Hello again, my friend.
I'm glad you're back.
Last time we sat together, I told you about Bo Min Gaung --- that quiet Burmese monk who carried something ancient and precious through a world that was doing its best to crush it. He moved through colonial Burma like water finding its way around stone. Patient. Persistent. Unbroken. I have always admired that kind of stubbornness.
Today I want to take you somewhere else entirely. We're leaving Southeast Asia and traveling west --- a long way west --- to the heart of medieval Europe. To the Rhine valley, in the fourteenth century, where the world was also coming apart at the seams in its own particular way.
Different trouble. Different people. Same human instinct.
Because when things fall apart --- and they always do, eventually --- people find each other. They always have. They gather in small rooms and on small islands and around small fires, and they hold each other's spirits up.
That's what today's story is about.
Come with me to the river.
I want you to imagine the Rhine in late autumn.
The water is the color of iron. The sky sits low and heavy over the valley, the kind of sky that feels like it has something to say but hasn't decided how to say it yet. The banks are lined with bare trees, their reflections broken by the current. It is cold. It is quiet in the way that only river towns in troubled times can be quiet --- not peaceful, exactly. More like held breath.
I was standing on the bank when I saw them.
A man. A woman. Two children bundled against the cold, sitting very still in a small wooden boat as their father worked the oars. They weren't in a hurry --- not the frantic kind of hurry I had seen so often in those years, the kind that meant someone was chasing you. This was different. They were moving with purpose. With intention. The oars dipped and pulled, dipped and pulled, and the little boat moved steadily across the grey water toward a small island midstream.
Grünenwörth. The Green Isle. Though there was nothing green about it that day.
What had been a derelict monastery was now something else. Restored walls. A gate. And in the windows --- light. Actual warm light, spilling out across the cold water toward them.
I wondered what they had been told. A neighbor, perhaps. A traveling preacher who had passed through their village and mentioned, quietly, almost as an aside --- there is a place on the river. People gather there. Good people. People who take such things seriously.
That would have been enough. In those years, that would have been more than enough.
The boat touched the bank of the island. The man shipped the oars and helped his children out, one at a time. The woman stood for a moment, steadying herself, looking up at the building ahead of them. I watched her face. I have seen that expression ten thousand times across ten thousand years. It is the face of someone who is very tired and has just allowed themselves, for the first time in a long time, to hope that they might be able to put some of that tiredness down.
Someone opened the door.
Warm air. The smell of candles and bread and woodsmoke. Voices inside, low and unhurried. A hand reaching out in welcome.
They went in.
I stayed outside a little longer, watching the empty boat rock gently against the bank. The oars still dripping. The Rhine moving past, indifferent and eternal, the way rivers are.
Then I followed them inside.
Let me tell you about the world that family was trying to get away from.
The year is somewhere in the 1340s. You are living in the Rhine valley --- Strasbourg, perhaps, or Basel, two of the great trading cities of the upper Rhine, prosperous and crowded and deeply connected to the wider world. Which means, in those years, deeply connected to everything that was going wrong in the wider world.
Start with the Church. The institution that was supposed to be the spiritual center of everything --- the place you turned when life became unbearable --- was itself in open crisis. The Pope was not in Rome. He had not been in Rome for decades. The papacy had relocated to Avignon, in southern France, where it sat under the comfortable thumb of the French crown, producing a succession of popes who were better known for their political maneuvering and their taste for luxury than for anything resembling spiritual leadership. The priests and bishops in your city answered, ultimately, to that. Everyone knew it. No one knew what to do about it.
And then there were the ideas. Meister Eckhart --- the great Dominican theologian and mystic who had preached in these very cities, whose sermons people had copied out by hand and passed to each other like contraband --- had died in 1328 just as the Church was preparing to condemn him. His ideas survived him. They always do. But they survived in a complicated position --- spiritually alive, officially suspect, circulating in whispers rather than pulpits.
