⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️ On Attunement: In this article, Joe Carlsmith explores a form of receptive awareness which involves a deep, meaningful engagement with the world that transcends conventional knowledge and rationality. Read it here.

🤯 What Woo Works: Tom Morgan reflects on his three-year journey exploring unconventional spiritual and therapeutic practices. Read it here.

🐕 On Grief: Andrew Conner reflects on the profound experience of losing his dog, Canelé, and how this personal loss deepened his understanding of grief's complex beauty. Read it here.

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🎇 Image of The Week

The James Webb Space Telescope photo of the month: “A close-in image of a protoplanetary disc around a newly formed star. Many different wavelengths of light are combined and represented by separate and various colours. A dark line across the centre is the disc, corresponding to the densest parts of the disc, made of opaque dust: the star is hidden in here and creates a strong glow in the centre. A band going straight up is a jet, while other outflows above and below the disc, and a tail coming off to one side.” Learn more here.

 🎁 Kill Your Dreams, Gain The World

This phrase flashed into my mind about a decade ago, during a time when I was reconsidering the role of future forecasting in my life.

For years, I had lived as if the present moment derived its worth primarily from what it would eventually lead to—the realization of some dream or the achievement of a more idealized self. This way of being gradually disconnected me from the present.

Tragically, this disposition finds no relief even in success. Upon realizing one dream, another quickly takes its place, and the cycle continues. Over years, we unwittingly inculcate an inability to appreciate the present.

It's perfectly fine to have goals and dreams to pursue. But we must balance our desire to usher in particular futures with the deliberate cultivation of attentional skills that enable us to appreciate and enjoy the innumerable blessings already in front of us.

This shift in perspective has allowed me to truly appreciate who I am today. While I still have yearnings and hopes, I no longer feel I must arrive at some concrete future state for my current life to have meaning. My life is already meaningful.

I now build with the riches of the present, rather than living like a pauper on the promises of the future.

Our society embeds in us an almost obsessive preoccupation with self-improvement, and ironically, this very preoccupation often stands in the way of genuine growth. By living off the scraps of some future redemption, we rob ourselves of the living energy available today—energy that could fuel wholehearted, beautiful action taken for its own sake, not merely as a means to some future end.

To "kill your dreams and gain the world" doesn't mean eradicating ambition. It means putting dreams in their proper place. Don't let them become a high-water mark against which you harshly judge your present performance. Don't let them cast shadows onto your life.

Let them be sunshine.

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🌊 The Surface of Mystery

Enjoy these words from Annie Dillard:

🤓 Learn This Word

Parea: A group of friends who regularly gather together to share their experiences about life, their philosophies, values and ideas.

⏳ From The Archives

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

What We Look for When We Are Looking: John Steinbeck on Wonder and the Relational Nature of the Universe

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” Baudelaire wrote — something Newton embodied in looking back on his life of revolutionary discoveries, only to see himself appearing “like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” What we are really recovering from childhood in those moments of discovery and exaltation is a way of looking at the world — looking for a glimpse of some small truth that illuminates the interconnectedness of all things, looking and being wonder-smitten by what we see.

That is what John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) explores in some lovely passages from The Log from the Sea of Cortez — his forgotten masterpiece that turns the record of an ordinary marine biology expedition in the Gulf of California into an extraordinary lens on how to think.

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