Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Riyadh this week, a Houthi missile struck King Khalid International Airport, killing thirteen people and wounding hundreds more. The attack lands with a particular weight, arriving at a place meant to signal Saudi Arabia's softer ambitions, its reaching toward openness and welcome, now interrupted by the oldest kind of violence.
From one form of harm to another quieter and more persistent, Yamonte Cooper writes in Psyche about the impossible position Black men occupy in America, carrying the weight of chronic racial trauma while being perceived, by the very systems that might offer relief, as the source of danger rather than its recipient. The wound and the misdiagnosis arrive together.
And into all of this, James Baldwin reminds us, through the lens of The Marginalian, that love is not something we find, as though it were waiting patiently in another room. It arrives, Baldwin suggests, when we have finally done the harder work of becoming available to it, when we stop rehearsing our defenses and begin, at last, to stand still.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
