After a roller coaster of a learning curve involving docker containers, reverse proxies, and command lines, I emerge from the migration triumphant!! This was one of those projects that felt intimidating, but achievable, and so good when they're "done".

Of course nobody who runs their own server is ever done, the entire thing is like a digital homestead and I'm more motivated than ever to share this with the world. There's something psychologically valuable about sovereignty that you don't notice until you have it. And in this modern world that has enclosed the American Dream behind a paywall to supply the landlords and CEOs with renters and wage labor, too many of us don't.

Just as I would build myself the happiest little gazebo and flower garden for sipping my morning coffee while I scroll the morning news if I could (I'm not even allowed to put a cute patio table on my balcony), so I am free to put whatever I want on my server.

Gone are the endless nickel-and-diming of Plesk, which wants an add-on subscription for every extension, and the endless struggle to get literally anything that runs in a docker container to actually work in such a high control hosting environment. Finally, I can put together a FLOSS system that works for me, and start canceling some of my other app subscriptions as well.

More than that, now that I feel safe and cozy in my digital home, I can refocus myself back on the task of expanding my blog!! I could (and probably will) write a whole other post on the branding shift and identity crisis of the past year as I morphed from Mike Shipley, Anarchist into Mystic Mikester. But as I've been doing this server work, I've been asking myself "what does Mystic Mikester have to tell the world?"

Because a big part of that shift is that radical politics just aren't enough to set us free, in my opinion. Empire is rooted deeply into our minds and spirits in ways that simply liberating us from unjust authority can't fix. If all harmful systems were magically swept away, we would simply recreate them unless we actually deconstruct them from within.

I'm not just talking about the indoctrination, I'm talking about the trauma and normalized abuse, the hubris and greed, the conflation of net worth with self worth, the intentional manipulation of our dopamine response for the ends of marketing and control.

You could go to years of therapy, but who can afford it? In this economy? I don't discourage it if you have access to it. And maybe if we shift to medicare for all, more of us can. But there's a deep well of wisdom in our ancient spiritual frameworks, and something incredibly powerful about tapping into the source of all creation (however one conceives it).

Maybe it's my recovery experience, but I know for a fact (and science agrees) that doing inner work through a spiritual lens can yield profound transformation, and this is the shift I've been cultivating as I move away from framing my work as "anarchism" toward framing it as "mysticism". What could be more punk and radical than telling all worldly authority to fuck off and making friends with the Divine?

Just ask Jesus, they killed him for it, because the powers that be know that if their lies fall apart; if humanity discovers that our power dwells within us and that we don't need anyone's permission to tap into it and wield it for our own and our neighbor's highest good, their world will crumble.

We have so much to gain from doing this work, but between Christian nationalism and every other toxic form of cult behavior that masks itself in religion, it's not hard to see why neither the forest nor the trees of spirit are visible beyond the appearance that the entire area is on fire.

I don't want to tell people what to believe, and anyone who presents themselves as having all the answers should be side eyed and avoided. There's no one true framework. No perfect set of practices. No single sacred text that holds all truth. But you can develop a mystic connection to the cosmic source, and that connection can pour healing and liberation into your life if you want it.

There's no other way to figure out how to popularize and communicate that except to sit down and start writing about it, and so I will. Let's get into it!!