Dear New School Friends:

I hope the new year finds you as well as you can be. As many of you know, I had a lifesaving five-hour surgery for an abdominal aortic aneurysm at University of California San Francisco Medical Center at the end of August.

The surgery and the recovery literally catapulted me into a new stage of life. I have worked with people with cancer and other life-threatening conditions for more than 35 years. It is quite another thing to experience a life-threatening condition and a major surgery oneself.

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I am beyond grateful for this new lease on life and for this new stage of life. I have turned over the active management of Commonweal to Oren Slozberg and our gifted leadership team. I meet with them weekly to provide my counsel. And I continue to focus on the projects I am most involved with—the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, our new online Cancer Help Program named Sanctuary, Healing Circles Global our recent website Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies, The Resilience Project and its philanthropic partner the Omega Resilience Funders Network, and, of course, The New School at Commonweal.

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If the last six months has catapulted me into a new stage of life, the past four years has certainly catapulted our country into a new stage in our evolution. So much has been written about this that I hesitate to add much of substance. But we know that we cannot go back. And we know that the path ahead is fraught with both dangers and opportunities. We have often taken democracy for granted over the course of my lifetime. We clearly do not have that luxury anymore. Continue reading →