04/08/2026
Of course I’m a spiritual person, though I’ve never needed anyone to approve or define what that means.
It’s not something I wear or announce. It simply exists, constant as breath, threaded through everything.
What I believe in, truly, is the vast, untamed potential of a human being. Not as an ideal, not as a theory, but as something I have watched emerge again and again whenever fear loosens its grip and a person finally allows themselves to become who they have quietly been all along.
I place very little faith in nation-states.
These rigid, flag-waving constructs have always struck me as theatrical and faintly absurd, arrangements designed far more for administration than for the flourishing of life. The same reserve extends to governments and to the mass media. There is something excessively rehearsed in their language, something strangely synchronized in their urgency. After a while certain patterns reveal themselves. They seldom deepen our understanding of reality. More often, they persuade people to surrender their own perception in exchange for ready-made certainty.
Because that is what I have observed over many years.
Human beings rarely live beneath their possibilities because destiny has denied them gifts or because they lack intelligence, courage or imagination. Far more often they become estranged from themselves. Fear settles into the psyche almost unnoticed, arriving in daily fragments: in headlines, in slogans, in carefully repeated narratives, and perhaps most powerfully in everything that remains unspoken. It is an ancient method. One that has survived precisely because it works.
Yet beneath all of that, each person carries something immeasurably larger than the identities they have inherited or the roles they have learned to perform. There is an inner orientation that persists through disappointment, confusion and loss, patiently drawing us toward a life that feels unmistakably our own. I have trusted that quiet movement far more than any doctrine ever written.
I have also learned that everything we exile from ourselves continues its existence elsewhere. Whatever we refuse to acknowledge does not vanish; it simply chooses another language through which to speak. Sometimes it appears in conflict, sometimes in resentment, sometimes in the certainty that all darkness belongs exclusively to someone else. Meeting that hidden territory has always seemed to me one of the deepest forms of freedom available to us.
I believe this: the human being is, at the core, a good creature. Imperfect, certainly, and fully capable of causing suffering. Yet beneath those fractures there remains an astonishing inclination toward goodness, beauty, creation and love whenever the conditions allow those qualities to breathe.
Good in the way a mountain is good, or an old forest whose apparent disorder conceals an exquisite intelligence. Life has never required rigid symmetry in order to create harmony.
There is something essential within us that instinctively turns toward what is genuine and quietly withdraws from whatever is artificial. That movement has earned my trust countless times. It has rarely hurried, occasionally disappeared from view, but it has never abandoned us.
And so, more than institutions, ideologies or systems, I place my faith in that enduring capacity of the human soul to remember itself.
- Lilianna Heitmann