Maurice Sendak: That Was Always the Whole Secret

Tears. This is so moving and something that I resonate so deeply with. Thank you, Maurice Sendak. What a beautiful gift of wisdom, beauty, compassion, and love. 🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

Live Your Life. Live Your Life.

Live Your Life.

In September 2011, an 83-year-old man named Maurice Sendak picked up the phone in his Connecticut home and called Terry Gross at NPR.

He had been on her show many times before. As one of the most beloved children’s book authors in history, he had written and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and dozens of other books that became woven into the childhoods of millions.

He had a new book out called Bumble-Ardy. He had created it during the most painful period of his life, while his partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn, was dying. "I did Bumble-Ardy to save myself," he told Terry. "I did not want to die with him."

What followed was one of the most beautiful interviews ever broadcast. For nineteen minutes, Maurice Sendak talked about getting old, about dying, and about the people he had loved. He spoke of the maple trees outside his studio window that were hundreds of years old and how, in the final stretch of his life, he had finally fallen completely in love with the world.

He cried. Terry cried. Listeners all over the country, driving in their cars or washing dishes, pulled over and cried with them.

He spoke of the tragedy of being 83 and outliving almost everyone he loved most—his parents, his brother Jack, his sister Natalie, his longtime publisher, and most painfully, Eugene. Then he said something that has been quoted ever since: "I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more."

He talked about how strange it was to find peace so late in life. He had spent most of his years unhappy, raised by Holocaust survivors who carried a grief they passed down to him. He had spent decades in therapy, once saying he believed in the existence of happy people but had never been one of them.

But near the end, something changed. He told Terry he was now in love with the world. He could look out his window at those beautiful trees and see them for what they were. He called it a blessing to grow old and have time for the things he loved—the books, the music, the quiet moments. "I have nothing now but praise for my life," he said.

At the end of the interview, he shared something with Terry that stayed with everyone who heard it: "You are the only person I have ever dealt with... who brings this out in me. There’s something very unique and special in you, which I so trust."

As they both wept, he added: "Almost certainly, I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you." Then, before hanging up, he gave her three final pieces of advice: "Live your life. Live your life. Live your life."

Eight months later, on May 8, 2012, Maurice Sendak passed away peacefully in a hospital in Connecticut at the age of 83.

His friend Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, was with him in his final days and brought him a gift: a photograph of Lewis Carroll sitting on a windowsill with his feet hanging outside. It was a perfect goodbye. The man who spent his life drawing children stepping into other worlds was now stepping into his own.

His books remain in nearly every library, and generations of children still join Max on his wild rumpus, always returning home to find their dinner waiting for them—and still hot.

In that final interview, he told Terry he would keep crying for the people he lost all the way to the end. "I’m a happy old man," he said. "But I will cry my way all the way to the grave."

He cried because he loved them. That was the whole secret. That was always the whole secret.

#neverforget #HolocaustHistory #womenshistory #RealHeroes

Copied from Moments from the Past

Cristina Breshears: Inheritance

 Thank you, Cristina Breshears. So powerful,

wise, and true. — Molly

By Cristina Breshears

I didn’t set out to write about inheritance. Not at first. When I began researching and writing Inheriting Our Names years ago, I thought I was writing about silence, about grief, about Spain’s Pact of Forgetting, about what a nation chooses not to say in order to survive itself.

I was interested in memory, in erasure, in the stories that slip beneath the surface and settle there, undisturbed — and how that inheritance impacts future generations. But even then, something else was moving underneath. Because silence and exhausted acceptance, too, is a kind of inheritance. Not just what is passed down in words and deeds, but what is carried forward in the absence of our voices and actions.

These past couple of years, I find myself deep in the lives of my great-grandfathers tracing land deeds and laws, migrations and violences, faith and its distortions. I thought I was writing an American history, or perhaps a reckoning. But here, too, the same question keeps surfacing, quiet and insistent: what do we do with what we’ve been given? Because, inheritance is not only material. It isn’t only names or property or bloodlines. It is also ways of seeing. Ways of justifying. And ways of looking away. It is the story you are handed about who you are and who others are in relation to you.

