2026-07-01

communities are aura-gated. cities have many communities of varying power levels superimposed onto each other. as you grow, you slowly uncover the full range and stack. you meet the coolest person ever and it turns out they lived across the street from you for years. you just weren't ready to meet them. you meet a genius researcher who will single-handedly change the course of the future and turns out you pass him three times a week walking through alamo square. you find a community of actual saints a few miles from you, their doors were always open yet you never noticed them. make sure you don't give up to early and move. a bit of patience goes a long way. sometimes you're only a week or two away from uncovering the next gem.

"Faith is primarily a response to God’s love, and the greatest mistake we can make as Christians is, in the words of Saint Augustine, “to claim that Christ’s grace consists in his example and not in the gift of his person” (Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, II, 146).  How often, even in the not too distant past, have we forgotten this truth and presented Christian life mostly as a set of rules to be kept, replacing the marvelous experience of encountering Jesus – God who gives himself to us – with a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily life." - Pope Leo