She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go. She let go of fear. She let go of the judgments.
She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head. She let go of the committee of indecision within her.
She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.
She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go… She didn’t search the scriptures.
She just let go.
She let go of all of the memories that held her back. She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.
She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.
She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She didn’t write the projected date in her day-timer. She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.
She just let go.
She didn’t analyse whether she should let go. She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter. She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.
She didn’t call the prayer line. She didn’t utter one word. She just let go.
No one was around when it happened. here was no applause or congratulations. No one thanked her or praised her.
No one noticed a thing. Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
There was no effort. There was no struggle.
It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.
It was what it was, and it is just that. In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her. And the sun and the moon shone forevermore.
Those entities who believe they own the whole of the world send in dancing puppets, beautiful, scantily clad succubusses, to wiggle and giggle and see if the cobra will rise from its basket and do a little weave and bob according to the dancing puppets will.
“Lust will be your downfall,” said the Most High to the warriors. Absolutely. A man who cannot control his mind, or his phallus, tends to “do the dance” and fall every time.
The hidden controllers have used the enslaved or agreeable Womb of Power against mankind for centuries, while causing great suffering for the Divine Feminine who tries, but cannot compete with the illusion, the alluring dance.
She doesn’t wiggle her hips like that. She doesn’t dress to gain a rise out of the snake. She’s busy building things, adding value to her soul, while he’s chasing smoke … looking for fire.
It’s too bad the Creatress doesn’t light his inner fire to match her efforts for creation … that he feels compelled to dance for the masters puppet, straight into fire of destruction.
She was executed at 29 for refusing to accept a world where women had no voice. Her final words would echo for generations.
Japan, early 1900s. The emperor was considered divine. Women could not vote, own property, or speak in political spaces. Society was a fortress built on hierarchy, and questioning it was heresy. Kanno Sugako looked at this fortress and decided she would not live within its walls.
Born in 1881, Kanno defied every expectation placed on Japanese women of her era. While society demanded silence and submission, she became a journalist—one of the few women writing for public newspapers. She didn’t write about fashion or domesticity. She wrote about injustice. About the suffocating restrictions on women. About the impossibility of change within a system that treated dissent as treason.
Her words were dangerous because they asked dangerous questions: Why should half the population be voiceless? Why should one man be worshipped while millions suffered? Why should we accept the world as it is when it could be something better?
Kanno wasn’t satisfied with words alone. She joined radical political movements, attended banned meetings, and connected with anarchists and socialists who dreamed of dismantling the entire social order. In an era when most women couldn’t leave home without permission, she was organizing revolution.
Then in 1910, authorities uncovered what they called the High Treason Incident—a plot against Emperor Meiji himself. Kanno was arrested along with two dozen others. The evidence was questionable, the trial rushed, the outcome predetermined. Twenty-four people would be sentenced to death.
Kanno Sugako was the only woman among them. The state wanted her to recant, to plead for mercy, to perform the expected role of the repentant female. They wanted her to cry, to apologize, to beg for her life in exchange for admitting she’d been led astray by men.
She refused every script they offered.
Instead, she wrote. In her prison cell, Kanno penned her autobiography and reflective essays that would be smuggled out and preserved. Her final writings revealed not regret, but absolute conviction. She saw her death not as a tragedy but as testimony—proof that some truths were worth dying for.
On January 24, 1911, Kanno Sugako was executed by hanging. She was 29 years old. As she walked to the gallows, witnesses reported she showed no fear. She had made her choice, understood its cost, and claimed her fate with startling clarity.
The Japanese government wanted to erase her. They banned her writings, suppressed her name, and hoped history would forget a woman who dared challenge divine authority.
But you cannot silence what refuses to be silent. Kanno’s story survived through whispers, through secretly preserved texts, through generations of feminists who found strength in knowing someone had walked this path before them. Decades after her death, her autobiography was published. Her letters were studied. Her courage was recognized. She became a symbol for Japanese feminists fighting for suffrage in the 1920s. For women demanding rights after World War II. For every movement that asked why women should accept less.
