Welcome to The Light, where we pause together in the quiet between the noise.
Pablo Casals, the cellist who many consider the greatest to have ever drawn a bow, once said that the man who works and is never bored is never old. He lived to ninety-six, playing each morning as though music were medicine. Perhaps it was.
From the vitality of a life fully inhabited, we turn to one man's struggle simply to live as himself. In Egypt, Saeid Mansour Abdulraziq has spent nearly a year in custody, charged with joining a terrorist organization for the act of converting to Christianity. His trial has been delayed again, the court declining to hear witnesses it had previously ordered to appear. A man waits in a cell for the freedom to believe.
And from a courtroom in Cairo, we drift back four centuries to a Flemish painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Researchers have found, hidden within his sixteen eleven canvas, what appears to be a bat consuming a bird, a behavior only recently documented by science. The natural world, it seems, was always ahead of us, waiting patiently to be understood.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