For a long time, I think I treated inheritance as something fixed. Or perhaps passive. Something simply received. But I’m beginning to see a distinction that feels essential. There is what is bequeathed to us, and there is what we choose to inherit. The first arrives without consent. The second requires participation.

Lately, this question has been surfacing not only in the past as I research the great-grandfathers, but also in the present. In the latest news cycle. In the rhythms of daily life. In the quiet, accumulating (and oftentimes unconscious) decisions we make about what we will accept as normal.

Take today … a proposal emerges for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, mobilized quickly in the name of protecting power after a moment of fear. This, after assurances the ballroom would never cost the public a dime. $400 million dollars. At a time when so many are quietly doing devastating math at their kitchen tables: rent or groceries; prescriptions or gas; one more shift or one more bill deferred.

U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham, Katie Britt, and Eric Schmitt today introduced the White House Safety and Security Act of 2026, which provides taxpayer funding for the construction of the presidential ballroom in the East Wing of the White House. The language is familiar: safety, security, necessity. But it is shocking how today the machinery is moving with startling speed while at the same time, children continue to practice lockdown drills, evacuations, duck and cover.

This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. One we have slowly and unevenly come to live alongside. In 2026, there have been at least 32 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 14 deaths and 15 injuries nationally. It hardly makes the news anymore.

I wonder, what does it do to a child to practice hiding? What does it do to a parent to practice letting go? I do not think that what we ask our children (and ourselves) to endure and carry disappears. It becomes part of us. It settles in the body and in our nervous system and in what we call normal. It settles. It shapes. It becomes part of how we move through the world.

I find myself thinking not just about policy, or politics, or priorities, but about formation. What does it mean to grow up inside this? What does it do to a child to learn that safety is conditional? That fear is something to be managed rather than prevented? That the world will not change, even when the threat is known and avoidable? What does it do to a child to learn that law actually can be rewritten or rearranged, but not for them?

We tell ourselves kids are resilient. And they are. But resilience is not the same as being unharmed. They are being harmed. We are being harmed.

This is the thread in my work I’ve been unconsciously teasing but didn’t fully see before. What we tolerate does not remain contained to the moment. It carries forward through memory and habit and through what we come to accept. Inheritance is not only what we receive from the past. It is what we allow to pass through us into the future. And this is where the distinction begins to matter. Because if everything that is bequeathed were automatically inherited, nothing would ever change.

But there is, I think, a narrow and necessary space between the two. A space of attention. A moment, sometimes brief, sometimes hard-won where we can ask: is this mine to carry? Does this fit into the fabric of who I am, who I want to be? Is this mine to perpetuate? What will this do, if I pass it on unchanged? What if I reshape this? What if I lay it down?

I don’t mean this in a grand or abstract way. I mean it in the smallest, most ordinary moments. Like in a reaction that feels inherited. Or a belief that has never been examined. In a silence that echoes something older than ourselves. But yes, also in the larger communal patterns: in what we fund with our tax dollars, in what we accommodate, in what we excuse, in what we call inevitable.

I think there could be a daily practice here. We receive. We notice. We discern. We decide. That is, sometimes we hold. Sometimes we reshape. Sometimes, with effort, we set something down. And then, the next day, we do it again. Not perfectly. Not completely. But with increasing awareness. This belongs in the world I want my children to inherit. This does not.

If my writing work is about uncovering what has been carried through silence, through story, and through blood, this moment today feels like something adjacent, but different. It is about our agency within inheritance. About the possibility that we are not only the recipients of history, but its intermediaries. That what passes through us is not predetermined.

What we endure, we become. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. But in real and measurable ways: psychological, cultural, moral. If we ask ourselves to live with preventable fear, we become a society that knows how to accommodate that fear. If we ask ourselves to adapt to harm, we become a society that confuses adaptation with resolution.

But the inverse is also true. If we refuse certain inheritances — if we interrupt them, refuse them, transform them — we can alter what is available to be passed on. We can shape what comes next.

