Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Washington this week, a simple question went unanswered. When asked who won the two thousand twenty election, Trump's intelligence nominee Jay Clayton went silent before the Senate rather than speak plainly. Susan Collins, watching nearby, expressed little concern. Something worth sitting with.
From that silence, we move to louder words. Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood before cameras promising to, in his phrase, hunt down illegal voters, citing two hundred fifty thousand non-citizens allegedly registered across four states. The language of pursuit applied to civic life carries its own kind of weight, one worth examining carefully and slowly.
And then, across an ocean and across decades, a quieter story. The chimpanzees who once reshaped our understanding of animal minds, who showed us that intelligence and grief and memory are not ours alone, ended their lives in the cold captivity of a Berlin winter. What we learn from other creatures, and how we then treat them, may say more about us than any election ever could.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
