There comes a time when the body completes its assignment. I can feel that time approaching. The body grows quieter, more fragile, less willing to cooperate with the plans it once carried out so easily. That is simply its nature. It was always temporary.
But the mind, the awareness, the love behind the words remains untouched.
To my friends at ACIM Gather, you arrived exactly when you were needed. What began as conversation became companionship. What began as study became shared awakening. Many of you were catalysts for essays I did not know I was ready to write. Your questions stirred something deeper. Your honesty invited my own. Together we explored ideas that at first seemed abstract and discovered they were intensely personal.
To those across the many ACIM Facebook groups who read, questioned, challenged, encouraged, and sometimes disagreed, thank you. You gave me a place to test what I was learning. You allowed me to say out loud what I was only beginning to understand. Writing was never about teaching you. It was about clarifying my own mind. You generously let me do that in public.
Through essays about ownership and the illusion of hierarchy, about forgiveness that feels impossible, about equality as the only ground for peace, about the ego’s endless courtroom drama, and about love that does not change when circumstances do, I was really writing one simple truth: nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists. That line is not philosophy. It became an anchor.
We wrote about relationships as classrooms. About control that dissolves when fear is seen clearly. About guilt that softens under gentle honesty. About the belief in separation that looks so convincing and yet never truly holds. Over and over, the theme returned: we are not what we think we are. The body is a costume. The story is a script. The fear is learned. The love is not.
And in all of this, Cherie has been my steady companion. She has supported this entire effort, even when the words took more of me than I expected. She added clarity when I wandered. She grounded what might have floated away. She kept me going when the body wanted to quit long before the mind did. If any good has come from these writings, her presence is woven through every page.
This body now shows more signs of frailty each day. It tires more quickly. It resists more often. That is not tragedy. It is completion. The body was never the source of what we shared.
If you have read my essays, if you have opened one of our books, if you have paused over a sentence and felt something shift, then I am still with you. Not as memory. Not as personality. But as the shared awareness that recognized itself in those words.
Every time you read a passage that reminds you that only equals are at peace, that forgiveness releases the forgiver, that love asks for nothing and therefore cannot be threatened, you and I meet again. Not in form. In recognition.
We have written about trials as lessons not yet learned. About fear melting when examined gently. About the idea that we are not here to win arguments but to remember who we are. If any of that has been helpful, carry it forward. Not as my teaching, but as your own knowing.
Do not mourn the costume when it is folded away. The actor was never the fabric.
Thank you for walking with me. Thank you for reading. Thank you for questioning. Thank you for allowing me to learn out loud.
If these words have meant anything to you, then we are not saying goodbye.
We are simply turning the page together.