I don’t know that we do this well, as individuals or as a nation (maybe I should just speak for myself). Momentum is powerful. So is fatigue. So is the quiet apathetic seduction of calling something “just the way things are; the way it’s always been.” But I am beginning to believe that the work is not as distant as I’ve imagined. It begins close with what we notice, with what we question, and with what we refuse to normalize. It begins in that space of discernment between what is given to us and what we accept.

I didn’t set out to write about inheritance, but it seems I have been writing about it all along. Not just what we carry from the past, but what we allow to move through us into the future. And maybe that is the alchemical work, after all. Not to choose what we are given, but to choose, again and again, what we will keep, what we will change, and what we will no longer pass on. Because what we do with what we’ve been given becomes what we give. And what we are shaping now will not end with us.

In the words of Czeslaw Milosz:

"Day draws near

another one

do what you can."

(image: A rendering of the new 650-person ballroom in a new 90,000 sq ft building)

Anne Lamott: Gold

I love Anne Lamott. I love the beauty and heart and humility and courage and fierce love that flows through Anne and which she gifts as mirrors for us all. Deepest bow of gratitude and love. 🙏💜 Molly

Photo by Molly

Gold

Half the time when someone announces, “Here’s the thing,” I bristle: Did God stop by their home that morning with a Power Point presentation? Had they contacted Stephen Hawking in a seance?

The other half of the time, I feel a desperate relief that someone is reminding me how appropriate it is that I feel completely discombobulated and hopeless, and yet that there is hope. Yesterday morning I woke to an absolutely unremarkable sky. Not a cloud in sight, gray but with some weak suggestion of brightness to the right where the sun could be sensed. I might have sensed a mere hint of gold, of warmth, but way too subtle for me in my current condition.

As usual in the morning, I turned to Scripture. Rebecca Solnit reminds me, “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.” And Mary Oliver: "Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.” Jesus (paraphrased): “Don’t be a jerk, and help take care of my sheep.” (cf Jefferson Airplane.)

So here’s the thing: Right now, circumstances have shaken up the snow globe, and for nervous cases such as myself, it is hard to get my bearings. Even before this godawful and illegal war, there were the billionaires cavalierly running and ruining things, a far right Supreme Court, Epstein, etc. not to mention our own mixed-grilled lives— struggling family members, climate change, the slow-mo decline of aging, and then? Ring ring ring: Our beloved old friends getting godawful diagnoses and dying. I ask you: Life just gets so much lifier than I was prepared for.

Some mornings after reading the most recent news of corruption, evil and treason at the highest levels of power, I’m reminded of Joseph Goldstein, the Buddhist writer, who once said, “Another day? Didn’t we just have one yesterday?”

It can be unfathomably weird and hard these days. How do we see a way forward through the swirling white particles of fake snow? How do we not give up and let them ruin and steal everything that is beautiful about America?

Well, here’s the thing: What has always worked before will work again. We stick together. We feed the poor. We take to the streets, loudly and peacefully, like Molly Ivins said, banging pots and pans and shouting, “This must end.” We keep the faith in We the People, in the Constitution, in the basic goodness and courage of people.

I have seen alchemy many, many times in my 72 years here: against all odds, lead transformed to gold. Sober drunks like me are Exhibit A.

My Jesuit friend Tom Weston always tells me, when I am at my most frantic and doomed, “We do what is possible, what is practical, simple and kind.” You all have got the kind part down: We wave to people, we return phone calls and library books, pick up litter, flirt with very old people in the express line even though they have brought coupons. You give some money or food or clothing to the poor, drop dollar bills into paper cups, you show up and listen to people who are hurting, while refraining from offering your incredibly annoying advice.

The game of life is rough, and a lot of people are playing hurt. We listen. We get them water.

The practical part is to help protect the midterms by supporting the integrity and possibly even the existence of the midterms. You give anything you can afford to the ACLU, and to the nonpartisan Election Official Legal Defense Network. If you are struggling with higher food and gas prices because of the illegal Iran war, have a garage sale and donate what you make that day. Doing this will make you happier that you could have imagine possible, what with the appropriate terror and grief so many of us are feeling these days. I promise: You’ll feel as enlivened and hopeful as you did at the last No King’s Rally. If you don’t, I will gladly refund your misery.

