Even as a young child I questioned the existence of God. I grew up in a fundamentalist world in which doubts could never be publicly acknowledged without grave consequences, but doubt was always there. As Frederick Buechner wrote, doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.

When I was in Bible college the questions grew exponentially. The theological systems I was taught were so air tight there was no room to breathe. If anything, evangelicalism today has grown even more air tight in its approach to divinity. It is not a world friendly to questioning souls.

Years after seminary I was reading my favorite novel, Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. At one point Jayber, the protagonist, is a student at a Bible college that sounds suspiciously like the one across the street from the cemetery where my parents are buried, the college from which I graduated.

While a student at the Bible college, Jayber seeks out an older professor he trusts and asks questions about God. The professor says, “You have been given questions for which you cannot be given the answers. You will have to live into them a little at a time. I will tell you a secret. It may take your entire life. I will tell you another secret. It may take longer.”

I have quoted those lines many times in my books, articles, television scripts, speeches, and sermons. It is seminal to my understanding of God.

For 500 years we have been under the heavy thumb of the modern age, with its left-brain fixation on categorization and analysis instead of holistic thinking, on knowledge instead of experience, and on things instead of relationships. The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right says I am a body.

To the left hemisphere of the brain, the existence of God is a problem to be solved. To the right, it is a mystery to be embraced. To the left brain spirituality is propositional, to the right it is mystical.

Iain McGilchrist is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. His key works are the massive volumes, The Matter With Things, and The Master and His Emissary. Both are the definitive works of our generation on brain science, and particularly on the relationship between the hemispheres.

McGilchrist does not shy away from talking about spirituality and mystery. He says one of the biggest unanswered questions of the universe is the existence of consciousness. What is it? Where does it come from?

He says, “No one has come up with an explanation for how consciousness comes out of matter.” McGilchrist surmises that matter must inherently have something conscious about it. He believes the universe itself is conscious. Psyche everywhere. That certainly gives new meaning to the words of Jesus in Luke 19:40 that, “the very stones would cry out.”

There is no such thing as objective truth, at least not as long as humans are involved, because we are always subjectively perceiving it. We can get powerfully close through rigorous intersubjective exploration, but even then the limitations of the scientific method leave us with only left brain exploration.

Back when I was still struggling in the evangelical world I read Francis Schaeffer’s He is There and He is Not Silent. I found it helpful at the time. Today it feels almost quaint, with a confidence in Reformed theology, the modern age and Enlightenment thinking that cannot hold.

Hans Küng’s Does God Exist was a valiant effort identifying notions about God throughout western history. I enjoyed it very much when it came out. Sophomoric books like Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demand a Verdict are sadly still out there, with that particular book now updated by McDowell and his son. McDowell’s book has sold more than all of my books combined. There is a certain humility in that, I suppose.

There is no evidence that demands a verdict. God is nothing if not subtle. But now that I am halfway through my eighth decade (which is 75, by the way, not 85 – wanna be sure you know that – I do have some vanity left) I am more convinced than ever of the truth of Jesus and his teaching, to love God, neighbor, and self. I am equally convinced that this universe is enchanted, or as Iain McGilchrist says, conscious.

Though not overtly religious, McGilchrist is partial to Christianity. He finds spiritual strength through the arts and nature. It reminds me of my friend, Joe D’Alessandro, who used to be our director when I was on television. Joe studied in Italy during his college years and Renaissance art is what led him to be a follower of Jesus.

Florence, who with her husband, Stan, hosted a reading group at their home for over twenty years, introduced me to the history and beauty of Christian art. I was always grateful for that. Growing up as an evangelical the art of the church was kept away from us, as was the rich liturgical tradition of the Catholic and Eastern churches.

It’s kind of embarrassing to me how much I loved evangelical megachurch worship. If I wasn’t barred from attending, I’d still enjoy the music today – though not the sermons. Something about the music and the carefully crafted hour always spoke to my soul in a way similar to Broadway. When I was preaching regularly at one megachurch here in Colorado, we would finish on Sunday at noon and I’d say to our worship pastor, “I want just one more service!” I had already preached for four services, mind you, one on Saturday and three Sunday, but that didn’t matter. Something happened in those services that was beyond the sum of the parts and I loved it. I wanted one more.

Today I find God in nature, in my grandchildren’s faces, in the Renaissance painters, in Broadway shows, occasionally in movies, always in Worthy is the Lamb and the Amen Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I believe love is God and God is love. At this point in my three-quarters of a century on this earth, I find that is enough.

And so it goes.

It took me over a year to slog my way through Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. Between Chernow and Iain McGilchrist’s two volume, four-inch thick, The Matter With Things, I find myself grateful for the 1600 words of a TED Talk. Does it really take 392,000 words (Chernow) or 700,000 words (McGilchrist) to tell a story or explain an idea? Don’t get me wrong. Both Chernow and McGilchrist are brilliant, but a good editor can be a marvelous thing.

My first TED Talk, at 1920 words, was about 300 words longer than the typical TED Talk, but I speak fast. I finished it in 14 minutes, the sweet spot for a TED Talk back in those days. In today’s TikTok world, they are shorter.

