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Friday, 27 February 2026
On this day of your life
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I believe God wants you to know ... ... that there is
no need to be afraid. Even if you were to die right now,
there would be no need to be afraid. This life, this
wonderful life, is on your side. This universe, this wonderful
universe, is in your corner, supporting all of life. This God,
this wonderful God, places Divine wisdom and power in
your hands. Trust that. Use it.
And let it give you strength. Right now. This day. |
Embrace Your Personal Power (OM)
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On Walking, Monks, & a Love that Started in Hot Springs.
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A Love That Walks—as Monks Reach Washington, I Remember How We Began in Hot Springs
My husband and I were driving back north after getting engaged. We had fallen in love months earlier when he was in Chicago for the summer. One night, we stayed up talking until morning and never stopped. After that, I flew to Austin every month.
In November, he proposed.
In December, I flew down to drive with him back to Chicago to start our new life together.
We decided to stop in Hot Springs for the evening. We were engaged and married a few weeks later, making it feel like a pre-honeymoon. A pause before everything moved forward. We chose the Arlington Resort, directly across the street from the entrance to Hot Springs National Park. My husband had stayed there once before, arriving late and leaving early, never having the opportunity to explore the area.
We arrived late, just before the kitchen closed. My husband was in pain, already living with what would later require surgery. I was in an autoimmune flare, my insomnia relentless, my nervous system buzzing like it had nowhere to put the energy.
Walking has always been my medicine.
When my body will not rest, I move it.
But my husband needed rest. As he rested in our tiny hundred-year-old hotel room, I walked the hotel. I didn’t know the area and didn’t want to leave the building, so I wandered the long hallways of the Arlington. Up and down staircases, getting my steps in until sleep was possible.
I woke early the next day, still feeling the buzz. I told my then-fiancé that I was off on an adventure to find us some breakfast. As I walked out of the front door of the hotel, I could not believe it: The Hot Springs National Park was directly across the street.
I grabbed our breakfast and headed back to ask him how he did not know this information, and that I needed to walk.
So, I packed up my gear and walked.
I walked all the way up the mountain, letting my legs take over, rather than my thoughts which usually insist on control. When I reached the top, I went higher, riding the tower up to see the whole place laid out beneath me. Then I followed the hot springs back down, tracing the water as it disappeared into storm drains and stone and old buildings, into history and ingenuity, until it led me back toward our hotel.
The Arlington is old and solid, built in the early 1920s, designed around the hot springs themselves. The earth’s heat runs through it, warming the building the same way it has for generations. The hotel does not fight the springs. It works with them.
That night, when I knew he was resting, I walked the hotel again, this time being a little more brazen, slipping into open rooms and walking around the pool. I found my way into parts of the old spa they had left accessible, spaces build around geothermal power way before we had language for sustainability. It amazes me how they were able to pump steam through the walls, redirecting heat.
Energy borrowed, not extracted.
I was wide awake. My body hummed. I kept thinking about how much people understood back then—how to harness the earth’s power without draining it, how to design around what already existed instead of forcing something new into place. It amazes me that we figured this out long before modern technology, and how easily we have ignored it since.
The next day, the mountain felt almost empty. I headed out again to walk the promenade. I walked it again and again, pretending I was there a hundred years ago.
Before dinner, I told my husband he had to go see the hot springs with me, that we had the whole mountain to ourselves. I would not stop talking about how empty it had been all day. Then my husband stepped outside with me…and a bus pulled up.
A group of tourists, including monks (or so we were told), stepped off and moved toward the springs.
Several of them removed their shoes and placed their bare feet directly into the water. I could not keep my hand in that water for more than a second. It was scalding, alive. I remember wanting my husband to feel it too—to understand just how hot it was and so that he could grasp how extraordinary it was that they could sit there with their bare feet in it.
They sat peacefully, as if they knew something we didn’t.
We did not interrupt. We exchanged simple pleasantries and quiet smiles. Their presence changed the air. It was strange, actually. I don’t really have an explanation for how it felt, only that we both sensed it—an overwhelming calm.
A shared stillness.