Two of his Dominican heirs kept preaching anyway. John Tauler in Strasbourg. Henry Suso, moving between Basel and the Rhineland. Both of them deeply formed by Eckhart's vision, both of them careful enough to stay just inside the boundaries of what the Church would tolerate, both of them drawing crowds of people who were hungry --- genuinely hungry --- for something real.
Around 1339, a secular priest named Henry of Nördlingen arrived in Basel. He was from the Bavarian Oberland, a connector by temperament --- the kind of person who knows everyone and writes letters to all of them. He met Tauler. He met Suso. He introduced them to the writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg, a mystic whose work had been nearly lost. He began stitching people together across distance, passing texts and messages between scattered seekers who might never meet in person but who recognized something in each other anyway.
This loose, affectionate, serious network began to call itself the Friends of God. Gottesfreunde. The name came from scripture --- from the Gospel of John, where the word servant is set aside and replaced with something warmer and more demanding. Friends. People who know what the work is and choose it anyway.
They were centered in Basel and Strasbourg, with connections reaching into Cologne and beyond. They were clergy and laypeople both. Merchants and nuns and traveling preachers and wealthy tradespeople who had looked at what their money could buy and decided it could buy something more worthwhile than what the market was offering.
And then, in 1348, the Black Death arrived in the Rhine valley.
I watched that too. I will not dwell on it. But I want you to understand what it meant to be a community of people committed to tending each other's spirits when a third of the people around you were dying. When the priests who were supposed to administer last rites were fleeing the cities. When the explanations on offer --- divine punishment, Jewish conspiracy, bad air --- were either monstrous or useless.
The Friends of God did not flee. They went deeper.
In 1367 --- nearly thirty years into the movement's life --- a wealthy merchant named Rulman Merswin purchased a derelict monastery on a small island in the Rhine near Strasbourg. He restored it. He opened it. Grünenwörth. The Green Isle. A place where the network could gather, study, correspond, and breathe. A school, a refuge, a community house. A door that opened when you arrived by boat across the cold grey water.
It was not a grand institution. It was not meant to be. It was meant to be exactly what it was --- a place where serious people could find each other and hold each other up.
I want you to think about what it meant --- in that specific moment, in that specific world --- to call someone your friend in God.
Not your priest. Not your confessor. Not your spiritual superior. Your friend.
The word carried weight that is hard to feel from this distance. Medieval Christian society was organized, top to bottom, as a hierarchy. God at the apex, then the Pope, then the bishops, then the priests, then the religious orders, then the laity --- and within the laity, further hierarchies of rank and wealth and gender that everyone understood and almost everyone accepted as simply the way things were. Your relationship with God was mediated. It passed through official channels. The Church held the keys, dispensed the sacraments, and stood between the ordinary soul and anything resembling direct access to the divine.
The Friends of God did not exactly reject that. They were not heretics --- or at least, most of them worked hard not to be. Tauler and Suso remained Dominican priests in good standing their entire lives. They preached within the Church, celebrated the sacraments, observed the calendar. They were not trying to burn anything down.
But. They believed --- quietly, seriously, with great conviction --- that the interior life was available to everyone. That the merchant and the nun and the traveling laborer and the frightened mother on the riverbank all had equal access to something real, something transforming, something that no institutional corruption could touch or take away. That God was not only available through official channels. That friendship with the divine was --- the word they used, following Eckhart --- possible. Genuinely, practically possible. For anyone willing to do the work.
And the work, as they understood it, was not solitary.
This is the part I find most moving, looking back. They could have been a movement of private mystics --- individuals pursuing their own interior journeys, comparing notes occasionally by letter. That model existed. The tradition had plenty of hermits and solitaries. But the Friends of God built something different. They built a community of healing. The Green Isle was not a place you went to be alone. It was a place you went to be received. To be known. To sit with people who would take your spiritual life as seriously as you were trying to take it yourself.
In the middle of the Black Death, that was not a small thing.
