This morning I had the privilege of observing not two, but five, Great Blue Herons congregated at the running trail waterfall; and I loved the way the sight underscored how these extraordinarily beautiful creatures always seem to locate themselves at such a specific spot so consistently.

It’s easy to discount the significance of the path I tread practically every day for the way it always leads me right back to where I started, but I love its seeming ability to continually present opportunities for me – and for my perspective – to become broader, more inclusive, and – hopefully – more uplifted. Throughout the week, I’ve been specifically considering how there may be a great deal more precision being expressed all around me than I necessarily notice or acknowledge and how every instance is an opportunity to feel gratitude for this.

Particularly where there seems to be such disorder – either in my own experience where I still feel I’m trying to regain my footing having made such an effort to engage in a constructive dialogue about the impact of a stock market-integrated journalism sector on public affairs, or in the world at large – paying attention to how often the presence of potential for unexpected but elegantly tailored solutions has been proven to me is encouraging.

I’ve written about it before, but I’ve felt reminded recently of a day several years ago when, feeling exhausted after having tried to speak about women’s rights in corporate media and encountering what I felt was severe resistance and then trying to speak about racial justice and encountering what felt like severe academic resistance, I drove to a documentary premier and confided in prayer that, while I was not complaining or threatening to give up, I needed more strength. When I parked, I recognized all I could do humanly – and all I felt was being asked of me at that time – was to put one foot in front of the other, and it actually felt like enough. That very evening, after the film, my prayer was answered through a deeply compassionate and encouraging individual conversation with none other than pastor C.T. Vivian after he insisted he’d felt a need to talk with me. Of course, in addition to being deeply meaningful, moments like this are comforting when they occur; but what’s stood out to me about their significance more recently has been all the obvious orchestration required in the lead-up. God does hear us before we call, and the key, so often, seems to be to get into listening mode.

I’ve been considering what new ways to look at all the political acrimony that seems to be roiling the country may be helpful as, more and more, the good qualities accentuated by all three leading presidential candidates have felt undeniably obvious. Even if it is a little bit caricaturistic, it’s true Kamala Harris has infused public dialogue with a needed dose of joy, good humor, and heart in recent weeks. And, as aggressive as late night comedians’ shallow attempts to assassinate his character have become, the measure of intellectual depth RFK Jr. has brought to the table has changed not only the tenor but the resonance of so many podcast broadcasts some of their content has penetrated corporate news rundowns.

Likewise, while I actually celebrate increasing levels of acceptance for men who embrace their whole, nurturing, and sensitive selves, there is also something to be said for the bravery, steadfastness, and protectiveness of masculinity. Whatever else is said about him, Donald Trump’s defiant response to the assassination attempt that failed by literally only centimeters last month did manifest the rather beautiful aspect of real manhood called courage.

While every person, and every current presidential candidate, of course, possesses every one of these qualities in reality, it still feels striking to me that, together, the trio represents a potential opportunity to address shared problems effectively together, even if it is in a contentious setting like a debate. It is almost like they are not being brought together by accident.

I’ve recently watched, and felt struck by, a climate change TED talk in which speaker Johan Rockström claims “linear change is no longer an option. The only option is exponential change. We know that the only currency that matters is speed and scale. We also need to become stewards of the entire planet. We need to now recognize that from [the] local to global level we are so intertwined that we must govern the entire planet.”

But, despite the urgency of the environmental problems at hand, does this argument not make an important – and arguably very problematic – assumption? Rockström goes on later in his speech to say that “we have ample evidence that citizens across the world, a majority of them, care about nature and climate. They trust climate science, they’re concerned about climate change, and they want solutions… And … we have so much evidence today that the solutions are not only available but if we implement them we get a more healthy, stable, secure future with the jobs and the economies that can compete and provide livelihoods into the future.”