The practical/spiritual part, in the loosest meaning of the word “spiritual” is to fill up on nature, on her staggering, showoffy beauty and her schoolmarm lessons: let her blow your mind with awe and the interconnectedness of all things. Remember that root systems share their oxygen, water, and nutrients with trees who may not be doing so well. We are in this together and we are connected. There is still so much magic in the world, let alone those the strange sidelong paths that Reverend Solnit describes. No matter how tempting it is to check out, stop hitting the snooze button. Keep looking up and around: Guess what? The sun did rise yesterday, not blindingly so, but as a plain old ordinary yellow sun, as life and possibility.

So here’s the thing: A golden portent of light means that that’s where the sun will come up. Stay alert, and let your good heart stay open. I know I sound like a broken record, but here’s the thing: I think we’ve got this.

— Anne Lamott

https://annelamott.substack.com/p/gold

It was such a joy to meet Anne Lamott

when she came to Powell's Books in Portland. 

 Which of her books would I recommend? 

Any and all of them. 

💜

Honoring and Celebrating All Women Everywhere on Mother's Day

This is something that I wrote a year ago that 

I am moved to share again. 💜🙏

Photo by Molly

Honoring and Celebrating All  

Women Everywhere 

on Mother's Day

Today I am thinking of Marita, Rubi, Alli, and Arlyne — each loving mothers to our beautiful grandchildren. And I am thinking of other family and many beloved friends near and far and wishing all a beautiful and blessed Mother's Day.

I am also remembering and honoring my mother and grandmothers and ancestors. And I extend my deep caring and love to all the mothers of all the species everywhere and to our Earth Mother.

This day can be one of both celebration and gratitude and love and also one of pain and loss. Throughout most of my adult life, I spent tortured minutes every year standing in the store aisle in front of Mother's Day cards trying not to cry. My experience was one of wading through countless cards that did not mirror my incredibly painful and traumatic experiences with my own mother who — up until the miracle of her partial awakening over the last seven years of her life — was imprisoned in her narcissistic illness. I honor and bless these women for whom this day is a reminder not of mother love, but of mother loss.

There are also the mothers who have endured the unbearable death of a child. I honor and again bless these women and the unfathomable loss that they have experienced. May there be gradual healing over time and may they be held with the deepest compassionate, wise, tender, and loving support over all the years that follow their great loss. (An excellent resource is Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore: https://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Unbearable-Love-Heartbreaking-Grief/dp/1614292965.)

Mother's Day, to me, is also a day to honor and celebrate all women everywhere. Many of us birth children and many of us do not. That said, there are countless ways in which women give birth — to beauty, courage, creativity, hope, and inspiration; to healing and unburdening and transforming ancestral and cultural trauma; to activism and generosity and passion and peace; to gratitude and kindness and wisdom and love.

I also acknowledge on this day that there are many women who, for so many different reasons, have not been able to find their way out of the trauma and suffering and legacy burdens that they have absorbed in their lifetimes. May we also hold with compassion and tenderness these women and the suffering that they endure.

Within all women everywhere is the Sacred embodiment of the many gifts of the Divine Feminine. On this Mother's Day may we reach out with heartfelt caring and compassion and love to all women everywhere. All can be honored. All can be blessed.

With love,

💗

Molly

Remembering My Mom and My Children On Mother's Day

 

Brian, Kevin, and Matthew Murray

Today I am remembering my beloved mother 

and my three beautiful sons. 

My heart is filled with 

gratitude and love.

 

💗🙏💗

Molly

John O'Donohue: A Blessing For Beauty

Photos are by Molly

A Blessing For Beauty

May the beauty of your life become more visible to you, that you may glimpse your wild divinity.

May the wonders of the earth call you forth from all your small, secret prisons and set your feet free in the pastures of possibilities.

May the light of dawn anoint your eyes that you may behold what a miracle a day is.

May the liturgy of twilight shelter all your fears and darkness within the circle of ease.