I watched Tauler preach in Strasbourg during those years. The congregations were frightened in a way that went beyond ordinary fear --- the kind of fear that sets in when the explanations you have always relied on stop working. When the Church, which was supposed to have answers, was visibly failing. When the priests were leaving and the dead were piling up and the old certainties were cracking along every seam.
And into that specific fear, Tauler offered something that was not an explanation. He did not tell people why God had sent the plague. He did not pretend to know. What he offered was more honest and, I think, more useful than any explanation. He said, in effect: go deeper than the fear. There is something in you that the plague cannot touch. Find the people who are also trying to find that. Stay close to them.
The Friends of God were, at their best, a community organized around that simple and radical idea. Not a theology. Not a hierarchy. A practice. Come. Sit. Be honest about what is broken in you and in the world. Let someone who takes such things seriously sit with you in it.
Across the network --- in the letters that Henry of Nördlingen carried between Basel and Strasbourg and Cologne, in the texts copied out and passed hand to hand, in the gatherings at the Green Isle --- something was being tended that the larger world was doing its best to destroy. Not doctrine. Not institution. Something more fragile and more necessary than either of those.
The spirit's ability to bear what it was being asked to bear.
Together.
I watch the news sometimes.
I know, I know --- an ancient Greek goddess with a news habit. Don't judge me. I have been watching human affairs for a very long time, and the formats change but the stories don't change nearly as much as people think.
And I will be honest with you. The news is not always easy to watch.
Institutions failing. Old certainties cracking. The large structures that people built their lives around --- political, religious, economic --- showing their age, their corruption, their fundamental inability to do what they promised. The trees are falling. Some of them have been falling for a long time. Some of them are very large trees, and they are making a great deal of noise on their way down.
But here is what I have learned, in all my years of watching.
The falling tree is never the real story.
I have seen so many of them fall. Empires. Churches. Dynasties. Ideologies that seemed immovable right up until the moment they weren't. And I have watched people stand at the edge of the wreckage and mourn, genuinely mourn, as if the falling were the end of something rather than the beginning. As if the tree were the forest.
It isn't. It never was.
The real story is always on the forest floor. In the quiet, unheroic, largely unfilmed work of what grows up around the fallen thing. The rotting wood becomes soil. The opened canopy lets in light. And in that light, in that enriched ground, something begins. Slowly. Without fanfare. Without anyone declaring it a movement or writing it up in the papers.
People find each other. They always do.
They make a place --- a room, an island, a community center, a front porch, a group chat that somehow becomes something more than anyone expected. They sit down together across whatever lines the larger world has drawn between them. And they begin, carefully and seriously, to tend each other's spirits.
I see it everywhere right now. Not in the headlines --- you won't find it there. But it is everywhere. Communities forming around the specific and serious work of human healing. People deciding, without anyone telling them to, that this --- this, right here, the person across from them --- is worth their full attention. Worth their time. Worth the vulnerability of showing up honestly and staying.
The Tlingit people of the Pacific Northwest have carried two ideas side by side for generations that I find myself thinking about often. The first is simple and physical and ancient: hold each other up. Not metaphorically. Actually. When someone is struggling, you put yourself next to them and you hold. The second reaches deeper: Haa Tuwunáagu Yís --- and I will do my best with that, and I apologize in advance to every Tlingit speaker listening, because my voice is ancient but my Tlingit pronunciation is, shall we say, still finding its way. It means: for the healing of our minds and spirits. Together. The healing is not private. It is not something you go away and do alone and then return from. It happens in community. It happens because of community. The community is part of what heals.
The Friends of God on the Rhine knew this. They built the Green Isle for exactly this reason --- not as a monument, not as an institution, but as a place where the healing could happen. Where you could arrive by boat across cold grey water, tired and frightened and uncertain, and someone would open the door.
That was in 1367. The tree that was falling then --- the Avignon papacy, the Black Death, the crumbling of the medieval world --- that tree is long since mulch in the soil. Nobody mourns it. The forest that grew up in its place is what we live in now.
