Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Texas, a judge — the first openly LGBT judge in her county — has agreed to resign and accept a lifetime ban from the bench following multiple misconduct complaints. Whatever one holds about the particulars, there is something worth sitting with here: the weight of a life in public service, and how it ends.
From the particular to the almost impossibly small — fruit flies, it turns out, not only survive gravity four times stronger than Earth's, they thrive in it. There is a kind of philosophy hiding in that fact. Resilience, it seems, does not always announce itself. Sometimes it simply keeps flying.
And then there is Simone de Beauvoir, whose meditations on marriage and freedom remind us that a self is not a fixed thing but a story we keep revising. We meet each other at single points in time, and yet we make promises that span entire lifetimes — as if we were not, all of us, quietly becoming someone new.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