When I work with TEDx speakers, where the manuscript must be memorized word for word, they think they will never be able to get their “big idea” down to 1,600 words . First drafts usually come in at around 3,500. We ask the speakers to do their best to get the word count as low as possible, but every word of a speech is a baby to which the speaker has painfully given birth. They just can’t get rid of them.

That’s why we have to take over. We get the manuscript down to 1600 words and you’d be amazed how often speakers say, “I don’t even know what you took out.” That’s because what we took out was extraneous to the big idea. It is not an easy process. My first TED Talk was at edit 38 before it was done.

Had it been a TED Talk, Chernow’s book would have been 2,856 minutes long, or 47.6 hours. By contrast, the audio book of my memoir, which has about 70,000 words, is just under eight hours long.

Okay, I can tell, you are getting bored. Let me make this more interesting.

In the musical Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda took a book that would have taken 47.6 hours to speak and turned it into a 2 hour and 23 minute musical with 20,500 words, give or take a word. That’s 144 words a minute, twice the words-per-minute of a typical Broadway musical. I’ve seen it five times and I’ve still not picked up all the words.

My two New York granddaughters, 17 and 18 years old, not only understand every word, they have memorized the entire libretto. Yeah, the entire libretto. Asha said apologetically, “Well, maybe there is one song late in the second act that I don’t know completely.” Seriously? Other than occasional phrases like, “I’m not giving away my shot,” or “I wanna be in the room where it happened,” or “I may not live to see our glory,” I haven’t memorized anything from Hamilton.

We took Asha and Lyla to see Hamilton last Thursday. The next night Cathy and I saw the Les Misérables 40th anniversary tour at Radio City Music Hall. Both shows were fantastic. I’ve seen Les Mis more times than I can count. As with Hamilton, I’ve seen it in New York, London, and Denver. I do have the entire 2:45 libretto of Les Mis memorized – I have for a long time. But it’s got half the words of Hamilton.

After watching both shows I realized how much has changed in our culture in the last forty years. When Les Mis came out we were still firmly planted in the modern age, with its certainties and clear moral standards. There were no ambiguities. We knew who the protagonist and antagonist were. It was obvious. We still lived under the fantasy that right and wrong were immutable and obvious. They never were, but for the better part of 500 years we hung on to that fantasy.

Hamilton is a completely different story. It is purely postmodern. There is no obvious protagonist except George Washington, who comes off looking pretty good. Certainly Hamilton and Burr, the two key characters, were not obvious protagonists or antagonists. Nor was Thomas Jefferson. Not even King George qualifies as an antagonist. He was relegated to comic relief.

In Les Mis you only see the bad side of Javert and the good side of Jean Valjean. In Hamilton you see the good sides and the dark sides that emerged from each main character because none of them had dealt with their shadow sides. The shadow sides are the unexplored parts of the psyche, the places we do not want to go because we do not want to find what is lurking there, waiting to be worked out. Working out what is in our shadows is hard and takes time.

Both Burr and Hamilton had a childhood that, left unexamined, created huge problems in their lives that finally landed them in Weehawken, New Jersey, where functionally both of their lives ended. You wonder what might have happened if more of our founding fathers had not just lived life at the surface. Washington had clearly done some work related to his early failings on the battlefield, but there did not appear to be much interiority in most of the founding fathers – not many poets in that group.

Which, come to think of it, is a lot like today’s national politicians, but that is another column (you can tell I’m an old magazine writer – I wrote “column”) for another day.

Hamilton, the musical, does capture the positive, negative, and unexamined shadow sides of the characters. That is quite a tribute to Lin Manuel Miranda and those who helped him shape the musical. Its depth and nuance are remarkable.

I’m headed to London next week, where I’ll see To Kill a Mockingbird. It seems odd to see it in London, but it’s having a short run there and I’ll be in town, and who wouldn’t want to see a play scripted by Aaron Sorkin. I just wish Jeff Daniel’s was playing the lead character. Now there’s someone who has explored his shadow side.

And so it goes.

I have been outside the evangelical world for twelve years this month, and I have drawn some conclusions. Nowadays, very little of my interaction is with people who reside in the evangelical world. According to the Pew Research Center, a reliably accurate polling organization, fewer than one quarter of Americans (twenty-three percent) identify as evangelical. My life is lived with the other seventy-seven percent.

If you live within the evangelical world, you are a part of an insular culture. Higher percentages of Americans are evangelicals in Indiana and Georgia than in Washington and New York. The percentage of evangelicals shifts depending on one’s geography, but there is no state in which it is higher than fifty percent.

When I lived on Long Island (and yes, it is on Long Island, not in Long Island. It is the East Village, not East Village. It is the Bronx, not Bronx. Okay, grammar lesson completed.) only three percent of the population was evangelical. Eighty-nine percent was either Roman Catholic or Jewish. As someone who grew up in an evangelical bubble, it was helpful for me to live on Long Island.