What Kanno Sugako understood—what made her both terrifying to authorities and inspiring to those who came after—was this: some systems cannot be reformed. Sometimes witnessing injustice without acting becomes complicity. Sometimes the only way to prove you’re free is to choose, even when the choice carries the ultimate price.
Her story is uncomfortable because it refuses easy answers. She wasn’t a martyr who accidentally stumbled into tragedy. She was a woman who looked at her options—silence or defiance—and chose defiance knowing exactly where it would lead.
History has given us many stories of women who survived against impossible odds. Kanno’s story is different. She didn’t survive. But her refusal to accept the world as it was helped create a world where Japanese women could eventually vote, own property, speak freely, and choose their own paths. She paid with her life for freedoms she would never experience. That’s not a story with a happy ending. It’s a story with an honest one.
Every right we have today was paid for by someone. Some paid with their time, their comfort, their reputation. Some, like Kanno Sugako, paid with everything.
Her legacy isn’t about the methods she chose—those remain historically complex and debated. Her legacy is about the question she forced into existence: What are you willing to sacrifice for a world you’ll never see but others might inhabit? She answered that question at 29, in a prison cell, with absolute certainty.
And her answer changed what was possible for every woman who came after.
I watched the woman steal three dozen eggs and a sack of potatoes while my shotgun sat loaded behind the door, untouched. It wasn’t the theft that froze me; it was the way she wiped her eyes before she ran.
My father built this farm stand in 1958. It’s nothing more than a weathered oak lean-to with a tin roof, sitting at the end of a gravel driveway that used to be surrounded by cornfields. Now, it’s surrounded by subdivisions with names like “Oak Creek” and “Willow Run,” where the only oaks and willows were cut down to pour the concrete foundations.
For sixty years, there has been a metal lockbox nailed to the center post. Written on it in fading white paint are two words: THE HONOR SYSTEM.
You take what you need. You put the cash in the slot. Simple. That box put me through college. It paid for my mother’s hip surgery. It was a testament to a time when a man’s word was his bond and a neighbor was just family you hadn’t met yet.
But times have changed.
I hear it on the radio in my tractor. Inflation. Supply chains. The price of diesel is up. Fertilizer costs have tripled. And out here, where the factories closed down a decade ago and the new service jobs don’t pay enough to cover the rent, people are hurting. Really hurting.
I’d noticed the light pilfering for months. A missing tomato here, a jar of honey there. I ignored it. If you’re desperate enough to steal a tomato, you probably need the vitamins. But last Tuesday was different.
It was a gray, biting afternoon. The woman drove a sedan that sounded like it was coughing up a lung. She didn’t look like a criminal. She looked like a nurse, or maybe a teacher—tired, wearing scrubs that had seen too many shifts. I watched from the kitchen window, sipping lukewarm coffee.
She stood in front of the stand for a long time. She opened her purse and counted coins. She counted them again. I could see her shoulders slump. She looked at the prices written on the little chalkboard—prices I had already lowered twice, even though I was barely breaking even.
Then, she did it. She grabbed the eggs. She grabbed the potatoes. She moved fast, terrified, looking over her shoulder. She didn’t check the lockbox. She just threw the food into her passenger seat and sped off, gravel spraying against the “Honor System” sign.
My neighbor, frank, a transplant from the city who likes to give me unsolicited advice about liability insurance, was pulling into my drive just as she left.
“You see that, Beau?” Frank yelled, leaning out of his shiny truck. “I told you! You gotta get cameras. Or shut it down. People today? No morals. They’ll bleed you dry.”
I looked at the dust settling on the road. “Maybe,” I said.
“It’s the economy,” Frank grumbled. “Makes wolves out of sheep. Lock it up, Beau.”
I went inside. I looked at my ledger. I was in the red. Again. The logical thing to do was to close the stand. Or put a padlock on the cooler. Frank was right. You can’t run a business on good vibes and nostalgia.
But I couldn’t get the image of that woman’s slumped shoulders out of my head. That wasn’t the posture of a thief. That was the posture of a mother who had to choose between gas for the car and dinner for the table.
The next morning, at 4:00 AM, I went out to the barn.
