Dear Reader: I’ve been working on several blog posts that I hope to share soon, but in the meantime, I thought I would share another journal entry with you. This entry is very spiritual—I feel that our national crisis has become a spiritual crisis, for myself and for us as a nation. How could it not be? Donald Trump’s second presidency is forcing many of us to think deeply about what we believe in and stand for.
This entry doesn’t offer many answers, and it ends on a note that feels unfinished. But looking back on what I wrote, I think there is a powerful message here: an act of resistance. Wrestling with my angst over Trump’s actions, on this day I turned away from his meanness and instead turned inward, striving to hear my own inner wisdom. I sense that this turning inward—towards quiet and stillness, towards compassion and love—must be part of what is called for now. It must be part of our movement as we grapple with how to resist Trump.
Two points of clarification. First, the entry may at a glance appear apathetic, because in it I find relief in the thought that “nothing has changed” with Donald Trump’s return. What I meant, writing these words to myself, was that nothing had changed in terms of my own spiritual journey and that of my fellow humans. I of course did not mean nothing substantive had changed in our politics, or that there was nothing active to be done in that realm.
Second, I write in this entry of God, and I mention Jesus, and I don’t want these words to be misunderstood either. I am a mystic: I have long felt connected to a Great Something that I call God and pray to often, but that I don’t take the trouble to define. This connection feels to me both vast and personal. I’m also deeply moved by Jesus’s teachings—but I don’t label myself “Christian” except perhaps in a very expansive, universalist sense. Those who are Christian now, or who have been wounded by Christianity in the past, may especially be confused by my wording. I hope my fellow mystics, at least, will understand what I meant. 🙂
August 6, 2025
On our last afternoon at the lake, I walked to the dock around 4 to swim. It was sunny with light clouds, and I noticed the warmth of the sun and the bobbing of the dock in the water. On a whim I sat on the dock, legs outstretched on its warmth. Then I lay back with my head on my bunched-up towel and just gazed at the clouds a while. There were two layers of them—a high, lacy white layer that wasn’t moving, and a lower, billowy layer that was swirling and building and drifting west. I watched it swirl and billow, feeling as though I could feel its dewey coolness on my skin, wondering at its beauty against the blue, wondering how it could be that this was the first time I had done this in years, just lying on my back and watching clouds, such a primal human pleasure.
I silently asked God to help me. Help me. Help me be close to You. Help me hear Your voice. Help me hear you, I thought, even amidst the noise. Please.
What I was thinking about was my anguish over our country.
The last few weeks had seen several pieces of terrible, ominous news. Trump had asked the Texas governor to gerrymander the state in a special session in order to gain the GOP five seats in Congress and help them keep the House in the midterms. The governor was proceeding with the plan. It was all just out in the open. Trump had also fired the head of the Department of Labor Statistics after a jobs report that was less than glowing, a move that slid us much closer to becoming a country where statistics are falsified and untrustworthy. A merger was approved between Paramount and Skydance, but only on the condition that the news from CBS be “balanced” to reflect the interests of the American people—and in Trump’s Orwellian administration, it’s easy to infer what “balanced” means. NPR was defunded. It all added up to more momentum in the avalanche as our democracy appears to collapse.
I keep wrestling with how to write about this anguish I feel, that so many of us feel. One night recently, I awoke at 3 a.m. and lay awake for hours despairing and trying to find a way to think about it, and about my advocacy for civil discourse, that brought me any comfort. A couple days later, I saw on Facebook that Elise had posted saying she keeps awaking at 3 a.m. over the country too, agonizing about the helplessness of watching us slide towards authoritarianism. She asked for advice; maybe 30 people responded, including me, saying they were going through the same thing.
I want people of the future to know what this moment felt like, what we who pay attention went through as this was happening. I want you, the reader in some future I cannot see, to know this: That in this moment, in spring and summer 2025 as Donald Trump unfurled his grand agenda, we understood belatedly that we had spent our lives in utter security and felicity, that all our lives we had unknowingly taken it for granted that we lived in a nation of laws and freedoms, a nation where citizens (and non-citizens too) could speak their minds and do their jobs without fear, where people routinely complained about injustice but where justice was, by and large, carried out, where government agencies were inefficient but worked for the people, providing essential services and many other ingredients to help society fluorish, like libraries and radio and TV programming and schools and weather reports and cancer research, where in general there was strife and disagreement but not darkness, there was dishonesty but not falsification of government reports. In short, where we unconsciously relaxed in the enjoyment of freedoms people have seldom enjoyed through history, but which were so embedded in the American psyche that we assumed we would enjoy them for the rest of our lives and would never have to live without them the way people in many other countries do. And now, as we watch in horror as Trump strips away so much that we took for granted, we are belatedly realizing that our confidence was false, that our security was an illusion—that at any time, people in power could have stolen these securities and freedoms from us; that it wouldn’t require a military coup, but just a corrupt, immoral President capable of swaying enough of the electorate that no one in Congress dared to challenge his moves. I think we previously imagined that it wouldn’t happen quite like this, if it ever happened—that there would be more resistance, and that the resistance we mounted in the first Trump term would surely prevail. But now, to have Trump be sabotaging our democracy from within, and to know that our own family members and friends (or former friends) are standing idly by or even supporting him, feels sickening and twisted, and we can’t help drawing analogies to Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, first by gaining popularity, then by seizing power and keeping it through force and fear, all while so many German people rationalized that this was what was best for the country.