For our purposes, we will stick with the national figure of twenty-three percent. That means over three-quarters of Americans are not evangelical. Among them are virtually all of my friends and acquaintances. After a dozen years living and having my being among such folks, I can say one thing with certainty.

To non-evangelical Americans, the single most defining element of evangelicals is their judgment. I’m so sorry evangelical friends, but I’ve never heard a single non-evangelical say you can spot an evangelical by their love. Not one.

When your primary concern is power and safety, the realm of the ego, you will be defined by judgment. Life will be determined to be safe or unsafe depending on the specific tribe of which you are a part, and your unwavering loyalty to that tribe. If you are judged by that tribe to be lacking, you will be excluded from that community.

When you have bought into the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement, that God’s natural position is to love you, but he cannot because you are actually unlovable, so instead of punishing you, something his holiness requires, he punished his own son instead, you cannot think about much else except doing whatever is necessary to stay in the good graces of that judgmental God.

And right there, in a single too-long sentence, is the crux of the problem. That form of Christianity is not driven by love, it is driven by judgment. Non-evangelicals have concluded that evangelicals are nothing if not judgmental because they have observed the landscape and they have come to the inescapable conclusion that they are, in fact, judgmental.

That evangelicals can fire their pastors for any hint of moral indiscretion, then distort themselves into pretzel-like shapes to endorse the presidency of Donald Trump, is beyond me. It is if they are saying, “We are really judgmental, but if it has to do with gaining and maintaining power within a political system, we will look the other way when a president’s morality is so corrupt that he’s already had to pay five million dollars to a woman he raped.”

Thomas Jefferson slept with his fourteen-year-old slave and continued to sleep with her for decades, fathering six children with her. But we won’t judge that because Jefferson was quite the writer, penning a Declaration of Independence that is one of the most beautiful documents ever initially rendered in English.

The truth is that Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant mess. So was King David, and Jacob, and the Apostle Paul, and you and me. We are all made in God’s image, and we are all a brilliant mess. That is not an oxymoron, it is a paradox, and it is endemic to the human condition.

When I transitioned I had more than one well-known leader with the Restoration Movement of churches ask me if I was going to “out’ them for their indiscretions of which I was aware. I told each of them, “I transitioned genders, not character. Of course I will not out you.” In their question was their own judgment. They now judged me as lacking, since I had transitioned genders, so they assumed I would publicly expose their lacking. It was sad.

When I transitioned I had already been a pastoral counselor for two years. If you add in all my years mentoring pastors and listening to church members, there was not much of anything that would have surprised me coming out of the mouths of evangelical leaders. On the whole I have found them to be no more or less morally pure than non-evangelicals. They just hide it better, and live in greater fear of being found out. Why? Because they know their peers are nothing if not judgmental.

Where brings me back to where I started. The single most defining element of evangelical Christians is their judgment. Their judgment trumps their love every single time.

Now that I live on the other side of such judgment, and inhabit a world of understanding and grace, I feel profoundly sad for my evangelical friends. They are missing the one thing I have known over the last dozen years in exponential measure – the joy of being truly alive and living as the authentic mess that I am. When you believe the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good, you will discover that three-quarters of the world will celebrate that calling with you.

That’s the way I see things.

And so it goes.

After twelve years, it is still maddening. I have lived as a man and I have lived as a woman, and life was much easier as a man.

That subject was the theme of my memoir, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned. It was the subject of my first and third TED Talks, which have had over eight million views. I’ve heard from women from all seven continents (yes, including two from Antarctica) thanking me for validating their experience.

For the last four years I served on my town’s Board of Trustees. In the first term I never felt dismissed as a woman. Our mayor was a woman, as is our town administrator. It felt good to be taken seriously. In the last term, not so much. There were male members who before arriving on the board, questioned my competence. One assumed I simply rubber-stamped what the staff suggested. When I was Paul, not once did anyone ever make that assumption about me. It was obvious I had my own thoughts. But as a woman, different story.

In this last term there were those who did not give me the respect I would have expected given my corporate experience, my years chairing a plethora of boards, my leadership abilities, and my accumulated wisdom. Rarely were they overtly misogynistic, but their assumptions belied their misogyny, as did their tendency to cut me off when I was speaking.

I have met with politicians who were mildly interested in the fact that I was mayor pro tem, but when I was talking with most of them, they had an eye on the room looking for someone else more powerful with whom they could engage. Once they found out about my TED Talks, books, and international speaking career, that all changed. But by then the damage had been done. Their glances over my shoulder had already told me what they really thought, that I was expendable, little more than talking wallpaper.

As Paul, when I could be helpful on an airplane I would offer my knowledge, thinking the other person would be pleased that someone who has flown three million miles was able to help them navigate the overhead space in the front of a 737-800. (Because the fuselage narrows toward the front, the bins are not as large as they are further back in the plane.) But for the last ten years or so, I say nothing. The poor souls turn their bags on end and try to slam the compartment shut, to no avail. But hey, as a woman apparently I cannot possibly know anything about complicated flying machines, so I keep my mouth shut.