I collected the eggs. I sorted the vegetables. Usually, I wash the potatoes until they shine. I polish the peppers. I make sure everything looks supermarket-perfect because that’s what the new people in the subdivisions expect.
Today, I did the opposite.
I took the biggest, most beautiful Russet potatoes—the ones that would bake up fluffy and perfect—and I rubbed a little wet dirt back onto them. I took the eggs that were slightly different shades of brown, the ones that were perfectly fresh but didn’t look uniform in a carton, and set them aside. I took the prize-winning heirloom tomatoes and found the ones that were shaped a little weird, the ones that looked like kidneys or hearts instead of perfect spheres.
I walked down to the stand and nailed up a new wooden crate right next to the Honor System box. I grabbed a piece of cardboard and a thick marker.
“SECONDS & BLEMISHED,” I wrote. “UGLY PRODUCE. CAN’T SELL TO STORES. 90% OFF OR TAKE FOR FREE IF YOU HELP ME CLEAR THE INVENTORY.”
I filled that crate with the best food I had. The “dirty” potatoes. The “mismatched” eggs. The “weird” tomatoes.
Then I retreated to the porch and waited.
She came back three days later. Same coughing car. Same tired scrubs.
She froze when she saw the new sign. She looked at the pristine, full-price vegetables on the main shelf, and then at the overflowing crate of “ugly” food. She approached it cautiously, like it was a trap.
She picked up a potato. She wiped a thumb over the smudge of dirt I’d carefully applied, revealing the perfect skin underneath. She paused. She looked at the house. I stayed back in the shadows of the curtains.
She didn’t run this time. She took a grocery bag and filled it. She took two dozen eggs. She took a bag of apples I had marked as “bruised” (they weren’t).
Then, she stood in front of the Honor System box. She didn’t have much, but I saw her put a crumpled bill in. It wasn’t the full price of the premium stuff, but it was something. She walked back to her car, not looking over her shoulder, but walking with her head up.
Over the next month, a strange thing happened.
The “Seconds” bin became the most popular spot in the county. It wasn’t just her. It was the old man from the trailer park down the road. It was the young couple who had just moved into the rental property. They’d pull up, read the sign, and load up.
And the Honor System box? It started getting heavy.
They weren’t paying market price. They were paying what they could. Sometimes it was quarters. Sometimes it was a five-dollar bill for a haul that was worth twenty. But nobody was stealing. Nobody was running.
One afternoon, Frank stopped by. He looked at the nearly empty “Seconds” bin and the few remaining items on the main shelf.
“You’re losing your shirt, Beau,” Frank laughed, shaking his head. “I did the math. You’re selling Grade A stock as garbage. I saw you put those peppers in there. Nothing wrong with them. You’re running a charity, not a business.”
“I’m not running a charity,” I said, leaning on my truck.
“Then what do you call it? You’re letting them take advantage of you.”
“No, Frank,” I said. “I’m letting them keep their pride.”
Frank went silent.
“If I give it away,” I explained, looking out at the cornstalks swaying in the wind, “they feel like beggars. If I let them ‘buy’ the ugly stuff for cheap, or help me out by ‘clearing inventory,’ they’re customers. They’re helping me out. It’s a transaction between equals. They get to feed their families without feeling small.”
Frank looked at the box, then at me. He didn’t say anything else about cameras.
Yesterday evening, I went down to close up the stand. The “Seconds” crate was empty, swept clean. The lockbox felt heavy. I opened it to collect the day’s take.
Amidst the dollar bills and coins, there was a small, sealed white envelope. No stamp. Just my name, “Beau,” written in neat cursive.
I opened it. Inside was a twenty-dollar bill—crisp, new. And a note.
“To the farmer, I know the potatoes aren’t bad. I know the eggs are fresh. I know what you’re doing. My husband got a job today. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We made a pot roast tonight with your ‘ugly’ vegetables. It was the best meal we’ve had in six months. Thank you for feeding us. But mostly, thank you for not making us ask. We will never forget this.”
I stood there in the fading twilight, the fireflies starting to blink over the fields. I held that twenty-dollar bill like it was a winning lottery ticket.
