⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🌊 Ram Dass on Chaos: How to not let change freak you out. Read more here.

💗 Love’s Inevitable Gravity: The Sacred Archaeology of Desire. Read it here.

💧River Runner: Watch the path of a raindrop from anywhere in the contiguous United States. Try it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Incredible sand art from UK land artist Jon Foreman: “This ones all about playing with contrasting layers and complex, tricky sections to repeat. Very time consuming style for me to work in but love the style, maybe I can mix some of this into another style and work a bit larger. As I've kind of said in the comments before its often not about beating the previous work but creating new avenues to explore and thereby expanding what I'm capable of. It's not all about that either its also keeping things fresh for me and allowing me to feel like I'm not just repeating myself.” See more of his work here.

👁️ Newness in The Usual

This is your periodic reminder that in the immediate panorama of your perception, there is a panoply of details that have somehow escaped your attention.

These details have been glossed over as our routines become—well, routine.

What commonly surrounds us stops standing out. That which is pervasive becomes invisible.

Some of these details may seem boring, but at least a few of them, I promise, are well worth your attention.

I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what they are. I only hope to encourage your way of seeing to temporarily slip out of the conditioned grooves it tends to relax into when faced with the run-of-the-mill.

Become a neophile of the ordinary. Find the newness in the usual.

There is a richness around you, almost beckoning you to lend the gift of your witnessing. Resuscitate the dormant beauty—and find your eyes beginning to glimmer.

“I believe that there is luminosity hiding in the shadow of the mundane. And things that hover at the periphery of our vision. If that’s magic, then I believe in it.” ― Natasha Mostert

🪐 Blackmailing The Universe

Contemplate these passages from C.S. Lewis:

🤓 Learn This Word

“Cosmopoesis, as articulated by Rob Burbea, refers to a way of perceiving and experiencing the world as sacred or divine—a creative opening of possibilities in how we see, sense, and experience the cosmos. It's a process where our perception opens up to see the world around us in a poetic, sacred, or enchanted way, while feeling oneself within such a cosmos. Burbea describes it as "opening up the possibilities of seeing, of sensing, of really inhabiting a different cosmos," allowing us to expand beyond conventional perception to recognize multiple dimensions or sacred qualities within our ordinary experience.”

Read more here.

⏳ From The Archives

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

How to Reach Where You Already Are, by Alan Watts

Previously unpublished commentary from a pioneer of East-West spirituality

“So, how can an individual realize that they are the universal self? In what way can a person who is under the impression that they are a separate individual enclosed in a bag of skin effectively realize that they are Brahman? This, of course, is a curious question. It proposes a journey to the place where you already are. Now, it’s true that you may not know that you are there, but you are. And if you take a journey to the place where you are, you will visit many other places than the place where you are, and perhaps when you find through some long experience that all the places you go to are not the place you wanted to find, it may occur to you that you were already there in the beginning. And that is the Dharma, or “method,” as I prefer to translate the word. That’s the method that all gurus and spiritual teachers fundamentally use. So, they are all tricksters.

Why use trickster as a word to describe them? Did you know that it’s terribly difficult to surprise yourself on purpose? Somebody else has to do it for you, which is why a guru or teacher is so often necessary. And there are many kinds of gurus, but among human gurus there are square gurus and beat gurus. Square gurus take you through the regular channels; beat gurus lead you in by means that are very strange indeed—they are rascals. Also, friends can act as gurus. And then there are gurus who aren’t people, like situations or books. Regardless, the guru’s job is to show the inquirer in some effective way that they are already what they are looking for.”

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