What I did not include in my TED Talks was what I have learned about competition among women. As one of my close female friends said, “You missed the teenage years when we learned how to deal with the mean girls.” Over the past twelve years I have developed close female friendships and watched them crumble into dust in ways that never happened, not even once, with my close male friends. Until I transitioned, I never lost a friendship. As Paula, I have lost more than one.

Women know they have to fight for what they have, and protect it once they have it. The world does not hand them anything. My experience is that women are reluctant to empower one another. They understandably work from a scarcity mentality because opportunities are, in fact, scarce.

With the friendships I lost, I found myself confronted by female drama, something I had never experienced as a man. Since then I have learned to identify and avoid it. I back away the second I see the spinning tornado of toxic drama coming. Now I know why Paula, my girlfriend, generally prefers working with men to working with women. She has said, “If you are both competent and attractive, other women will try to take you out at the knees.” Good to know.

Still, the difficulties of female relationships do not hold a candle to the power I relinquished when I transitioned. Men almost never treat me with the same respect with which I was treated as Paul. There are a few exceptions, like Stan, Fred, Mark, Josh, Colby, and others. Interestingly, most of them are post-evangelical pastors.

It is not that people dismiss me because I am transgender. Most do not know I am transgender. They dismiss me because I am a female, and an older female at that. In American culture older females are functionally invisible. Older males, on the other hand, are granted positions of honor for their supposed wisdom. Four of our last seven presidents have fallen into that category, including one who is spectacularly devoid of the tiniest shred of wisdom.

I do not expect things to change anytime soon. When I watch the elk during the rut I realize gender arrived out of  a primordial soup that gave the male of most species more muscle mass than the female, and therefore the power to treat females as objects and possessions. It’s been that way for millennia.

The good news is that one species has evolved to the point in which males have developed the agency to allow them to grow beyond that misogynistic behavior. Now, if just more of them would exercise that agency.

And so it goes.

I was working in Kentucky last week and took time to visit Mill Ridge Farm in Lexington, the Kentucky Horse Park, and the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. The pastoral scenes were calming, an immaculate horse farm and the Shaker Village with its order and simplicity. We spent the night in a room at the East Family House at the village and had a delightful dinner and breakfast there the next morning. I took the picture above at the village on Wednesday evening.

At Mill Ridge Farm, as the guide talked about the farm’s fifth generation ownership, I watched through the door of the breeding barn while Casa Creed, one of the stallions, ran back and forth in pleasure, waiting for his chance to dazzle us with his brilliance.

On the final day of the trip I visited with my brother and his wife. We talked about our years in Akron, Ohio, and the good people who were a part of the West Akron Church of Christ. There were so many pleasant memories of so many people who were very good to us. The time in Kentucky was a delight. I even had a chance to introduce Paula to Skyline Chili, three-way, dry, as it should be eaten. The trip home was a shitshow, as air travel has become in these greedy times, but it couldn’t dampen my spirit.

On Saturday morning we headed to Blue Roof Equestrian Center in Erie, Colorado, where Paula keeps her warm-blooded Hanoverian dressage horse, Lyrik. I watched her ride in the outdoor arena for an hour before we headed to our guilty pleasure, Cracker Barrel, (Shh! Don’t tell anyone we go there) for a very early dinner, as old people (well, I’m old – Paula is not) are inclined to do.

This is what summer is, blue skies, Kentucky bluegrass, Colorado’s purple mountains majesties. I was feeling pretty good about life. Then the Knicks won on Saturday night and I mean, maybe there is a God. I’m pretty sure Jonathan and Kijana are still celebrating.

Then came Sunday evening, and the absolutely surreal, disturbing debacle on the lawn of the White House, as grown men beat each other to a bloody pulp while thousands of the most powerful people in the world sat there and cheered.

I was reminded of the demand for bread and circuses and the part that played in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but I doubt anyone who would actually know what those references mean was attending the spectacle.

I have no illusions, there has always been brutality in our nation. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn so poignantly said, the line between good and evil runs straight through the center of the human heart. But thousands of people watched, apparently without irony, as abject violence was celebrated on Flag Day. It may as well have been the spectacle of a public hanging, the last of which took place in the US in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1936. Only that was not at the White House.

Unless I am missing something, not a single elected politician in attendance spoke out against the unconscionable comment one of the fighters made about Michele Obama. And yes, that includes the president. It is all so very troubling.

I still believe in this nation and in our ability to right the ship of American democracy, but scenes like last night’s are not giving me much to work with in the way of hope.

November 3, 2026 will be an extremely important day in the history of our nation. Do those of us who care what happens, care enough to do the grassroots work to put guardrails on this presidency? I have been actively contributing to the campaigns of candidates who will stand up to growing authoritarianism. I ran for office in an attempt to bring civility to local government. I’ll let our town residents decide how the man they elected is doing in that department.

It is ironic that evangelical Christians, who are always ready to talk about the fruit of the Spirit, are still supporting the Christian nationalism on display at the White House last night. It is an oxymoron that they should speak of the fruit of the Spirit at all.

Galatians 5: 22, 23 describes the nine specific virtues that comprise the fruit of the Spirit. They are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Please, someone from that world, tell me which of those virtues was on display on the White House lawn last night? Anyone?