The economists will tell you that the Honor System is dead. They’ll tell you that in a dog-eat-dog world, you have to lock your doors and guard your hoard. They’ll tell you that kindness is a liability on a balance sheet.
But standing there, listening to the crickets and feeling the cool evening air, I realized they’re wrong. The Honor System isn’t about trusting people not to steal. It’s about trusting that if you treat people like people, they’ll rise to meet you.
I pocketed the note and walked back to the house. Tomorrow is another day. I need to wake up early. I’ve got a lot of perfectly good vegetables to go ruin.
Because hard times don’t create thieves; sometimes, they just reveal who is hungry. And true community isn’t about watching your neighbor through a lens; it’s about making sure their plate isn’t empty so they don’t have to steal to fill it.
In the year 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was led to a stake in the heart of Paris, surrounded by a crowd of thousands. She had been condemned as a heretic—the first person the Paris Inquisition would burn for refusing to recant.
Her crime was writing a book.
Marguerite Porete was born around 1250 in the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. She was highly educated, likely from an aristocratic family, and she joined the Beguines—a movement of women who devoted themselves to spiritual life without taking formal vows or submitting to male religious authority.
The Beguines lived by their own rules. They worked among the poor, prayed in their own communities, and sought God on their own terms. This freedom made Church authorities nervous. Women living outside male control, speaking about God without clerical permission, threatened the very foundations of institutional power.
Marguerite took this freedom further than most. Sometime in the 1290s, she wrote a mystical text called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It was a conversation between allegorical figures—Love, Reason, and the Soul—describing seven stages of spiritual transformation. At its heart was a radical idea: that a soul could become so completely united with divine love that it no longer needed the Church’s rituals, rules, or intermediaries. In the highest states of union, the soul surrendered its will entirely to God—and in that surrender, found perfect freedom.
“Love is God,” she wrote, “and God is Love.”
She did not write her book in Latin, the language of clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French—the language ordinary people spoke. This meant her dangerous ideas could spread beyond monastery walls, beyond the control of priests and bishops.
And spread they did.
Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes, forcing Marguerite to watch her words turn to ash. He commanded her never to circulate her ideas again.
She refused.
Marguerite believed her book had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. She had consulted three respected theologians before publishing it, including the esteemed Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines, and they had approved. She would not let one bishop’s condemnation silence what she believed to be divine truth.
She continued sharing her book. She continued teaching. She continued insisting that the soul’s relationship with God belonged to no earthly institution.
In 1308, she was arrested and handed over to the Inquisitor of France, a Dominican friar named William of Paris—the same man who served as confessor to King Philip IV, the monarch who was simultaneously destroying the Knights Templar. It was a busy time for burning heretics.
Marguerite was imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months. During that entire time, she refused to speak to her inquisitors. She would not take the oath required to proceed with her trial. She would not answer questions. She maintained absolute silence—an act of defiance that infuriated the authorities.
A commission of twenty-one theologians from the University of Paris examined her book. They extracted fifteen propositions they deemed heretical. Among the most dangerous: the idea that an annihilated soul, fully united with God, could give nature what it desires without sin—because such a soul was no longer capable of sin.
To the Church, this suggested moral chaos. To Marguerite, it described the ultimate freedom of perfect surrender.
She was given every chance to recant. Others in similar positions saved their lives by confessing error. A man arrested alongside her, Guiard de Cressonessart, who had declared himself her defender, eventually broke under pressure and confessed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Marguerite held firm.
On May 31, 1310, William of Paris formally declared her a relapsed heretic—meaning she had returned to condemned beliefs after being warned—and turned her over to secular authorities. The next day, June 1, she was led to the Place de Grève, the public square where executions took place.
The Inquisitor denounced her as a “pseudo-mulier”—a fake woman—as if her gender itself had been a lie, as if no real woman could defy the Church so completely.
They burned her alive.
But something unexpected happened in that crowd of thousands. According to the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis—a monk who had no sympathy for her ideas—the crowd was moved to tears by the calmness with which she faced her death.