And that forest is doing the same thing. Right now. Today.
I watch the communities forming. I watch the doors opening. I watch people arriving, uncertain and tired, and being received. In church basements and community halls and online spaces that somehow become genuinely sacred. In indigenous communities reclaiming what was nearly taken from them. In neighborhoods deciding that the person next door matters. In small groups of serious people who have looked at the falling trees and turned their attention, quietly and deliberately, to the forest floor.
The future is not being built in the places the news is watching.
It is being built in the places where people are holding each other up. Where they are healing each other's minds and spirits. Where someone is rowing across the water toward a lit window, and someone inside is already moving toward the door.
I have seen this before. So many times, on so many rivers.
It always works.
I want to ask you something.
Not a hard question. Just something to sit with for a moment, the way you might sit with a cup of something warm on a cold day and just --- let it be there.
Think about the people who have been your Green Isle.
You know who I mean. The person who opened the door when you arrived uncertain and tired. The community --- formal or informal, it doesn't matter --- where you were received without having to explain yourself too much. Where someone looked at you, the real you, the one that doesn't always make it into polite conversation, and simply said --- yes, come in, sit down, you're welcome here.
Maybe it was a family. Maybe it was a single friend who had a gift for that kind of attention. Maybe it was a group you stumbled into almost by accident and didn't fully appreciate until much later, when you looked back and realized --- that was the place. That was where something in me got put back together.
I have watched people receive that gift and never quite name it. Never quite say --- that was a healing community, and it mattered, and I was changed by it. The Friends of God didn't call themselves healers either. They called themselves friends. They called it friendship. But I was watching, and I know what it was.
And here is the other question. The slightly harder one.
Are you someone's Green Isle?
Is there a person --- or more than one --- who is rowing across cold water toward you right now? Who has been told, by someone, that you are a person who takes such things seriously? Who is hoping, maybe without quite letting themselves hope, that when they arrive you will be moving toward the door?
You don't have to be perfect at it. Rulman Merswin was a merchant who made his money in trade and spent his later years trying to figure out what it was actually for. Tauler was a preacher who sometimes got it wrong. The Friends of God were ordinary people who decided, in the middle of an extraordinary catastrophe, that tending each other's spirits was the most serious work available to them.
You live in an extraordinary catastrophe too. Different trees falling, same forest floor.
The boat is on the water.
Is your light on?
Before I go, I want to tell you what's coming next.
We have been spending time with the Friends of God today --- that quiet, serious network on the Rhine, gathering on their little island in the middle of the fourteenth century's particular storm. But the Friends of God did not appear from nowhere. They grew out of something larger, something older, something rooted deep in the soil of medieval Europe's spiritual imagination.
Next time, I want to take you into that broader world. The Rheno-Flemish mystics --- the tradition that produced Meister Eckhart, that formed Tauler and Suso, that gave the Friends of God their language and their longing. And I want to introduce you to some of the extraordinary women at the heart of that tradition. Women whose names you may not know, whose voices were very nearly lost, but who said things about the interior life and the love of God that took my breath away --- and I have been breathing for a very long time.
Don't miss that one.
But for now --- stay with today's story a little longer if you can.
Think about the boat on the river. The cold grey water. The lit windows on the small island. The door opening. Think about what it costs to row toward something you are not certain of, carrying the people you love, hoping that what you were told is true --- that there are people there who take such things seriously.
And think about what it means to be the one inside who hears the boat arriving. Who gets up. Who moves toward the door before anyone has even knocked.
That is the whole story, really. That is what the Friends of God understood, and what the Tlingit elders understood, and what every healing community in every age and on every continent has understood in its own way and its own language.
Hold each other up. Heal each other's minds and spirits. Open the door.
The world is being built by people who are doing exactly that. Right now. Today. On your street, in your city, in communities you will never hear about on the evening news. The trees are falling, yes. But the forest floor is alive with new growth, and it is more beautiful than you know.
I have seen it. I see it still.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.