And so it goes.

Years ago I was hiking alone to Bridal Veil Falls in Rocky Mountain National Park. It had been a dry winter and there was no snow on the trail. The morning of the hike it snowed about an inch or two. As I headed out of McGraw Ranch, I was making fresh footprints in the snow.

About two miles into the hike I saw tracks in the snow laterally across the trail. I looked closely and there were four toes, with a three-lobed heel. It was the first time I had seen a mountain lion track, and the size indicated it was not a small cat. As I kneeled on the ground, measuring the tracks with the ruler printed on the back page of my book, Scat and Tracks, I jumped to full height. (I dunno, is it a little weird that I own that book?) I did not need to be kneeling in the snow so the mountain lion could think, “Aw, that’s so nice of my lunch to make themselves smaller so I can more easily prepare my meal.”

I gingerly turned back toward the trailhead when I happened across a ranger heading up the trail. I told him about the tracks and he was eager to see them. I showed him the tracks and then turned toward the trailhead. He said, “There’s no need to shorten your hike. You’re tall enough no mountain lion is going to attack you.” I said, “I understand what you are saying, but has anyone told the mountain lion that?” The ranger laughed and I kept walking back to the trailhead, off in search of a safer trail.

I thought of that ranger when I read the New York Times bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. The authors said we should not listen to the artificial intelligence entrepreneurs who offer confident assurances that AI will never become nefarious. The authors say those creating artificial general intelligence do not even fully understand how it works! It’s like saying, “That mountain lion won’t eat you,” when you know absolutely nothing about the feeding habits of mountain lions.

I was pleased last week when graduates from multiple universities booed as commencement speakers spoke in glowing terms about artificial intelligence. The speakers were caught off guard, confused, flummoxed. In their Silicon Valley bubble, apparently no one dares confront them about the dangers of artificial general intelligence.

An additional concern about AI is that in many nations, safeguards have been put in place to protect people from losing jobs to artificial intelligence, as well as regulate every stage of its development in an attempt to limit its abilities. With the current administration in Washington, that is not going to happen in the US.

Silicon Valley is ruled by people with overactive left brain hemispheres and underdeveloped right hemispheres. The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right says I am a body. The left is interested in what it knows. The right is interested in what it experiences. The left is interested in things, the right is interested in the relationships between people and things. The left is focused on categorization and analysis. The right is interested in putting information in a wholistic context. The left hemisphere is more mechanistic, the right is more organic.

The truth is that the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere. In a healthy person, information comes into the right hemisphere, is passed to the left for categorization and analysis, and then brought back to the right to be placed in context. Unfortunately, in our current world, for 500 years or so, we have valued the left hemisphere over the right. In other words, the half of the human brain that asks how but never asks why is in charge, and that should frighten us all.

Thank goodness some powerful voices are speaking out about the dangers of AI. In a commencement address to Stanford graduates last week, Apple founder Steve Wozniak said, “You all have AI. That’s right, you all have AI, actual intelligence. We’ve discovered it takes nine months to make it.” Wozniak was applauded.

In his first encyclical, Pope Leo said, “Humanity, in all of its grandeur and woundedness must never be replaced or surpassed.” He also said we must “abandon construction of yet another tower of Babel and join forces in building up the common good.”

There are a lot of mountain lions in the Rocky Mountains. Cathy and I have seen tracks in our yard. Last winter Cathy saw one outside the office window. I ran after dark when I lived on Long Island. I do not run after dark in Colorado. Why take a chance with an enemy that is potentially lethal?

I am not much for celebrating birthdays, though I did enjoy it as a child. Most birthdays meant inviting Bob and Dave May over for dinner and eating chicken my mother had fried in Grandma Stone’s iron skillet. On my ninth birthday Bob and Dave gave me the model car pictured above, a 1959 Oldsmobile. It’s on a bookshelf in my office, along with a green 1960 Ford Galaxy, a red 1964 Ford Galaxy, and a yellow 1964 Thunderbird.

In a lot of ways I was a typical boy. I loved cars, erector sets and chemistry kits, and spent a good bit of every August obsessed with praying mantises. We caught them, built generous sized cages, and fed them grasshoppers. We loved watching them eat the grasshoppers. One year we made the mistake of putting a male and female praying mantis in the same cage. The female ate the male while they were engaged in, shall we say, memorable activities not well understood by ten-year-old boys. That memory stayed with me. But I digress.

A lot of random anniversaries remain in my mind, locked there by the memory gods. My parents wedding anniversary was May 20. This year would have marked their 80th anniversary. They made it to 73 before Mom passed. Dad died six months later. Grandma Stone, my maternal grandmother, was born 139 years ago this coming May 28. She lived into her nineties, as did both of my parents.

Cathy, my former wife, reminded me this morning that today was her mother’s birthday. She would have been 95. She passed away last year, October 12 to be exact. I remembered it was her birthday first thing this morning, before Cathy told me. Today is also the anniversary of one of my “firsts” as Paula. I’m not telling you which one or what year. That’s private. Another is coming up in nine days.