May the angel of memory surprise you in bleak times with new gifts from the harvest of your vanished days.

May you allow no dark hand to quench the candle of hope in your heart.

May you discover a new generosity towards yourself, and encourage yourself to engage your life as a great adventure.

May the outside voices of fear and despair find no echo in you.

May you always trust the urgency and wisdom of your own spirit.

May the shelter and nourishment of all the good you have done, the love you have shown, the suffering you have carried, awaken around you to bless your life a thousand times.

And when love finds the path to your door may you open like the earth to the dawn, and trust your every hidden color towards its nourishment of light.

May you find enough stillness and silence to savor the kiss of God on your soul and delight in the eternity that shaped you, that holds you and calls you.

And may you know that despite confusion, anxiety and emptiness, your name is written in Heaven.

And may you come to see your life as a quiet sacrament of service, which awakens around you a rhythm where doubt gives way to the grace of wonder, where what is awkward and strained can find elegance, and where crippled hope can find wings, and torment enter at last unto the grace of serenity.

May Divine Beauty bless you.

— John O’Donohue

 From Beauty – The Invisible Embrace

Dorothy Day: Love and Ever More Love

Photo by Molly

Love and Ever More Love

Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other's faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much. 

— Dorothy Day

David Korten — Rewilding: The Quest to Restore Living Earth

 

DAVID KORTEN | May 6, 2026

We are rapidly dismantling the living systems on which our future depends—forests that regulate climate, wetlands that filter water, grasslands that sustain biodiversity, and migration corridors that keep ecosystems whole. These losses are undermining water security, food systems, and climate stability.

The Growing Rewilding Movement

A counter to this story of degradation is the growing worldwide rewilding movement. Its purpose is to restore large living landscapes and the ecological processes that sustain them. The time has come to ask how we can learn from—and build on—the experience of these emerging efforts.

Much of this work is made possible by a small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals who are directing significant portions of their fortunes toward large-scale ecological restoration. They carry a deep sense of responsibility for how their privilege can be used in service to the living Earth and all its people.

One such couple is Douglas and Kristine Tompkins. I first met Doug and Kris some 20 years ago. I knew Doug, co-founder of Esprit clothing, as a funder of the International Forum on Globalization, of which I was for many years an active member. In 2004, I had the privilege of spending a week at the Tompkins’ Patagonian ranch. Doug took me on flights over their vast and magnificent lands. Together Doug and Kris directed their personal fortune to buying and restoring lands, which they then turned over to the Chilian and Argentine governments to become vast public parklands. They thus transformed their private wealth into enduring public ecological assets.

Another such philanthropist is Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss citizen and long-time U.S. resident who built his fortune through the medical device company Synthes. He has committed billions of dollars through philanthropic organizations to protect lands worldwide. His support includes major contributions to conserve Romania’s Carpathians, and to the global 30×30 initiative—an international effort to protect at least 30 percent of Earth’s land and oceans by 2030. Wyss is also a major contributor to African Parks, which now manages protected areas in partnership with governments and local communities in 12 countries across Africa. Some large-scale conservation efforts, including those led by organizations such as African Parks, have faced criticism for excluding or mistreating local communities—an important reminder that rewilding must be grounded in respect for human rights, Indigenous knowledge, and shared governance if it is to succeed over the long term.

In the United States, where land is divided among public agencies, private owners, and Indigenous nations, rewilding is emerging as part of a complex mosaic of multi-owner landscapes that link wild cores, working lands, and community stewardship across entire regions. Examples are the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and Montana’s American Prairie project. These examples demonstrate that rewilding is not confined to sparsely inhabited places like Patagonia. It can take root where people live, work, and share responsibility for the land.

A Spectrum of Human Habitation

We can envision rewilded landscapes on a spectrum of human habitation. At one end are core wild areas—places where human intrusion is minimized and ecological processes are allowed to unfold on their own terms. These areas are essential to restoring the integrity, resilience, and evolutionary potential of Earth’s living systems. But they cannot stand alone.

