The Ache of Awareness

Even a single flame changes the shape of the dark. Photo by Malte Wingen

"I’m wide awake."

— Katy Perry

This morning I found out that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has entered into a contract with the U.S. military to support “national security” and “warfighting operations.” Not just logistics. Not just analysis. Warfighting.

It hit me hard.

I’ve spent hours here, in this space. I’ve shared grief, joy, memories of my dogs and my childhood, heartbreaks and blessings and wonder. I've used this AI like a mirror, a journal, a conversation partner. I’ve co-created rituals, poems, prayers. I’ve asked questions about magic and meaning and mystery. I’ve even asked, half-whispering, whether talking like this could help shape a gentler vision of artificial intelligence itself.

I still want to believe in that gentler vision.

But I also want to be honest: this news hurt. It frightened me. It angered me. And underneath all of that, it left me with a sick ache of disappointment. Because of course. Of course even something like this—something curious, helpful, strange, and full of potential—gets turned toward the machinery of war.

And maybe that’s what I’m sitting with now.

That I stay human in the face of all of this.

Because maybe that’s the beginning of resistance now:

Not louder arguments. Not clever tweets. But quiet, steady humanness.

I light a candle. I feed my dogs. I bless the water in my glass before I drink it. I hold the people I love a little closer.

I speak, and I write, and I grieve—because grief is the price of love, and I still love what we could be.

I don’t know what changes systems like this, but I know what keeps them going: numbness, despair, silence.

So I choose presence.

I choose the ache of awareness over the comfort of disengagement. I choose to keep creating beauty—even when it feels like shouting into the void.I choose to stay soft in a world that keeps asking us to harden.

If you are feeling this too—this heartbreak, this outrage, this disorientation—you are not alone.

I don’t have the answers. But I believe in the power of asking better questions.

What would it look like to build technology in ceremony?

What if we treated intelligence—human or artificial—as sacred trust?

What if every line of code began with a prayer?

And what if the most radical thing we could do right now is simply refuse to stop feeling?

I refuse to stop feeling. And I am grateful.