⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🎈 The Remarkable Story of Laura Buxton: A true tale of impossible coincidence. Watch it here.

🌌 The Cosmogony of You: A reminder of the majesty and mystery of the universe. Read it here.

🪦 2 Men In A Cemetery: A poem by Joshua De Schutter on what matters in life. Watch it here.

💌 Want More? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

In 1973, the local forestry agency in Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan, initiated an experiment to study the growth of Obi cedar trees (飫肥杉). They planted 720 trees in ten concentric circles, with spacing between trees increasing from the center outward. This design aimed to observe how varying tree density affects growth. Over time, this arrangement resulted in a striking, mandala-like pattern visible from above.

👁 Seeing The Invisible

"A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest." - African Proverb

I've adored this proverb from the moment I heard it.

I find too often our collective attention is fixated on conflict, both genuine and manufactured.

Sure, conflicts need to be addressed but a consciousness only riddled with resolving fights and settling feuds misses something essential.

By bringing light to the trees growing in the background, we encounter a space of nourishment that can imbue us with the strength and resilience to navigate the falling wood.

Making choices and attempting transformation from a place of fear and hatred begets more fear and hatred.

By seeing beyond the front and center, we find an abundance of reasons to love this world as it is, despite its flaws.

By seeing behind the curtain, we find pathways to greater significance.

Then we can reckon with our own imperfections, instead of projecting our perceived lack of wholeness onto the world.

This isn’t about fabricating something from nothing or perceiving what isn’t there.

It’s about seeing what is there that we no longer notice. Countless treasures get rendered into the background as we age and our constructs of the world solidify.

Other things have always lived in the background. That is because we are much more prone to notice the dynamic aspects of our “salience landscape” rather than the still and silent ground upon which they rest. The things that remain pervasive are often left unconsidered. That which is ubiquitous becomes invisible.

Bringing these things into focus can serve as a profound wellspring of gratitude and wonder.

🤔 For The Curious

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🌟 Undischenchanting Ourselves

Savor these words from author Malcolm Guite:

“I feel one of the things we need most, certainly in the West at the moment, is re-enchantment. We need to see the magic and beauty and luminous quality. I think the great thing that Lewis and Tolkien offered in particular was a way back into seeing the world. In a sense, we're not re-enchanting the world. What we're doing is we're undisenchanting ourselves. The world is still as enchanted as ever it was. It's still kindling with beauty. But we have eyes that see not, you know, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. You know, that's what Hopkins was saying. One of the things that poetry can do is to take away that film of familiarity and make the world enchanted again. I always loved the bit in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. They meet this guy who's actually a star, but in human form. And, you know, he's had his setting, he's going to have his rising. And Eustace, of course, has been brought up in this reductive way. He says, oh... In our world, a star is just a ball of flaming gas exploding forever into the cold vacuity of space. And the star says to him, even in your world, that's not what a star is. It's only what it's made of.”

Pairs nicely with this passage from George Eliot:

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”

🤓 Learn This Word

Aphercotropism: The response an organism has as it grows to overcome an obstacle in its way

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⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked link from a previous edition of 🌀🐇

Should We “Revere” the Universe? — An Exploration of Yūgen

In Japanese aesthetics, there is a concept called “yūgen” that refers to an awareness of the profound grace and subtlety of the universe — an awareness which evokes feelings that are inexplicably deep and too mysterious for words. Alan Watts once wrote of yūgen, noting that,

I find these to be beautiful examples of situations which might provoke this feeling of yūgen, and upon reading them, I feel that I know exactly what yūgen is, despite there being no English translation. Yūgen is an expansive feeling, a mystical awareness, an almost soaring reverence for existence that is summoned forth by a poignant confrontation with the ineffable details of reality.

This feeling is integral to who I am. It is something I have experienced many times, and it is the essence of my most intimate connection to the universe. Sometimes this mystical, reverent feeling arises when I contemplate life from a macro-perspective, imagining the endless, sprawling sea of the cosmos. Often, though, it is the tiny, transient, unexpected details of day-to-day experience — a flittering hummingbird, a diminishing sunset, a precious song or bit of poetry — that awaken an expansive feeling, humbling me and reminding me that I exist in an enigmatic wonderland about which I know virtually nothing.

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