As I lay there on the dock before Ron arrived, I asked God for help, guidance. And I did get an answer.
Nothing has changed, the voice said. You are still a human in this world, this beautiful world, beautiful as it ever was through all the sorrows of human affairs and injustice and suffering. Countlesss people have lived and loved in countries that were not democracies. The Answer does not depend on that. It’s about finding your own personal path, personal connection to God. Nothing has changed. God is still the same, Nature is still beautiful, humans are still flawed but striving.
This answer began to soothe me.
Then Ron arrived. We eventually began to kayak before swimming. We headed across the bay to the island where the eagles live. As I had started doing, I tried paddling without my special kayak mount for my injury, trying out how my elbow did, and discovered that today it gave me no trouble. This meant we could go faster and farther; we went to the island and around it, then back. Paddling back, to my joy I found that I felt stronger than I had all trip—for the first time since this injury, I could really put my body into the motion, pulling into my side and using my muscles, sinking the paddle blade deep into the water first on one side, then the other. My kayak cut through the water with a satisfying sloshing sound, the nose turning a little each time I stroked, and I grinned with joy, relishing this feeling I had been missing, feeling strong and hearty. The clouds had covered the sky by now, the blue disappearing. On the way to the island, an eagle had swooped down from the north and done a series of dives in front of a pontoon boat, seeming to dance above the water, aborting its own motion when its fish prey dove beneath the surface (I assume). Then it left off and flew to a tall pine at the shore, alighting in a top branch. It seemed to peer imperiously at us as we passed now on our return, its aquiline white head cocked in profile against the sky, its black body bulky beneath.
We pulled our kayaks up onto the sand, me happy to have ended the trip on such a good note, and braced ourselves for the water. It felt like the air was only sixty-five degrees: I walked down the dock and got in, happy to discover that because of the cold air, the lake mostly felt warm—although I still let out my usual “Whoo!” as I made the final push into the water and immersed my chest and shoulders. My arms and shoulders felt cold, but not the rest of me.
Ron quickly got out again and went to shower and warm up. I stayed, delighting in the comfortable water.
The two nearby houses were quiet. Another house was noisy; the whole time I was out, there was background noise from them, kids yelling, parents’ voices sounding over them. But they were more distant, so I had a little solitude and could be reflective. Thank you, I said to God, Sky. Thank you for the kayaking, the swimming, for being able-bodied. Thank you for the message you gave me earlier, the Answer.
It’s about finding the sweetness while we are here. This was another thought that came to me that evening, either now as I swam, or earlier on the dock, or perhaps later as I rewatched Buena Vista Social Club with Ron. Life is about finding the sweetness while we are here. We cannot stay forever. But while we are here, finding the sweetness, the Light, and knowing as we move through life that we have moved through it with sweetness and light and Love, if not always, then as much as we could. I am trying, I thought.
This thought was on my mind all through that evening, I think, as I lay on the dock, and kayaked with Ron, and swam, and watched the movie. It was a thought about being close to God while being in the world. Finding the sweetness is what Helen Keller meant, I think, by “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.” It means seeking that feeling I have most easily when I am alone, when I can hear the voice of God and relax into the vast goodness I can feel in the world. When I let go of pettiness and smallness and feel myself expand, like Jesus turning the other cheek, like Gandhi acting out of love, free of fear, authentic, connected.
When I think of it a certain way, even my fear of death diminishes. If I could die knowing, as I looked back on my life, that I had been a part of this sweetness and Light most of the time, a participant in it and an agent of its spreading on Earth, then I think I could be at peace with dying. And I like to think, in my mystical, universalist way, that this might really have been Jesus’s message and that of other sages: that we can overcome death itself by following the Path of light and goodness, by placing that heart-connection at the center of our lives. That this is perhaps what he really meant by “take up your cross and follow me,” by “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.”
It’s Saturday afternoon now. There is so much to record, still, and lots of other things to get done. But this lake trip reoriented me in a really good way, and I felt as though a few lanterns had been lit for me, pointing me down the Path. I feel myself to be beginning back down it again, and it feels so important to write about. The Path is about orienting my life, my self, towards God and service. It means listening deeply to my inner voice.
Katie, I say yes to this one thousand times over. You so perfectly out into words exactly the place so many of us are finding ourselves in. I am so grateful for that Path of Light. And I am so grateful you have been gifted the talent to write for so many of us.