Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
The Pentagon has released its third collection of files on unidentified anomalous phenomena, this time including video footage captured by ordinary civilians. What strikes us is not the strangeness of what may be out there, but the strangeness of our longing to know. We have always looked upward, searching for something that confirms we are not alone in a vast and indifferent universe.
From the sky, we return to earth, and to a father writing about his son. His other children have never brought friends home. He describes autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder with a tenderness that refuses to flinch. Disability, he suggests, does not diminish a life. It breaks open the people surrounding it, until they are capable of a larger kind of seeing.
And Emily Dickinson, in the first autumn of her thirties, confessed to a terror she could tell to no one, so she sang instead. Maria Popova traces the alchemy behind Dickinson's most beloved poem, and reminds us that hope is not comfortable. It has feathers, yes, but also fangs. It is born precisely in the places we cannot bear to look.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
