In celebration of Pride Month: June 2026.
This post is inspired by Thorn Coyle’s newsletter that I received this morning:
James Baldwin is one of my favorite writers. He was also a massively intelligent and cogent thinker, who held great insight into the human condition. Baldwin saw in us a breathtaking capacity for love, he also gazed unflinchingly at the worst parts of humanity, mostly our bigotry and greed.
Along with his writing, teaching, and activism, Baldwin fought for a life in which he had time and space to do the deep thinking that gave rise to his insights. He also danced with friends, smoked, laughed, and lived life as a gay Black man during times when the world was distinctly unkind to people like him, fleeing to France when the US became to heartbreakingly difficult to bear.
Thinking of Baldwin makes me wonder: how often do we pause, breathe, and ponder? How often do we think about the human condition instead of simply reacting to events?
Also: how to we make space for joy? How do we continue to create?
Form Thorn’s favorite book of James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time
Dear James:
I HAVE BEGUN this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft.
You may be like your grandfather in this, I don’t know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came
into what the late E Franklin Frazier called “the cities of destruction.'” You can only be destroyed by believing that you really arc what the white world calls a n*&^%r. I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it.
*Note by Caryn MacGrandle of the divine feminine app. I debated copying these [copyrighted] pages on the app. But especially for #Goddess101Texts this Juneteenth, 2026, it felt too important what James wrote. Support his work by buying a copy to read the rest. The link above is for a new book so the profit should get to his family. Here is a niece of his Aisha Karefa-Smart who appears to be continuing his most noble tradition of bringing bullshit to light.
This post is part of Goddess 101 Texts – telling another side of Our Story.
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