I did my first TED Talk on November 11, 2017. I can’t believe it’s been almost nine years. The talk was released on December 19. I was speaking the next morning at a high school in Littleton, Colorado and watched the talk for the first time when it had fewer than 100 views. To date it has had over seven million views. There are still at least 100 views a day. Last fall there were a couple of months when the algorithm gods were smiling and the talk was back up to 5,000 views a day. Go figure.

I graduated from high school on May 21. The girl I was in love with at the time had turned 18 the day before. Though I was crazy about her, she chose the other guy. I remember the summer they got married, though I do not remember the day.

Cathy and I got engaged on June 22, 1972. I asked her to marry me while we were standing in front of Jackson Christian Church in Massillon, Ohio. Not exactly a romantic spot. One of my closest friends was born in Boulder, Colorado six days later. I always think of my friends as being about my age. Most are much younger than I. I imagine that means something.

The woman I am happily dating now was born exactly 40 days before I graduated from high school, 21 days before I turned 18. That just seems weird. We first held hands when we were at a restaurant where I was eating a wedge salad and shepherd’s pie. Also weird. I remember the date of that too.

The Stone Canyon fire started on the afternoon of July 30, 2024. I was just returning from a run up Stone Canyon Road when it broke out. I was Mayor Pro Tem at the time and spent a good part of that day and the next at the fire station, watching agencies coordinate firefighting efforts. It was like a carefully choreagraphed dance. I was on NBC Nightly News that day, still in my running clothes, covered in sweat, no makeup, hair sticking out like Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons.

The day Cathy and I got married is an easy one to remember, December 31. We were pronounced husband and wife right before midnight.

I remember lots of other random dates, but I can tell I’m starting to bore you.

Three days from now is my 75th birthday. I am hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park that day. I won’t have cell coverage, just so you know. I don’t want you to think I’m rude if you text and you don’t hear back from me.

Seventy-five does not seem nearly as significant as 70 was. I’m not sure why. It feels like 80 will be the next tough one. I mean, I still run six days a week, mountain bike, hike, and fly all over the world speaking and whatnot. That is not likely to change anytime soon.

Every day of this life is holy, sacred, and to be lived for the greater good, including this coming Saturday, May 2. Life is good, and I am blessed on this 29th day of April, in the year of our Lord 2026.

Around seven years ago I went through one of the more difficult experiences of my life. Because of the millions of views of my first TED Talk, I was earning a good living speaking around the world. I was pastoring a new church. Five years after my transition, I was really settling into my life as Paula.

In the midst of this upturn I was suddenly afflicted with internal turmoil. I had a new therapist with whom I was doing EMDR, a rapid eye movement therapy known to heal trauma. The trauma I experienced when I came out as transgender and lost all of my jobs and most of my friends needed to be healed. That was the reason I began EMDR, but as if often the case, it brought up deeper trauma that had been retained in my body.

When we are threatened, the cerebral cortex turns over its functioning to the midbrain – the amygdala and hippocampus. The hippocampus goes into hyper memory mode, though what it remembers is not necessarily what is ultimately helpful. The amygdala helps us respond with fight, flight, fawn, or freeze, depending on the nature of the trauma. Flight is usually the first choice, if the midbrain decides fleeing is likely to be successful. If flight is not an option, we will fight. Fawning occurs when we befriend the perpetrator, prioritizing staying alive over fight or flight.

If the midbrain decides none of those options is available it goes into freeze mode. Freeze mode turns off active memory and in short, prepares you to die without consciously experiencing the death. If you survive freeze mode, you have no memory of the event. Though your mind has no memory of the trauma, your body does. The trauma is held in the body until it is released.

If you’ve ever seen a deer recover after being chased by a predator, you will notice the deer shake and shiver from head to toe. In that physiological response the body is ridding itself of the trauma just experienced. It is literally shaking off the trauma.

Humans have no such automatic physiological way to release trauma. It remains in the body until it can be released, often through therapeutic methods like EMDR, somatic therapy, cognitive processing therapy, or prolonged exposure therapy. I am fairly well acquainted with the first two. The clearest and most understandable book that explains the process of healing trauma is Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger.

It is one thing to treat people experiencing post-traumatic stress. It is another when the post-traumatic stress is your own. On three occasions when I was in EMDR back in 2019, I left the therapy session without the trauma contained. Containment is a process in which the session is wound down so the trauma does not leave the therapy office with you. One time I went to the home of one of my copastors and literally slid to the ground in tears, completely dissociated. My copastor had no training to know how to deal with that.

On two other occasions I went to a close friend who did intuitively know what to do. She sat with me until I could move out of my dissociation and become regulated. On one occasion that took several hours. I will always be grateful for her presence, care, and nurture.

That was seven years ago. For the last two weeks I have found myself again in a place in which trauma has been triggered and I have found myself dissociating. If you know me at all, you know I am nothing if not controlled. Becoming dissociated is very troubling.