She displayed, the chronicle noted, many signs of penitence “both noble and pious.” Her serenity unnerved those who expected a screaming heretic. Instead, they witnessed a woman who seemed to have already transcended the fire that consumed her body.
The Church ordered every copy of The Mirror of Simple Souls destroyed. They wanted her words erased from history along with her life.
They failed.
Her book survived. Copies circulated secretly, passed from hand to hand across Europe. It was translated into Latin, Italian, and Middle English. For centuries, it was read anonymously—no one knew who had written it. The text was too powerful to disappear, even without a name attached.
It was not until 1946—more than six hundred years after her death—that a scholar named Romana Guarnieri, researching manuscripts in the Vatican Library, finally connected The Mirror of Simple Souls to its author. The woman the Church had tried to erase was finally given back her name.
Today, Marguerite Porete is recognized as one of the most important mystics of the medieval period. Scholars compare her ideas to those of Meister Eckhart, one of the most celebrated theologians of the era—and some believe Eckhart may have been influenced by her work. The book that was burned as heresy is now studied in universities as a masterpiece of spiritual literature.
Her ideas about love transcending institutional control, about the soul finding God directly without intermediaries, about surrender leading to freedom—these are not the ravings of a dangerous heretic. They are the insights of a woman centuries ahead of her time.
The Church that killed her eventually softened its stance on mystical experience. The Council of Vienne in 1312 condemned eight errors from her book, but the broader current of Christian mysticism she represented would continue flowing through figures like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, and countless others who sought direct encounter with the divine.
What the flames could not destroy was the truth she had grasped: that love, in its purest form, is greater than fear. That no institution can ultimately control the relationship between a soul and its source. That words born from genuine spiritual insight have a way of surviving every attempt to silence them.
Marguerite Porete spent her final years in silence—refusing to speak to those who demanded she deny her truth. But her book has been speaking for seven centuries.
Some people say your success was just an accident, luck.
They will never admit it was because you tried, tried, tried again. You never gave up, and success was finally achieved.
That’s the way it always happens in the “natural world”.
The others, who get “instant” results, are just manipulators, often thieves and abusers, not successful creators of solutions through genuine, persistent effort on one’s own supply.
Of course the manipulator will whine about your achievements and successes. They’ll insist it’s a hoax.
If a man can walk away from the woman who gave him everything her body, her heart, her sleepless nights, her dreams poured into building a family then his betrayal is limitless.
True character isn’t measured when life is easy. It’s measured in how he treats the hearts that once trusted him completely, in how he protects what he helped create.
When a mother is broken by someone who promised love, the wounds don’t stay with her alone.
They echo in the children who watch quietly, learning what trust, safety, and respect mean—or don’t.
They see the heart they should have been able to depend on crumble.
They internalize the fear, the doubt, and the uncertainty.
They begin to question what love should feel like, and whether it is reliable.
A real man does not destroy what made him a parent. He does not take for granted the devotion, the care, the nights spent worrying and planning and nurturing. He stands firm. He protects. He stays loyal. Not because it’s convenient, not because anyone is watching, but because it is sacred.
Betrayal is not just a personal failure. It is a fracture in the foundation of a home, a lesson taught to children that love can be abandoned.
And while wounds can heal, the reverberations linger unless accountability, care, and integrity are restored.
To honor the love that built a family, a man must remember: the women who gave him everything do not exist merely for convenience—they exist as pillars of life, love, and legacy. To abandon her is to abandon the sacred trust of parenthood, the love that shaped the next generation, and the respect that defines true character.
He may never be judged only by his words, but by how he protects, cherishes, and honors the hearts that once trusted him fully.
My husband didn’t pack his bags for a mistress. He packed them for a “movement.” He said he was suffocating in our silence, but the truth is, he was drowning in the noise.
We were the picture of the American Dream, circa 2024. Or maybe the caricature of it.
We had the house in the suburbs with the kitchen island that was too big to clean and a mortgage rate that kept us awake at night. We had two cars in the driveway and subscriptions to five different streaming services we never watched. But mostly, we had the glow.
That pale, blue, flickering glow.
