1996, the book is titled The Essential Mystics: The Soul’s Journey into Truth. It’s a survey of the mystical, or “liberal,” traditions of the world’s religions.

Like I said, it’s not about politics, far from it, but everything I do comes from the essential teaching that I learned while sitting at my grandmother’s knee in Sunday School. That essence has stayed with me over the years. She would never have called it mystical, but I think it is. We are all given this one precious gift of life. In that, we are truly all created equal. All of us, as my grandma would say, are God’s children.

Thank you!

From [the mystics] we came to know that what any authentic mystical opening brings us is a sense of wonder, a freedom from time’s fury and anxiety, and a growing revelation of a far larger and more marvelous universe and a far vaster Identity than anything we could begin to intuit with our ordinary senses and consciousness. When we are touched by mystic grace and allow ourselves to enter its field without fear, we see that we are all parts of a whole, elements of a universal harmony, unique, essential and sacred notes in a divine music that everyone and everything is playing together with us in God and for God. And if we work patiently with what we come to know, through prayer and meditation and loving service to other beings, we will, all the traditions promise us, come to understand what Christ meant when he said, “The Kingdom of heaven is within you,” and what Sultan Valad, Rumi’s son, is trying to transmit to us when he writes, “A human being must be born twice. Once from his mother and again from his own body and his own existence. The body is like an egg and the essence of man must become a bird in that egg through the warmth of love, and then he must go beyond his body and fly in the eternal world of the soul.”