It was wonderful and weird.
I remember very clearly thinking that this was a good way to begin a life together.
As I watched the 19 Buddhist Monks arrive in Washington, D.C., the memory of our trip flooded me. The monks led by Bhikkhu Pannakara walked from Texas to D.C. on a spiritual journey to promote peace, love, compassion and mindfulness. They arrived in the capital in a quiet single-file line with crowds gathered all along the route.
They looked like the kind of presence that makes people lower their voices without being asked to. The did not demand respect like so many politicians, they simply received it. It was beautiful and strange for these times.
They were not protesting, they were reminding us, offering a call back to unity and hope at a time where division so many times feels like the default setting in this country. Their walk was not easy. One monk losing a leg on the journey and still rejoined for the final stretch.
The more I read, the more I learned of the quiet stories of the monks moving through towns and highways and weather, resting, accepting water, asking nothing of anyone, teaching nothing loudly.
Just walking.
I think about that now, and about how at the time, I did not know how much pain would shape our marriage. I did not know how often love would look less like fixing and more like understanding, sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to solve it.
Love has always been our medicine.
Not because it erases pain, but because it makes room for it without letting it take over everything.
I think about Hot Springs and those bare feet in water I could not tolerate. About insomnia and finding relief through motion. About a man in pain choosing presence anyway. About monks trusting the distance.
I think about power and awareness and global consciousness. About how careful I am with my water use, my energy consumption, and even my AI usage. Long before we were here, people already knew how to live in conservation with this planet instead of arguing with it.
There is a kind of power that does not announce itself. The springs do not advertise. The monks do not persuade. The mountain does not hurry. Heat rises and water flows. People learn how to move with what already exists.
And somehow, that is what our love has learned to do as well:
A love that walks. A love that adapts. A love that sits in the heat.
Because love, like peace, is not something you arrive at. It is something you practice. Step by step.
~
author: Amy Sullivan
Image: Author's Own
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
The Epstein Files don’t just Reveal Criminality—they Teach Helplessness.
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We used to be horrified by the phrase “kids in cages.”
Not because the metaphor was clever. Because it was literal: chain-link, mylar blankets, concrete floors, fluorescent lights that never go off, and crying babies in the background. Children processed like evidence, held like inventory.
We knew it was wrong, and for a minute we couldn’t stop thinking about it. We felt the wrongness in our bodies, and it haunted us.
Then something happened that is almost more terrifying than the cages themselves:
We got used to them. The haunting stopped.
Outrage has a shelf life in an attention economy. Not because the harm stopped, but because our nervous systems cannot stay in open-loop emergency forever. The story doesn’t end, so our minds do what minds do to survive: they downshift. They compartmentalize. They normalize.
The keyword here is “survive.”
The normalization becomes its own kind of policy. The political class changes costumes, the language changes, the headlines change, but the machinery keeps running.
In 2021, under the Biden administration, the number of unaccompanied children held in Border Patrol custody surged again, including reports of kids being held far beyond the intended short-term window, and it hit a scale that fact-checkers compared to previous peaks.
But we barely noticed.
Maybe it was inconvenient to admit it wasn’t just an “evil Republican” thing. Maybe with the pandemic, we just didn’t have the bandwidth to notice.
This is how a society learns to live with the unthinkable. Not by agreeing with it—by learning to look away without noticing.
We have looked away.
And now we are inside a different version of the same mechanism, scaled up until it starts to feel cosmically destabilizing.
The Epstein Files
A flood of documentation so massive that it stops functioning like “information” and starts functioning like weather. An atmosphere. A constant drip of names, connections, communications, logistics, receipts.
A revelation that never resolves into justice. The Epstein files will not become the Epstein trials—and we can feel that in our gut.
In late January 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice published millions of pages of Epstein-related material under a federal transparency law, including large volumes of media. And across February, the news cycle has been a churn of fallout, denials, resignations, investigations, and political theater, with no shared sense of closure.
This is the part that feels like a psychological operation, even if no one planned it in a smoky room.
Whether engineered or emergent, the effect is the same: the unthinkable is delivered to the public as a slow-release toxin.