For the last three years, Mark hadn’t really been in the room with me. He was in the comment sections. He was in the forums. He was fighting invisible wars against strangers who lived three thousand miles away. Dinner conversations used to be about our day, about the kids who were off at college, about the leak in the gutter.
Then, the conversations stopped. They were replaced by lectures.
He would look up from his phone, eyes bloodshot, and ask if I’d seen what “They” were doing to the dollar. What “They” were putting in the water. What “They” were teaching in schools. He never specified who “They” were, and frankly, depending on which channel he was watching, “They” changed every week.
I was exhausted. Not physically, but deeply, spiritually tired. I was tired of walking on eggshells in my own living room, afraid that mentioning the price of eggs would trigger a twenty-minute rant about supply chains and geopolitical conspiracies.
So when he stood by the door with his duffel bag, looking like a man preparing for a tactical mission rather than a mid-life crisis, I didn’t cry.
“I can’t do this anymore, Sarah,” he said. He sounded breathless, like he was running from something. “I need to find a place that’s real. I need to be around people who are awake. You… you’re just sleepwalking. You’re content to let the world burn as long as you have your garden and your coffee.”
He called it a “sabbatical for clarity.” He was going to drive out West, maybe join an off-grid community he’d found online. A place where “freedom still mattered.”
“And what about us?” I asked, leaning against the granite counter I still hadn’t paid off.
“I need to save myself first,” he said. “You should try waking up, Sarah. The world is ending.”
Then the door clicked shut. The engine revved. And he was gone.
I stood there in the hallway. I waited for the panic. I waited for the crushing weight of abandonment that every magazine article told me I should feel.
Instead, I heard it.
The silence.
The TV wasn’t blaring breaking news about a crisis I couldn’t solve. The phone wasn’t pinging with notifications about impending doom. The air in the house didn’t feel charged with static electricity anymore.
I walked to the living room and picked up the remote. I pressed the power button. The screen went black.
“Okay,” I whispered to the empty room. “The world is ending. So I might as well make dinner.”
The first week was strange. The silence was loud. But by the second week, I realized something terrifying: We had been working ourselves to death to maintain a lifestyle that was making us miserable.
I looked at the big house. It was a museum of things we bought to impress people we didn’t like. It was a storage unit for anxiety.
So, I did the unthinkable. I put the house on the market.
My friends were horrified. “But Sarah, the equity! But Sarah, where will you go? You need to downsize to a condo downtown, stay connected!”
I didn’t want a condo. I didn’t want “connected.” I wanted “grounded.”
I bought a small, drafty cottage two towns over. It needed a new roof and the floors creaked, but it had a front porch and a plot of land that got good morning sun. It reminded me of my grandmother’s house in the 80s—before everyone carried a computer in their pocket, back when neighbors actually knew each other’s names not because of a neighborhood watch app, but because they borrowed sugar.
I stopped watching the news. I figured if the world actually ended, someone would come knock on my door and tell me.
I started living a life that looked, from the outside, incredibly small.
I cancelled the subscriptions. I got a library card. I bought a second-hand radio that only picked up the local jazz station and the Sunday baseball games.
I started baking. Not the sourdough starter trend for Instagram, but real baking. I dug out my grandmother’s handwritten recipe cards, stained with butter and vanilla from forty years ago. There was something spiritual about kneading dough. It was physical. It was real. You couldn’t argue with flour; you just had to work with it.
One afternoon, my internet went down. A year ago, this would have caused a meltdown in our household. Mark would have been screaming at the service provider. I would have been panicked about missing emails.
Now? I just made a cup of tea and sat on the porch.
A young woman walked by, pushing a stroller. She looked frazzled, a Bluetooth earpiece blinking in her ear, talking rapidly about quarterly projections. She stopped when she saw me.
“Everything okay?” she asked, pointing at my house. “Power’s out on the whole block. No Wi-Fi.”
“I know,” I smiled. “Would you like a slice of apple pie? It’s still warm.”
She looked at me like I was an alien. Then, she looked at the pie. She touched her earpiece and tapped it off.
“I… I would love that,” she sighed, her shoulders dropping three inches.