Surrounding these self-organizing natural spaces are zones of active stewardship, where rangers, scientists, and local communities protect wildlife, restore habitat, reintroduce species, and guide ecological recovery. Next are human-integrated landscapes, where people earn livelihoods through guiding, hospitality, regenerative agriculture, and other enterprises tied directly to ecosystem health. Finally, there are areas of dense human populations with diverse, thriving economic activity.

These zones are not static. A landscape undergoing restoration may need substantial human assistance in reestablishing plant and animal species. Later it may advance toward greater ecological autonomy. Rewilding, in this sense, is not a fixed state but an unfolding process.

Sustaining Rewilded Areas

Can rewilded areas be sustained over time? The evidence suggests that they can, but only if we abandon the fantasy that such areas can be supported though the earnings from ecotourism alone. Analyses by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and others show that tourism revenues are often volatile and insufficient. This also highlights a deeper tension: economic systems driven by transnational corporations seeking to maximize short-term financial returns are fundamentally at odds with the long-term stewardship that rewilding requires.

What is promising is a blended model: initial philanthropic financing to secure and restore landscapes, followed by diversified income streams from tourism, local enterprises, and ecosystem services, combined with long-term endowment-style support to sustain essential stewardship functions.

This is why initiatives like the Legacy Landscapes Fund are so important. The Fund provides long-term, dependable funding for exceptional landscapes, acknowledging a simple truth: even the best-designed systems require a permanent stewardship layer that markets alone will not provide.

That distinction matters. A forest, wetland, savanna, or coastal ecosystem produces forms of real wealth rarely recognized by conventional economists. These include carbon storage, water regulation, soil renewal, habitat for diverse species, and the conditions essential to life itself—along with beauty and wonder.

An Ecological Civilization requires that we recognize and value these forms of real wealth. A rewilded landscape should not be expected to behave as a profit center like a shopping mall. The relevant question is whether it can generate sufficient aligned economic activity to support the human stewardship required to maintain ecological integrity.

The Carpathian initiative in Romania reflects the blended model of support. Foundation Conservation Carpathia is restoring one of Europe’s last great forested mountain systems while building a non-destructive regional economy. Through local enterprise support and Travel Carpathia, it is creating livelihoods that depend on a flourishing landscape.

Europe’s broader rewilding movement has made explicit this integration of local communities into rewilded areas. Rewilding Europe promotes enterprises that generate income while supporting ecological restoration and community wellbeing. These efforts are seeding what might be called an “economic ecology” of locally rooted businesses whose success depends on a healthy ecosystem.

For now, rewilding exists largely at the margins of an inequitable global economy that continues to fragment and deplete the living Earth. In a profound paradox, many rewilding initiatives are funded by wealth generated within that very system. Yet what they demonstrate is not merely an act of repair, but a different possibility: an economy organized around regeneration, stewardship, and long-term care.

In Patagonia, the Tompkins-led initiatives demonstrate how private wealth can be transformed into public goods on a national scale—transferring millions of acres into national park systems while supporting surrounding communities through nature-based tourism and related enterprises.

The deeper opportunity is moral as well as practical. Rewilding at scale allows concentrated private wealth—often accumulated through global markets and industrial systems—to be redirected into a shared, living inheritance: forests, watersheds, wildlife, and livelihoods that endure across generations.

A Model for Ecological Civilization

We are learning how to design human economies as embedded parts of living systems—where some places are left to the wild, some are carefully tended, and others sustain large human communities living in balance with nature.

A living landscape mosaic is what an Ecological Civilization will look like in practice.

Please go here for David's website: https://davidkorten.org/

My Review and the Trailer for "Steal This Story, Please!," Where This Film Can Be Seen, and More...

Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! were the first journalists at Standing Rock in 2016

Independent investigative journalist and author Jeremy Scahill

***

The Trailer 

***

The Awards

Please go here to see the awards that have been given thus far to Steal This Story, Please!: https://stealthisstory.org/awards

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When and Where To See

Steal the Story, Please!

Steal This Story, Please! is playing around the country. To see where the documentary is playing near you, please go here: https://stealthisstory.org/

This film will continue to be featured in Portland at Cinema 21 through May 7th. If you are local and interested, please go here to view times/dates and get tickets: https://www.cinema21.com/

***

Democracy Now!

