Purple Rain

A Minnesota story about sensitive souls, quiet generosity, and love that keeps moving during hard times.

Wow. This publication has more than tripled in subscribership in the last ten days.

As a highly sensitive soul, my way of showing up in this moment has lived on the page. I write what I notice. I name what my body feels. I tell the truth with a steady voice. I invite you to activate your sensitive-soul superpowers and spread love everywhere you stand.

Thank you for loving Minnesota.

Thank you for staying close.

Everyone in Minnesota has a Prince story.
And sadly, right now everyone in Minnesota also has an ICE story.

When those two realities share the same landscape, Minneapolis becomes symbolic. This is the city where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet, a place built on confluence, and the place where the waters reflect the sky. Here, we remember how to merge, how to gather, and how to hold the tension of two currents with a firm grip on our integrity.

That is why Minnesota has felt like a North Star lately. People keep looking here and asking, “How are you doing that?”

We are doing it the way we have always done it.

We are doing it with sensitivity.

In Minnesota, we grow up with a particular relationship to empathy that comes from living in a place where weather has teeth. When you grow up where your eyelashes freeze, empathy turns into an every-day survival skill. You learn how to keep each other safe in small ways that never make the news. You learn how to carry steadiness in your hands. You learn how to keep your nervous system resourced enough to keep going… and going… and going.

Sensitivity in engrained in the culture.

We are a land and a people of love, and acceptance, and abundance.
And no matter how much they try, ICE can’t beat that out of our bone marrow.

So when I think about Minnesota as a home of empathy, I think about our most iconic Minnesotan: Prince.

Prince, the hush, and the deep interior

Prince moved through life with the hush of a whisper so quiet that everyone leaned in.

He had a deep internal life, and like most Minnesotans, he had an exquisite relationship with privacy and humility. He had a nervous system that picked up on everything in the room, then turned that information into music. His work is evidence of an Extraordinary Empath—someone who could translate feeling into sound that made people cry, dance, remember, soften, and wake up.

That is one of the truest sensitive-soul strategies I know: when you guard your inner life with devotion, your gifts have space to ripen. They have room to deepen. They have the quiet they need to become what they are here to become.

Prince also kept his roots close, because Minnesota taught him how to keep the sacred sacred. He stayed tethered to the mycelial network of home. That is a Minnesota thing. We grow strong in community. We become ourselves inside the web of people who know our original face.

The most Minnesota thing about Prince was never the headlines.

It was the giving.

In a WCCO report about his charity Love 4 One Another, an educator and activist described Prince’s style of generosity with one sentence: “Just don’t say anything about it.” That report points to federal tax forms showing Love 4 One Another gave more than $1.5 million from 2005–2007. Prince never wanted attention or accolades for his giving. This $1.5M was what was public. Most of his giving was anonymous, as every Minnesotan would prefer it to be.

The Minnesota Star Tribune described him as private about his philanthropy, noting he often gave anonymously, including a reported $30,000 donation for musical instruments at a neighborhood elementary school in Chanhassen. A Scholastic kid-reporter piece echoes that same “keep it quiet” thread, sharing a local parent’s recollection that the school learned only later about Prince’s help because he wanted it kept hush.

This is how sensitive souls give when their hearts are wide: they give in a way that protects the receiver.

This is abundance with a hush.

Minnesota’s abundance in a season that asks for backbone

Right now, Minnesota is living inside one of those historical moments where tenderness needs a backbone. And Minnesotans are stepping up to their Empathic Extraordinary in ways that would make Prince smile his quiet proud-to-be-a-Minnesotan grin.

In this season of federal presence and fear, sensitive-soul Minnesotans have been activating abundance the way we do it: in real time, with practical creativity, with quiet steadiness, and an stubborn belief that community is a renewable resource.

One of the clearest examples is Stand With Minnesota, a living hub of ways to support families, neighborhoods, schools, and organizations impacted by federal enforcement. It reads like a map of compassion that keeps updating itself: donate, volunteer, direct support, resources. When you scroll a page like that, you can feel a state trying to hold its people. You can feel how many hands are reaching for each other at the same time.

I challenge you take a few minutes to scroll through the never-ending list of gofundme campaigns listed here and choose a few to drop a ten-spot. I have been doing this myself and donating 25% of my new paid subscription offerings here to various schools on the list.

As a former teacher, let me offer a bit of advice, if you want to make sure your donation goes directly to a family in need, choose a school. School teachers and educators have their hearts in the right place. Just ask our history-teacher-football-coach-turned-governor, Tim.

Local Businesses

Just a few of the local businesses that are feeding people, holding space, creating warmth, moving resources to the places where people feel most exposed.

In Powderhorn Park, Modern Times Cafe shifted into a free, donation-based model, with the stated intention to keep feeding people while federal agents remain in the city. The Minnesota Daily reported that donations poured in fast enough to cover expenses into the following month.

A few blocks and neighborhoods away, Easy Day Cafe has hosted a food and essentials drive where volunteers pack boxes for immigrant families sheltering during weeks of detentions, estimating it helps feed about 250 families each week.

In northeast, Recovery Bike Shop opened its doors during the general strike as a warm place for people, offering supplies like hand-warmers, food, and whistles.

And then there is the entirely female LGBTQ-friendly tattoo shop that turned art into a fundraising river. Jackalope Tattoo shared totals from a flash day they described as a community “get out” fundraiser: 85 tattoos, 250+ attendees, raising over $22K donated to local mutual aid efforts.

These are only a few examples. They stand in for a much larger truth: behind every fundraiser and donation drive is an average, everyday Minnesotan with a tender heart and a practical plan. The grandmas who bring an extra bag of groceries. The neighbors who build phone trees. The teachers who organize relief funds. The faith leaders who keep singing and praying and showing up. The coworkers who quietly coordinate rides. The artists who turn their craft into care.

This is what I mean when I say Minnesota believes in abundance. It lives as a way of life, a cultural reflex in the bone memory of people who have learned, over and over, that warmth saves lives.

And we do it quietly, because hush is how we’re trained from diapers to be humble and kind.

This is the humble wealth of this place.

Love that doesn’t need applause because it just is.

If you are new here to HUSH

Welcome.

Welcome to the intersection of Grounded Avenue and Woo-Woo Way, where we believe words and prayers matter, and we love practical action. Welcome to a space for oddballs and weirdos and tender-hearted people who feel a lot, notice a lot, and still choose to stay loving.

If this piece touched you, I invite you to carry the spirit of it into your own streets. May love become visible in your choices. May generosity become a rhythm. May your sensitive soul become an instrument that plays warmth into the world.

Minnesota has been singing that song for a long time.

Prince sang it in his own way.

And right now, a lot of people are singing it together.

Because a revolution isn’t a fight for what’s right. It happens on an average Tuesday in everyday actions by every day people spreading love and abundance everywhere they go.

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