Dear friends,

It was the sign that closed the loop for me. On the way to the Kachina Woman rock formation in Boynton Canyon, Sedona, AZ, beyond the parking lot and where the initial map and trailhead information lie, the sign said, “Wilderness is a special place.” Sponsored by the city, the sign commemorates the Wilderness Act of 1964, created to preserve the American wilderness. Because of it, we have over 111.7 million acres across 803 wilderness areas.

Wilderness is not only special, but vitally important. Wilderness areas are where wildlife can flourish free from the harms that contribute to endangerment and extinction. Where diverse ecosystems can exist free from pollution and extraction caused by mass urbanization and the ever-present colonial impulse to dominate, control, and own.

My spirit leaped at this sign because I had begun to reclaim wilderness—not as a place absent of human involvement, but as a place that reveals what it means for humans to work with the land, as Indigenous communities have done for millennia, rather than seeking to dominate it. It was within this grounding reality of the wilderness that I found immense freedom, joy, and healing.

As we enter the country’s 250th year, the wilderness has also taught me about America. America is not a place that belongs to one group, or even to a select, elite few, but to all people and all creation. America belongs to the migrants who have moved here to flee conditions created by globalization as we enter 32 years of NAFTA. America belongs to the indigenous communities whose land was stolen, and the descendants of enslaved people whose bodies were used as collateral, a debt never repaid, to create the economic power that allows us to lead in the development of frontier AI models today.

During my time hiking alone over 300 miles of trails over several months across the New Mexico and Arizona wilderness areas, I also learned that America belongs to the silkworms that hang from the Aspens and Ponderosa trees, to the desert cottontails and brown bears along the Gila River, the namesake of the Gila Wilderness area, America’s very first wilderness area established in 1924. These animals, trees, and river systems taught me not to pay too much attention to the word “wilderness” and the dangers and hazards it connotes, but to see the inherent structure and complex systems, powered and automated by divine order and preserved through indigenous ancestral technologies. No data center needed.

My time away was less of a sabbatical and more of tactical training to develop the spiritual arsenal to fight boldly in this moment. I moved between my hermitage in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the monasteries of Christ in the Desert and Our Lady of the Desert, and spaces where consequential public and private conversations were taking place, giving speeches at Harvard, Yale, Brown, the University of Strasbourg, the Buenos Aires City Government headquarters, and the New York State Assembly. In doing so, I came to understand the importance of a clear, strong voice amid increasing fear and uncertainty—and at a time of immense possibility.

The wilderness around me opened up the wilderness of my soul. And like the desert fathers and mothers in Africa in the Fourth Century, I found the voice of God—a signal amid the now never-ending noise of chatbots—and refuge from the spiritual snares of the infinite scroll. I prayed for direction and support. I grieved my grandmothers, my mother and father, and the other family members I have lost over the last nine years. I grieved for myself: the young girl who had largely been surrounded, not supported, and who, in several instances, was sabotaged by those she trusted, paid, and relied upon to help carry the weight of this mission. I grieved for the woman who was bullied by institutions that extracted her work and sought to erase her in the process.

Who watched as she steadily tried to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem while they built the tower of Babel—even those for whom words like “trust,” “ethics,” and “justice” seemed to roll effortlessly from their tongues. This was happening precisely when the work was most needed: when emboldened racism, engineered income inequality, and the erosion of basic rights such as due process were creating not merely a cognitive dissonance with the development of frontier AI models, but the very context in which those models were being developed. The context was clear: the infrastructure of chattel slavery being remade into new forms.

I prayed for new language and a strong moral voice. This prayer was answered on May 8, 2025, with the election of Robert Prevost, the first-ever American pope, who chose the name Pope Leo XIV in continuity with Pope Leo XIII, the father of Catholic Social Thought, who boldly critiqued the extreme labor conditions and economic systems born out of the Industrial Revolution. Like the Egyptian slave Hagar in the wilderness—the first and only person in the Bible to give God a name, “El Roi”—I knew God could see me, too.

Now, one year after his election, Pope Leo XIV has released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. I realized that while our voting rights may be all but eradicated by a single Supreme Court decision in the wilderness that is the American political system, we have an advocate in heaven. Our votes and prayers matter there, where they matter most. The word “vote” itself comes from votum, Latin for “prayer.”

In the video below, I speak more about my sabbatical, my time organizing and teaching about AI within monasteries, and Catholic Social Thought, as well as what His Holiness Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas means for the Data for Black Lives movement and Black communities at large. The video is an expanded adaptation of two sessions I led at the Santa Fe Institute earlier this month: a flash talk titled “Misrecognition as Infrastructure: AI, Human Dignity & Civil Society” and a breakout session on technical sweetness—the seductive allure of technological possibility, abstraction, and the call to contemplation as a response.

As I filled my jug and hiking water bladder with water from Harding Spring, directly from Oak Creek, I realized that the resources and infrastructure needed to navigate the wilderness at this time are already abundantly available. I filtered and drank the water, naturally cold from the spring, though the surrounding temperatures were in the 90s, and felt immediately hydrated. No bottled water, no matter how expensive and well-branded, could replace the taste and refreshment, not just to the body but to the soul.

What are our natural springs? At D4BL, our springs are not artificial. A corporation does not bottle our running water; market forces do not constrict its flow. Our buildings are not just made with brick and mortar, but made of sandstone, mudstone, limestone, siltstone, shale, and gypsum, and they soar higher, grander than any skyscraper could.

As I build the technological and spiritual infrastructure for D4BL 2.0, I am honored to join the External Advisory Board of Brown University’s Data Science Institute, in addition to my service on the advisory board of Harvard’s Data Science Initiative. My direction in this work is not determined by artificial, human-made intelligence, but guided by divine and ancestral wisdom, like the North Star. The vision, clarity, and grace I received in the wilderness were not self-generated, but given by God—and for these gifts, I am forever grateful.

This is a longer update since my last newsletter. There has not been a single day when I have not thought of you all, and I pray for every one of you daily.

More soon,

Yeshimabeit