⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️ Seeing Beauty In The Ordinary: Even in life’s most challenging moments, beauty quietly waits to offer us comfort. In times of pain or loss, noticing the small things around us — the warmth of sunlight, the comfort of a friend — can remind us of life’s gentle grace. These seemingly ordinary experiences, so easily overlooked, become subtle guides back toward hope and healing. Watch it here.

🕰️ Contemplating The Passage of Time: A reflection on the fleeting nature of childhood from the perspective of a mother. Read it here.

🌳 Escape Into The Woods: Beautiful Birdsong in a Serene Spring Forest. Watch it here.

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

🎇 Image of The Week

“The cliff above Yalong Glacier in Tibet is covered with ancient trees of various shapes. I used the branches of these trees to frame the distant glacier and snow-capped mountains.” says photographer, Li Jun.

 👶 A Letter To My 11 Day-Old Son

A proper capstone to a summer day replete with ice cream cones and red wagon rides—watching you witness the fireflies.

I hope to see their brilliant buzzing beneath the stars spark your little eyes with wonder.

There’s so much of the world to see, my son. So much I want to see with you.

To be there as you gawk upon majestic firsts and to return to certain sights and scenes you might remember as traditions.

What will you reflect on with nostalgia when you’ve grown? What of this world will be beyond reach after the slippage of some decades?

I used to ride bikes and knock on doors, uncertain if my friends were home. We’d get lost in the outer reaches of neighborhood lawns, hiding and seeking til the sun almost set.

Now phones triangulate our location wherever we go. Even from within the cathedral of the forest, newsfeeds feed us news.

It’s hard to get lost anymore. And trust me, I appreciate the GPS but sometimes it feels like the dry turf we travel once rushed with such serendipity. What did we lose in all this power we’ve gained?

And it’s not that I don’t love technology. I do. It’s a marvel that any answer can be found within a pocket’s reach.

But I hope that doesn’t keep you from pondering the weavings of this world and inventing your own answers. Not everything is settled. Maybe nothing is.

So I pray that within this technosphere, you don’t become reluctant to wander. Both physically and spiritually. Both aimlessly and aimfully. Both cautiously and courageously.

So you might discover what’s meant for you in this flash of light called life.

You have been stitched into existence.

Your birth is a knot in time. You are a mind tangled up in matter.

Through the passing grains of sand, it seems that we unravel.

A mystery into mystery.

My boy, I don’t know who you are. You are too young to try and tell me.

But on the other side of an arc of time, I imagine you reading these words.

So while I have the chance, let me tell you..

My heart erupted on the day you were born. Tears streamed down my face as you entered into outer Earth and were placed in your mother’s arms.

There’s a love I have for you that precedes anything you’ve done, anything you could do.

Accomplishment or performance is not a prerequisite for this love.

I will do my best to demonstrate this love to you as you grow so that in any attempt you might make, you can only fall as far as this foundation.

I know I will fail at times. Forgive me. But I will not fail completely.

If I do this right, I will light little lanterns of love—memories of warmth and compassion—to accompany you as you travel this wild, messy world.

Son, I hope to be in your life in such a way that you always remember…

Your father loves you.

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✍🏼 In Praise of The Semicolon

Ponder this sentiment from David Bentley Hart:

“A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language's miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Eremition: The act of gradually fading from the lives of others, not out of malice but a desire for solitude or renewal

⏳ From The Archives

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

Pioneering Biologist and Writer Rachel Carson on Wonder, Parenting, and Why It Is More Important to Feel Than to Know

“Our inborn capacity for wonder, Carl Sagan reminded us in his remarkable reflection on spirituality, is both the heart of worship and the soul of science — in fact, what more beautiful and true way to define science than “systematic wonder”? But wonder is also one of the most endangered human faculties, and we frequently forget just what’s at stake as we risk its extinction in adulthood — a risk that begins, though far from ends, with how our hopelessly unimaginative formal education system handles young minds, rewarding rote memorization over curiosity and measuring achievement by standardized tests scores rather than character-building.

Marine biologist, conservationist, and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) is credited with sparking the modern environmental movement with her groundbreaking 1962 book Silent Spring. A cultural message equally timeless yet timely came three years later, in the posthumously published The Sense of Wonder which Carson originally wrote as a 1956 article for Woman’s Home Companion. The book endures as a magnificent manifesto for the vibrant curiosity with which we are all born, and which we all risk of losing as we slip — slowly, imperceptibly, yet steadily — into our adult apathy and resignation. Above all, it extends a reminder that the faculty for wonder is our most precious natural resource and our greatest responsibility to conserve.”

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