This trauma response arrived with the loss of the mayoral election. I wrote last week about some of the reasons for the loss. Doing a postmortem of the campaign was important, both for me and for other transgender candidates who might consider running for office. But this emotional response was not about understanding. It was about feeling, and the overwhelming feelings were shame and guilt for having let others down.

That has resulted in an inability to concentrate, an avoidance of friends, dysthymia (a generalized malaise,) acedia (spiritual torpor) and a few moments of dissociation.

You might ask why I am writing this. It’s a fair question. Why would I want to invite a few thousand folks to look into the process of my inner workings? The reason is because I know there is a very good chance you too have had a similar experience, past trauma you do not even recognize coming forth in your body via an unexpected trigger. You do not have to run for mayor for this to happen. The triggers that cause post-traumatic stress are many, and often bear little resemblance to the original trauma.

But when they come, you need to care for yourself. Do what you must to get through the day. This is not a time to be concerned about disappointing others. You must take care of yourself. Things began to lift when I left a conference I was attending with friends and cancelled my attendance at another. I felt like I was letting people down both times, though none of them gave me the slightest indication that I was.

As the weight began to lift, I found the strength to attend my last meeting of the Board of Trustees as Mayor Pro Tem. I gave a little speech, focused on helping the incoming board members feel comfortable in their discomfort. It is a big job, and anyone who takes it on without feelings of inadequacy does not understand just how big the job is.

I then attended a party honoring our outgoing mayor, who has become a very close friend over the last four years. I had delightful conversations with folks from town, politicians from the region who have become acquaintances and friends, and others who wanted to celebrate Hollie’s service to the town. I was complimented on how I ran my campaign and encouraged to try again. The trying again part does not sound very appealing, but the evening was very encouraging.

Life is not a problem to be solved, it is an experience to be lived. Sometimes it is a puzzle and a mystery. Some parts of life cannot be solved or even understood. They must be lived, and trusting the flow is a part of the living.

To be clear, I am good, and there is no need to reach out in concern. I have proven to be a very resilient soul. I just thought it might be helpful if I shared my experience with you. As I say at the end of many a blog post…

And so it goes.

There’s nothing quite like running for office. My first term on the town Board of Trustees we did not have enough candidates for an election to take place, so all candidates were seated. There was an election for my second term. I did not start getting nervous until right before election day. I knew the odds were with me, but I still let out a sigh of relief when I knew I had been elected. I ended up serving as mayor pro tem, a decision made by the trustees in their first meeting.

This time the odds are 50/50 and I really have no idea who will win. I’ve been trusting my gut but my gut has not been reliable. Every couple of days it shifts its opinion. Someone asked me at church yesterday if my opponent was formidable. I hadn’t used that particular term, but if formidable means he may well beat you, the answer is yes, he is formidable.

Mark has a lot of institutional knowledge about the town. As a board member he has dug deep into issues and at times brought illumination to the entire board. He is a dedicated volunteer who has devoted countless hours to meeting the tangible needs of others. He is a good guy.

If he is so exceptional, why am I running against him? I’ve worked with Mark on the board for two years. I believe he is a better board member than he would be as mayor. I’ve chaired boards for over half my life. I believe a key to efficient functioning in any organization is good governance. It is my opinion that I will be a more effective mayor than he would be.  As I said in one of the candidate forums, the town is probably in pretty good shape whoever wins.

But back to the election itself. It is flat out strange to realize that in twenty-four hours you will find out if people have made the decision to accept you or reject you. I suppose that happens to everyone who becomes one of the final two candidates in any job search, but in those situations it’s a handful of people making the decision. Here, it is an entire municipality, or at least the voters thereof. Well, a portion of the voters thereof.

Municipal election are notorious for a light turnout, particularly when they are spring elections. There has been a lot of interest in this election, with two candidates for mayor and nine for six open board positions. Still, I will be surprised if we get over a fifty percent turnout. If it was this November, that would be a different story. Most people would agree that things are running pretty well here at the municipal level. When people feel that way, they tend to feel less passionate about voting.

I’ve used the picture on the left above for my campaign. The one on the right, the cover photo of my book, has more of a Mona Lisa feel. The women at my speaker’s agency prefer that picture. They say it gives me gravitas. One of my good friends says it makes me appear aloof. I reckon the truth is in the eye of the beholder.

I am not sure how anyone running for office could avoid taking it personally if they lose. I mean, people had an option and they specifically chose someone else over you. I imagine it drives some people to campaign harder. When I decided to throw my hat in the ring, I had already worked through the whole rejection thing. I would not have run if I would not have been okay losing. People are not rejecting you as a person. They are rejecting you as the elected leader of their community.

It has been interesting that not once have I heard a single word during this election cycle about the fact that I am transgender. I am sure there are people who are not voting for me because of it. But ours is a liberal enough environment that they are not posting about it online. One board member sent a letter to the editor of our local newspaper alluding to it and stating strong support for me. He had sent it to me before sending it to the paper. It was thoughtful and very well written. At least two other newspapers had articles about the election. They did not mention my gender at all.

