The weight of the world feels so intense, and I am so tangled in it.

I just completed a half-day online mindfulness retreat and boy, did I ever relate to that reflection. I’d recently finished Ben Rhodes’s After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, described by The New York Times book review as Rhodes “going out into the world to understand how it has become such an illiberal authoritarian mess.” He feels we, as a country, particularly due to the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 banking collapse, are largely responsible for “disseminating the toxins that now infuse the world.