The Brightest Stars Shine In The Deepest Dark

911, Q, Fear, and My Child’s Mind in the Time of Covid.

This was written and then also recorded for a recent Conspirituality Podcast episode.

“I wanna be in the dark Daddy, I wanna be a skeleton. Turn off the light,” says my toddler daughter.

Later, when she hears I am coming to read her bedtime story, she hides from me under a towel with her mother, and they make silly ghost sounds and giggle, as I pretend to be scared and look for them.

Then she pulls off the towel and yells, “surprise!” through her tiny toothy grin.

In 1871, Charles Darwin published the third of his books on evolutionary theory: The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.

In a way we could say this was (unintentionally) a seminal book in what would later become somatic psychology, in that prior to Darwin’s observations, Western thinkers had puzzled over where to locate human emotional life viz a vis the ever present mind-body problem.

The wisdom of the day mused that surely emotions were the domain of an
immaterial mind or soul.