We sat on the porch steps. We didn’t talk about the election. We didn’t talk about the stock market. We talked about how hard it is to keep hydrangeas blue. We talked about how fast her baby was growing. We talked about the smell of rain before a storm.
For an hour, we were just humans. Not voters, not consumers, not demographics. Just humans eating pie.
“It feels like time moves slower here,” she said, wiping a crumb from her lip. “I feel like I remember this feeling, but I don’t know from where.”
“It’s not memory,” I told her. “It’s presence. We used to live like this. We just forgot we could.”
Three months later, Mark called.
The connection was crackly. He was somewhere in the desert. The “community” hadn’t worked out—too many arguments about leadership, too few people willing to clean the latrines. Now he was in a motel, looking for the next big thing.
“It’s chaos out here, Sarah,” he sounded smaller, older. “The country is falling apart. You have no idea. I’m just trying to find a signal so I can upload my vlog.”
“I’m sorry, Mark,” I said, and I meant it.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Are you still… asleep?”
I looked around my kitchen. There was a bowl of fresh tomatoes on the counter. A stack of paperback books on the table. The radio was playing a soft saxophone melody. The window was open, and I could hear the neighbor’s kids playing tag, their laughter cutting through the summer air.
I wasn’t asleep. I was the most awake I had ever been.
“No, Mark,” I said gently. “I’m just living.”
“But how can you live when everything is at stake?” he demanded, his voice rising with that old, familiar panic. “Don’t you care about the future?”
“I am building the future,” I said. “I’m building it right here. By keeping my peace. By feeding my neighbors. By refusing to let the noise inside my house.”
He didn’t understand. He hung up to go chase another phantom, another outrage, another digital war.
I put the phone down. I didn’t check social media to see if he posted about our call. I didn’t check my bank account to soothe my anxiety.
I went back to the dough on the counter. I pressed my hands into it, feeling the resistance, the elasticity, the promise of something rising.
We spend so much time screaming for a better world that we forget to build a decent life. We think freedom is having a million choices, a million channels, a million voices in our pockets.
But I learned the truth in a creaky house with a broken internet connection.
Freedom isn’t about escaping the system. It’s about unplugging from the fear.
It’s realizing that the “Good Old Days” aren’t a time you can travel back to. They are a state of mind you have to fight for, right here, right now.
And one thing is certain: Happiness doesn’t come from having the loudest voice in the room. It comes when you realize you no longer need to shout to be heard. You just need to be whole.
A woman’s aura is one of the most powerful forces within a home. It carries her emotions, her thoughts, her intentions, and her spiritual vibration. Long before she speaks, her energy is already communicating. A home can feel warm, tense, alive, stagnant, peaceful, or chaotic—and often, the root of that vibration is the state of the woman’s inner world.
This is why the feminine path calls for deep emotional hygiene. Just as she cleans her physical home, she must cleanse her internal one. Breathwork releases anxiety from her chest. Journaling clears mental clutter. Movement releases stagnant energy from her hips and womb. Herbal baths dissolve emotional residue from her aura. When a woman purifies her energy, her entire home begins to shift.
Children feel it first—they relax, open up, feel safer. Partners feel it next—the tension dissolves, communication softens, connection deepens. Even visitors feel it—they enter the space and say, “It feels peaceful in here.” This is the power of a woman in alignment.
A woman does not need to raise her voice or demand control to influence her household. Her power is subtle, but it is magnetic. Her calm steadies the home. Her joy lifts it. Her sorrow dims it. Her healing transforms it. This is not pressure—it is divine authority.
When a woman honors her energy, she teaches everyone around her to honor theirs. She models emotional intelligence, spiritual awareness, and intentional living. She becomes the emotional thermostat, not the emotional sponge. She leads with softness, not with exhaustion. She heals with presence, not perfection.
A woman in her feminine power is the medicine of her household. Her aura becomes the blessing that fills every room, every conversation, and every heart that shares the space with her.
I almost let a teenage girl freeze to death on Thanksgiving Eve because of a stupid sign I hung on my own wall.
NO LOITERING. NO SLEEPING. NO PETS.