If the world, in other words, is already outfitted with the heart, the intelligence, and the will to face the future together wisely, why would there be a need for more of a top-down approach to governance to be added to the equation? More to the point, what systemic cause for climate change could, perhaps more efficiently, simply be removed? I continue to believe the merger of America’s news sector with Wall Street deserves attention here and that a forum for it to be addressed is needed.

I have written before about having decided to leave CNN and The Washington Post, as well as what was in many ways a wonderful freelance gig working on numerous National Geographic documentaries all for reasons of conscience both because these decisions were terribly difficult (I do not mean to encourage others to make similar choices) and because I still feel the reasons for them are relevant to dialogues about the role and effect of the corporate media sector today. Almost immediately after relocating from Atlanta to Washington after giving my notice to CNN, I felt so unsettled by all I’d experienced that I sat down to write a long letter to Jim Walton, who was still at the helm of the company. It had all just felt so unjust I felt my perspective simply needed to be shared to someone who would listen. But, after writing about all I’d witnessed and experienced, it felt clearer to me than ever that, even though I did believe many people in leadership positions at CNN cared about others, and even though I did believe the company did some good, the only conclusion I felt I could reach about the outfit’s overall approach to the world was that the corporation’s top concern was the aggregation of money and power and that it felt unlikely writing to its president would make an difference because he had to have known this. He was not really in charge in a sense, in other words. The machine was.

So often, today, it’s not what appear to be insensitive leaders atop large corporations causing all the division and gridlock plaguing the country, it’s the calculating, and very often secretive, systems that placed them there.

When researching nonprofit journalism organizations after this experience, I felt concerned when reading about the decision of one such outlet to install a new editor who talked a great deal about resolution he’d made going into the role that his team would not focus on so-called sensual stories. This, of course, was not out of any sort of disagreement in principle with the avoidance of sensationalism in news given that, as a rule, this is a good policy. It was that, intuitively, I felt that this editor was actually telegraphing a determination to avoid uncovering gender-based abuse in order to keep in place a discriminatory mindset that empowered him.

The subsequent decision of not only this editor but many others to hurriedly shift attention away from the women’s movement in corporate journalism to a tunnel vision focus on race alone once solutions to a problematic tendency for news leaders to dominate and control were raised was not only predictable but, I felt, little more than an attempt to further consolidate power.

As difficult as it does feel like the topic has been made to tackle, I still feel news corporations’ hegemony over the country is problematic enough to merit confrontation even though, very often and in recent years, these organizations do manage to say what sound like many of the right words and go through what appear to be many of the right motions when addressing matters of human rights in policy formulation. Just as the democratic party has arguably become precisely the opposite of what its name implies, journalism corporations today seem to perform little more than the exact opposite of their stated missions. Almost like the transformation prevailing practices of Christianity underwent after the religion’s cooptation by Rome, neither American democracy nor American journalism has gone through the past five years of cooptation by the corporate news apparatus unscathed. And the massively profitable podcast punditry cottage industry that has arisen ostensibly in order to counterbalance (but of course only serves to reinforce) the transformation has been unhelpful. (I actually like Megyn Kelly, but that her program is emblazoned with the phrase “no agenda” further illustrates my point.

It still seems to me that the only way the country’s trajectory (barreling right toward what increasingly looks practically like a giant table saw that would rip us apart) is to initiate a public debate about the role of news corporations. And it’s worth celebrating that there are political candidates willing to bring the heart, intellect, and courage to the table (should they every gather around one) that we need in order to collectively face the fact that the wizards running our country behind the scenes are not really formidable and need only be exposed by our willingness to allow for healing conversations.

As a person from Plymouth, Massachusetts, where I am grateful to have been placed at birth, I continue to hope to be able to help raise awareness about the continued presence of so much of what we are all seeking, but has only been obscured. I realize it may sound a little bit sentimental, but, I love how frequently it’s been demonstrated to me that following one’s own heart faithfully and independently can actually lead to community and joining.