What if the life you’re working so hard to keep up isn’t entirely yours? From engineered desire to the American Dream to the phone in your pocket, much of what we call “just the way things are” was handed to us. A contemplative look at the script running in the background — and how we begin to wake up.
I have taken to musing with a machine. I should say it plainly, because a year ago I would have found the sentence absurd. But there is no truer word for it. Late in the evening, house quiet, coffee going cold at my elbow, I have been thinking out loud with an artificial intelligence — […]
On loving people, you deeply disagree with — and staying whole at the table. Every family has a table, and every table has a moment. It might arrive over a holiday meal, or in a text thread that turns suddenly ugly, or in the silence after someone finally says “the thing”, they’ve been holding back. […]
She circled the block three times, food in the car, afraid to be seen doing something good. From masks and Rottweilers to an archbishop’s phone call, Judy names the interior struggle of her life: moving the light out from under the bushel — a lighthouse still, gently, on the move.
She left a secure consulting career, drained her savings, and drove to a 22-acre retreat where every participant had cancelled. She went in anyway — and became both the facilitator and the only guest. What she heard in that empty room still shapes her work sixteen years later.
On a fence-free street in Trinidad, a neighbor called her by his late daughter’s name and set a place for soup. Judy Joseph McSween’s story begins with a truth she spent forty years unpacking: her gifts weren’t given to her — they were recognized.
Before this becomes a conversation about individuals, it has to be one about culture. Global EQ is declining and women still don’t feel heard — and the contemplative tradition knew what the Gallup data now confirms: a culture that can’t hear “no” from its most consistently silenced members hasn’t yet learned to see them as fully real. The close of the No Means No series, on the work that belongs to everyone in it.
A man writing to women, with humility: your “no” is a complete sentence. Drawing on the Enneagram, emotional intelligence, and the desert mother Amma Syncletica, this is about why saying no can be so hard — and why it never required anyone else’s approval or understanding to count.
Man to man, plainly: when a woman says no, what you do next reveals more about your character than almost anything else. On the Enneagram patterns that tempt men to push past a no, an honest personal reckoning, and the one thing emotional and spiritual maturity actually ask — to stop, and to leave the other person free.
The numbers were right; the leader was wrong. Jim on a costly Varment Guard failure, the desert fathers’ practice of watchfulness, and why intelligence races toward answers while wisdom questions the frame itself — and how EQ and SQ together move us from merely knowing to actually discerning.