We are forced to metabolize horrors at a pace no human organism evolved to metabolize.
We are trained to consume atrocity as content.
We are given exposure without resolution.
And exposure without resolution does not liberate people—it destabilizes them.
When something is truly unfathomable, the mind doesn’t just reject it. The mind fractures around it. People swing between obsession and shutdown, doom-scrolling and dissociation. It is a frantic hunger for the next drop, followed by nausea, followed by numbness, followed by shame for being numb.
That’s not moral failure.
That’s physiology.
A nervous system can only stay in sustained horror for so long before it reaches for anesthesia.
And here is where the trap closes:
If the story becomes: “Look how bad it is, and nothing will happen,” then the files don’t simply reveal criminality. They teach helplessness.
They become a curriculum in hopelessness.
And control thrives in hopelessness.
Hopelessness is the perfect governance strategy because it doesn’t require censorship. It doesn’t require jackboots. It doesn’t even require lies. You can publish the truth and still win—if the truth arrives without consequence.
Because a truth with no path forward becomes a cage of its own.
So people do what people do when they feel trapped:
They cope.
They distract.
They pick a team.
They weaponize the information against enemies and ignore it when it implicates allies.
They turn a nightmare into a talking point.
They make memes so their bodies can breathe again.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the unthinkable becomes part of the wallpaper. That is the spiritual crisis underneath the political crisis.
Not only, “What happened?” But “What happens to us when we are asked to witness evil as a spectacle, day after day, with no justice, no repair, no reckoning, no protection for children that we can feel in our bones?”
It changes us.
It changes who we trust.
It changes how we relate to institutions.
It changes how safe the world feels at a cellular level.
That is real. That dismantling is real.
And still…
We have to be careful with the conclusion our despair is begging us to draw.
Despair wants to say: Nothing matters. No one can be stopped. The powerful are untouchable. The world is rotten. Close your heart. Shut it all down.
That is the voice of captivity. It sounds sophisticated. It sounds like realism.
It is, in practice, surrender.
Here is a different way to hold it, one that does not require optimism or denial:
What if the job is not to “handle” the whole horror at once?
What if the job is to refuse the nervous system capture? To refuse the false binary between numbness and collapse?
To say:
I will witness what is real, but I will not let it destroy my capacity to act.
I will not let endless revelation replace accountability.
I will not let the exposure itself become a substitute for justice.
Because names in documents are not convictions, and archives are not trials. (That distinction matters if we care about truth and not just rage.) But the existence of the archive still reveals something unmistakable: structures that protected predators, insulated reputations, and treated children as disposable.
If we want to break that, we don’t need to carry the whole nightmare in our bodies at once. We need to build consequence.
Consequence is not only courtrooms, though we should demand them.
Consequence is also: support for survivors that is material, not performative; statutes of limitation expanded; institutions forced into transparency and liability; media that investigates instead of drip-feeding spectacle; and communities that stop outsourcing protection to systems that have already demonstrated their priorities.
And in the meantime, a personal ethic that is almost revolutionary in its simplicity:
Do not let horror turn you into a spectator.
You are allowed to set limits on what you consume.
You are allowed to stop reading when your body starts to freeze.
You are allowed to grieve.
You are allowed to rage.
You are allowed to keep your heart open without feeding yourself into the algorithm like kindling.
The goal is not to be perfectly informed.
The goal is to stay human enough to protect what can still be protected. The goal is to keep your agency intact.
If control thrives in hopelessness, then hope is not a mood. Hope is a practice.
Hope is choosing a lane where your hands can touch reality.
Hope is refusing to normalize cages, in any form.
Hope is refusing to let “nothing will happen” become a prophecy you help fulfill.
And if you feel yourself changing, if you feel your inner world reorganizing around the knowledge, you are not weak. You are not dramatic. You are reacting like a sane person reacts to an insane world.
Let that sanity become a vow:
Not to carry everything, but to carry what is yours to carry.
Not to know everything, but to do something real.
Not to look away, but to look forward and build consequence anyway.
~
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