Welcome to The Light, your quiet-hour reflection.
Sometimes the places that frighten us most are simply places we don't yet understand. Researchers studying infrasound, those low frequencies below human hearing, have found that certain sound waves can produce feelings of unease, dread, even the sense of a presence nearby. What we call haunted may simply be the air itself, vibrating at a frequency our bodies register before our minds can name it.
And yet, not all that moves through us is so easily explained. This Mother's Day, there are those grieving not just an absence, but the particular ache of losing the one who first taught them what love looks like. For those mothers without their own mothers, the invitation is not to push past the grief, but to rest inside it, to let tenderness and sorrow occupy the same quiet space.
That tension between what we feel and what we're told to feel reaches back centuries. Scholars examining medieval art have found that the repeated depiction of Black figures as executioners, as instruments of punishment and hierarchy, was never neutral. Images rehearsed often enough become assumptions, and assumptions become the architecture of a world.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