I run a 24-hour laundromat in Chicago—where winter doesn’t show mercy, and if you show too much, your business turns into a free hostel. I’ve learned the hard way that if I let one person nap on a folding table, by sunrise I’ve got a whole encampment of them.
Rules keep the doors open.
Or at least, that’s what I told myself.
Last Wednesday, the wind was doing that sideways snow thing, the kind that slaps your face even when you’re indoors. I was in the back, grumbling about mopping floors instead of being home with my wife’s turkey, when the door chimed.
A girl walked in. Seventeen, maybe. Thin as a coat hanger. Hoodie soaked. Sneakers squishing with each step.
And beside her?
A monster.
At least, that’s what I thought.
A massive gray Pitbull mix. Scarred. Shivering. Built like he could bench-press a sedan. The type of dog people avoid by crossing an entire street.
“No dogs,” I barked, tapping the No Pets sign like a judge swinging a gavel.
She winced. “Please… just ten minutes. The shelter’s full. I just need my toes to stop hurting.”
The dog—Tank—pressed his whole body against her leg, as if trying to fuse himself into her for warmth.
“Fifteen minutes,” I muttered. “He makes one sound, I’m calling the cops.”
They retreated to the coldest corner. I retreated to the security monitor, looking for any excuse to kick them out.
Then I watched her pull out a handful of coins—pennies, nickels, a dime that looked like it had survived the Great Chicago Fire. She counted them over and over until she could afford a pack of those terrible orange peanut-butter crackers.
She sat on the floor, opened the pack…
and didn’t take a single bite.
She broke a cracker and held it out to Tank.
“Eat, buddy.”
Tank sniffed it. His ribs showed. He needed food desperately. But he pushed it back toward her.
She insisted. He refused.
And in that moment, on a grainy black-and-white screen, I watched a starving dog protect the only person he loved by refusing to let her go hungry.
My throat tightened.
Then things got worse.
Mike—the drunk regular who occasionally slept behind a dryer—stumbled over, reeking of whiskey.
“Got a dollar, sweetheart?” he slurred.
Tank stood up—not snarling, not attacking. Just planting himself like a shield between the girl and the man.
A living, breathing wall.
Mike reached toward her shoulder.
Tank growled—a low, seismic warning that said, Touch her and you’ll wish you hadn’t.
The girl wrapped her arms around Tank’s neck and begged, “Don’t hurt him, please! He’s just scared!”
That was the moment my rules stopped mattering.
I grabbed the baseball bat, marched over, and pointed it—not at the dog, but at Mike.
“Out. Now.”
He left so fast he forgot his bottle.
I locked the door. Flipped the sign to CLOSED. The girl looked up at me with terrified eyes, bracing for the moment I’d kick her out into the blizzard.
But I just walked to the back, grabbed the Tupperware my wife had packed—thick turkey slices, mashed potatoes, gravy—and set it in front of them.
“The dryer in this corner overheats,” I lied. “I need someone to sit here tonight and make sure it doesn’t catch fire. Job comes with dinner.”
She stared at the food like it was a dream she was afraid to touch.
“Sir?” she whispered, voice cracking.
“Eat,” I said. “Both of you.”
Tank waited—actually waited—until she swallowed her first bite before he took one for himself.
The toughest thing in that room wasn’t my bat. It was a half-frozen Pitbull who’d rather starve than let his girl go hungry.
That night changed me.
We spend so much time judging people by what they wear, where they sleep, or what they have in their pockets. We judge dogs by the size of their jaws and the scars on their skin.
But loyalty doesn’t live in appearances.
Compassion doesn’t come with a price tag.
And sometimes the best guardian angel you’ll ever meet arrives covered in frost, with a teenager on one side and a trembling Pitbull on the other.
If I’d followed my own rules, I would’ve shut the door on both.
Instead, I learned this:
Family isn’t always blood.
Protection doesn’t always look gentle.
And the biggest hearts often beat inside the bodies we’ve been trained to fear.
So next time someone walks into your life looking rough, tired, or “dangerous”…
maybe look twice.
You might be staring at the purest form of love you’ll ever see.
opensenseme 