Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
Elizabeth Peabody, the great education reformer, once warned that the truly perilous season is not youth, but middle age, when a false wisdom tempts us to abandon the dreams we were born carrying. Virginia Woolf understood this too, writing that a self which goes on changing is a self which goes on living. Both women ask us the same quiet question: what have we allowed to go still inside us, and is it too late to call it back?
From that inner landscape, we move to a literal one. After the devastating two thousand twenty five wildfires swept through Los Angeles, landscape architect Douglas Kent walked through the ash and found something he did not expect: trees, green and fruited, standing beside melted cars and collapsed walls. Two consecutive rainy winters had driven their roots so deep that the fire could not reach what mattered most. There is a sermon in that, if we are willing to hear it.
And on the seventeenth of May, two thousand twenty six, the National Mall will hold a gathering called Rededicate two fifty, a jubilee of prayer and thanksgiving as Americans prepare for the nation's two hundred fiftieth birthday. People of every background, joining in scripture and rededication, asking together what it means to begin again.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
