Outsiders into insiders . . .
Monday, June 29, 2026. 8:30 a.m. It's the Moon's day . . . Green Country shares the heat wave moving across the U.S. Forecasts indicate heat index of 103º along with strong, gusting Southerlies mid afternoon today.
We are all instruments of Creation. No choice. Our only choice is between love or fear. Our lives and the world are the consequence. This is why Buddha's first noble truth is that Life contains suffering.
Mercury goes retrograde today with effects extending to July 23, 2026, and invites us to slow down and pay closer attention to the signals moving through our lives. What happens during this Mercury retrograde isn’t a blanket disaster. Often blamed for missed messages, tech issues, and crossed wires, the present cycle is less about chaos and more about awareness.
The Week Ahead. – Joyce Vance, in Civil Discourse.
A short answer to Trump's projected fears of immigrants: The American century will not be extended by making the country smaller. No serious nation can win the twenty-first century by telling much of the world’s ambition to go elsewhere.
America’s superpower has been the ability to turn outsiders into insiders...Trump would have us abandon the concept of a regulated open border … The better policy is simple enough to state: open legal migration for peaceful people willing to register, work, study, or build; immediate work authorization; rapid residence; strong labor-law enforcement; serious penalties for trafficking and exploitation; portable benefits; language and civics investments; local settlement support; and citizenship for those who make their lives here. The border becomes a civic threshold, not a prison wall. The immigration officer becomes a registrar of new Americans, not a ration clerk for human possibility.
A sovereign nation may close itself. It may also open itself. It may decide that its greatness lies not in guarding scarcity but in manufacturing abundance. It may decide that the future belongs to the country that can welcome, absorb, educate, employ, naturalize, and inspire more people than any rival civilization. It may decide that population is not a burden but a platform as the U.S. has for most of its history...Open borders is treated as a fantasy because our imagination has been disciplined by restriction. But the actual fantasy is Trump's. He and his minions believe that a rich, aging country can wall itself into renewal. The fantasy is that exclusion produces cohesion. The fantasy is that talent will wait politely while America debates whether it is still brave enough to be America. – Raymon Pearcey, The Golden Door: A Strategy. Shared email, 6.27.26.
It was on this day in 1974, while on tour with the Kirov (now ) Ballet in Toronto, Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union, citing artistic reasons, and he later settled in the United States.
Today is the birthday of the author of The Little Prince, French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He was born in Lyons in 1900.
Frank Loesser was born on this date. The composer, librettist, and lyricist, was born in 1910, New York City. He received the 1962 Pulitzer Prize and achieved major success writing for Broadway musicals.
The composer conductor, arranger Leroy Anderson was born today in 1908, Cambridge, Mass.
And, Anne-Sophie Mutter is 62 years old today. The German violinist and superstar in the world of classical music was born in 1963, Rheinfelden, West Germany.
The “unplayable” violin concerto ...