If you haven't already been watching, reading, or listening to Democracy Now!, please go here for the website: https://www.democracynow.org/

***

A 30 Year Anniversary Celebration of Democracy Now! and Global Independent Journalism

If you missed this amazing celebration and would like to see it, please go here: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2026/03/excellent-and-highly-recommended.html

* * * * *

A Larger View of This Documentary

My husband I saw Steal the Story, Please! in Portland on April 27th. It is hard to describe my experience. It was so deep, so profound. Yes, the lifetime of Amy Goodman was featured. Simply awe inspiring. And the heart of the film also illuminates the vital need for and power of global independent journalism, which is indeed the "lifeblood of democracy."

We saw Amy as a child and how she came to be inspired to be one of the most extraordinary independent journalists nationally, globally, and of all times. We met her beloved dog, learned the history of her amazing father, met her 106 year old grandmother, and followed the astounding 30 year history of Democracy Now! from its inception to the present day.

We also had front row seats to Amy's travels all over the country and worldwide. We watched her go into war zones, be beaten and arrested, shine bright light on corruption wherever she found it, visit gravesites of ancestors who had died in the Holocaust, travel to where climate disasters had hit and where the fossil fuel industry was destroying a livable planet, and bring the stories of indigenous peoples, of marginalized populations, and of politicians doing the bidding of their wealthy donors rather than acting out of the best interests of We The People, all living beings, and the Earth. There are those like Jeremy Scahill — and Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, George Monbiot, Norman Solomon, Ibram X Kendi, Henry Giroux, Angela Davis, countless worldwide indigenous voices, and on and on — that I only came to know through Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!

Again and again, and over the course of her adult lifetime, Amy Goodman has gone to where the silence is and brought forth the stories and the voices rarely or never heard on mainstream corporate funded American media. Because Amy has never been in the pockets of any wealthy donors, she has for decades embodied a profound dedication to truth and to holding the powerful accountable rather than being their voice pieces. And this is why I have been donating every month to Democracy Now! for many, many years. And this is why independent global news is so essential to the welfare of us all.

Amy Goodman if my heroine. She is among those who I most respect and am grateful for and admire and been inspired by. She is part of my inspiration to start my blog 18 years ago. And because of my exposure over the years to Amy's courage, integrity, truth-telling, and utter commitment to empowering us all as human beings, my own resilience, stamina, curiosity, and profound caring for all of life on Earth has grown and grown. 

This is so much more than simply a political post that I am doing here, now, today. Amy Goodman is among those who inspires me to act, to be informed, to speak to what I am learning again and again and again, and to do my part in alleviating the suffering in our world. Amy is among those who have inspired and empowered me to hold in growing depth both the trauma and tragedies of our world and also its amazing beauty and the love and connection and caring that is possible between us all as human beings. 

This is the larger view, something so much greater than being just "political." This is about my children and grandchildren and all of the children of all of the species on Earth. This is about our hearts, about truth and wisdom and courage, about curiosity and awareness and inspiration, about our interrelationship with all of our planetary sisters and brothers, and about being empowered to act out of the consciousness of the highest good for us all. 

The essence of what flows through Amy Goodman and the gifts that she brings to myself and our world is intertwined with my spiritual path. The bottom line is to embody and act out of compassion and love. I bow with the deepest gratitude to all who have made such a profound difference in my life. Amy Goodman is certainly among them.

This extraordinary documentary ended with Patti Smith singing People Have the Power. Tears. My heart was so opened, moved, inspired, and filled with gratitude and passion to claim my power in doing my ever growing part in the the universal struggle for a just, sustainable, equitable, and peaceful world. I'll end with this video of Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, others singing this song at the close of the 30 year anniversary special honoring Amy Goodman and others and the phenomenal Democracy Now!

May we all be inspired!

And steal this story, please!

🙏💜

Molly

One of the countless times that I have been gifted with seeing Amy Goodman

It was so wonderful to see and meet Jeremy Scahill!