I am well aware how fortunate I am to live in a place in which my gender identity is not a major issue. For most folks it is an afterthought. As our mayor said, “The fact that Paula is transgender is the least interesting thing about her.” I so wish that is how trans folks in the rest of the nation were experiencing life in their neck of the woods. Being transgender is hard to begin with, let alone navigating life if you are being treated as a pariah by your neighbors.

Would I run for office again? I was ambivalent about running this time. I was strongly encouraged to run by our town staff and current and past board members. I would not have done it without their encouragement. I will be disappointed if I lose, but not profoundly. If I win, I have a lot of hard work in front of me for the next two years. But the pay makes it all worth it. And what is the pay, you ask. It is $700 a month. That’s right – a mind-blowing $8,400 a year. What on earth will I do with those kinds of riches?

I will update this post tomorrow to let you know how things go.

Life is full of pleasant surprises. I saw two of my granddaughters this week. I was in Tucson on a working vacation, finishing the proposal for my next book. I stayed at a resort and was sitting in the lobby reading a novel on Friday morning when I saw someone who looked a lot like the father of two of my grandchildren. He walked past and a few seconds later his twins, my granddaughters, walked by. Ava saw me and they all ran over.

They had come to Tucson with their dad for spring break, four weeks after we’d flown home with them from California, where we had gone for winter break (pictured above.) They were on their way to the airport to head home, but we had a few minutes of unexpected delight. The bellhops enjoyed watching our little reunion. Such moments must be celebrated. As I sat in the lobby, grateful, I thought of all of the times in my life when moments of joy have come unexpectedly.

It was almost midnight on a delayed flight to LaGuardia last year and I was the first passenger off the plane. An off-duty pilot who had been in the cockpit jump seat was walking behind me. He caught up with me as we left security. “I think I know who you are. My wife might have strongly recommended that I watch your TED talk yesterday.”

I said, “Yep – that’s me. I’m assuming your wife thought you had been a little insensitive to women?” Sheepishly he said, “Uh, yeah, that might have been the case.” We had a delightful little chat out to the curb where he caught his shuttle and I had a chuckle. He was quite good-natured about it all.

Then there was the time I was in Oregon, along the Columbia River, stopping in my rental car to look at one dramatic waterfall after another. At Multnomah Falls, the fourth stop I had unintentionally shared with folks in their rented Volvo station wagon, the husband said, “We’re going to have to stop meeting like this.” I laughed and we began to chat. I asked them where they were from and they said Cincinnati. I asked what part and they said Delhi. I asked what part of Delhi and they said, “Paradise Lane.”

I said, “Huh. Let me ask you a question. Did you just buy a road bike built for two, and you were out on it for the first time, riding a little wobbly, and you almost ran into a runner you passed?” They looked at me with great surprise and said, “Yeah, a few weeks ago that happened.” I said, “I know. I was the runner.” I had been teaching at a seminary in Cincinnati, staying with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, and went for an evening run at the same time this couple tried out their new bike. It was now two months later and here we were in Oregon. We talked for a while. They knew the seminary. Their pastor had attended there.

I was getting ready to speak for TED Women in 2018 when I heard one of the other speakers doing her dress rehearsal. I said to my son, “She’s from Appalachia, like, my neck of the woods in Appalachia.” TED speakers are from all over the world, so hearing a familiar accent is unusual. I went up to her when she finished and found out she was the fire chief in Huntington, West Virginia, my hometown. We were born in the same hospital. We were both doing TED Talks the next day. We’ve been friends ever since. I ran into her wife at the Charlotte airport Admiral’s Club a couple of months ago.

Back when I was in television I would frequently have people come up to me and tell me they had watched me on in the middle of the night. Their stories were always similar. “My wife was in the hospital and we were up during the night and we watched your show. It brought us a lot of peace.” Or, “My baby was colicky, and I couldn’t get any sleep and I watched you while I tried to calm her down.”

I was the on-air host of a quasi-religious nature show focused on those who were up in the middle of the night. We showed scenes of nature, told uplifting stories, and generally tried to encourage folks. You could tell it was Christian but you had no idea whether it was Catholic or Protestant, which was a good thing. I was the head writer. My favorite shoot was eighteen shows in Vienna, Austria on the church fathers and another eighteen on Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, and Mahler. We shot at a thirteenth century Cistercian monastery and the Vienna Opera House, among other stunning locations.

For me, those people coming up and telling me about watching our show in the middle of the night were precious encounters. I believe when I come to the end of my days, that will have been some of the most important work I ever did, soothing people who were struggling in the middle of the night.

I have had a lot of people come up to me in airports or on streets and thank me for my TED Talks too. They tell me the talk made them laugh, and cry. I love that. It means the talk made them feel something.  I remember an orthopedic surgeon at a conference at UCLA who said, “I always thought I was crazy until one of my female colleagues showed me your TED Talk.” I told her I had heard from a lot of women in male dominated fields (like orthopedic surgery) telling me the same thing.

Still, none of those match up to seeing my granddaughters unexpectedly in a resort in Tucson. After they left I cried, grateful for all of the blessings that come our way in this holy life, our short pause between two great mysteries.