Those of you who have been kind enough to follow me this past few years might be aware of how improbable my life is now, how many curious and unexpected twists it has taken, and how long and sometimes uphill a process it has been.

And how rich and full it has become.

Many of the people I know are wringing their hands and beating their breasts over the current state of things, and as much suffering and worry as there is, these past few years have been  good to me, they have opened doors and gates for me and let me down a road I believe I was destined to travel.

This time has brought me riches and satisfaction and joy beyond my imagination just a short while ago. In darkness, there is learning and awakening.

I think the issue for any spiritual or feeling person is whether or not there is anything in our world that we can truly call “sacred,” whether it be God or love or purpose. Something is sacred when it is devoted to a religious or spiritual or higher purpose, I believe I have found such a purpose.

In recent weeks, and thanks in great measure to this collection of strangers we call the Army Of Good,  we have altered some lives, human and animal.

Kelly Patrick has burned her tent and moved out of it into a comfortable, safe and dry home, thanks to the support we provided her in being able to rent a place to live for herself, her daughter and her grandson.

Every time it rains, I give thanks that she is in that better place, she is a good person with a good heart, she deserves to live in a real home.

This week, Sakler Moo, an especially gifted and courteous young refugee from Thailand, who has suffered greatly on his journey to America, was accepted into a prestigious school called the Albany Academy.

We were able to give the school the  $6,000 that was needed to close the gap between what they could give him and what he needed to pay his tuition.

He starts school September 7, and I have committed myself to paying this money over the next three years as well.

Sakler’s young live is forever changed.

In a new kind of adventure for me, I have joined forces with a loving group of animal lovers called the Friends Of Homeless Animals to find good and loving homes for some of the most desperate and poorly treated animals in our world.

They are the saddest of the sad, the lepers of the dog world, and we have already found good homes for two of them, considered unadoptable by their rescuers just a few weeks ago. Their names are Evie and Jen, and hopefully, Albert one day soon.

They are dogs, of course, but more than that, they are timely and needed symbols of our own love,  empathy and humanity the two things we are do disturbed to find receding in our culture and political life.

When I looked beyond the narrow confines of my farm, I see so much anger and conflict it is hard to be hopeful about our lives, but then I have found my own attitude to resignation and despair: doing some good, what could be simpler?

It is easier to do good fo dogs than people, and cheaper. But both are rewarding in their own way.

Dogs are a mirror of our lives, they reflect us and our own ability to find compassion and bring it into our lives. Yesterday, a community of strangers, from Arkansas to Texas to Upstate New York to Minnesota joined hands and hearts to give Evie a loving home for the rest of her days.

Hers was a life far down the list of our self-absorbed human concerns, now transformed. It does take a village, and we are one. For Debra in Minnesota, Evie’s life was not too small to save.

And then there are the Mansion residents, people I have come to know and love. They are also symbols beyond their own reality, a measure of how we can care for the vulnerable and the sometimes abandoned in small but meaningful ways.

It feels sacred to me to bring them the mechanics of life – soap, shoes, underwear, socks, stamps and envelopes, books and movies, attention and affection.

Every time I see the gratitude and relief in their eyes to be able to walk in shoes that fit I feel a kind of joy once unknown to me. Mostly, they wish to be known and remembered as they move to the edge of life.

It is a minor miracle to me – and I think to many of you – to change a life in profound and last ways, from Sakler Moo to Kelly Patrick to poor Evie left to die in a filthy concrete cell.

What I most want to say here is that when the totality of my life is lived as a series of Beloved messages sent out into the world, then everything I meet and everything that happens to me and to us becomes a unique opportunity to choose a life that cannot be conquered by anger, cruelty or the smallness of spirit, or even by death.

In my life, joy and suffering become the way to spiritual fulfillment, which I am beginning to feel in life for the first time.

In a letter to his friend, a philosopher, the author Julien Green wrote: “When you think of the mystical experience of many saints, you may ask yourself whether joy and suffering aren’t aspects of the same phenomenon on a very high level.”

I think, for me, this is so. We are sent her for a very short time, and I have come to see that it best spent on the search for good, not wealth or power. Some days, I can hardly believe I can be involved in so much good.

I am coming to see that this is not temporal, or fleeting. It is here inside of me for real. I think they call that faith.

Thanks to you all for making this possible.

Audio: Remember Albert