⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🚶‍♂️‍➡️On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking: From Charles Darwin to Toni Morrison, Jeremy DeSilva looks at our need to move. Read it here.

🕹️ Life Is A Video Game: Here are the cheat codes. Watch it here.

👁️ The Magic of Mundanity: Seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“Sometimes, the Moon visits the Pleiades. Technically, this means that the orbit of our Moon takes it directly in front of the famous Pleiades star cluster, which is far in the distance. The technical term for the event is an occultation, and the Moon is famous for its rare occultations of all planets and several well-known bright stars. The Moon's tilted and precessing orbit makes its occultations of the Seven Sisters star cluster bunchy, with the current epoch starting in 2023 continuing monthly until 2029. After that, though, the next occultation won't occur until 2042. Taken from Cantabria, Spain on April 1, the featured image is a composite where previous exposures of the Pleiades from the same camera and location were digitally added to the last image to bring up the star cluster's iconic blue glow.” Source.

🪑 No Ordinary Moment

Find a chair and have a seat.

Now it might seem to be just a common piece of furniture.

But if you sit long enough, allowing the world to slow, you might begin to recognize something extraordinary about where you’re sitting.

You might, out of the corner of your eye, catch a glance of a grander scheme of things.

The subtlest sensation of a gravitational intelligence at work, busy weaving a world around you.

Pulling in the right threads and connecting the right dots at the perfect time.

Where nothing is out of place.

Where this moment rests at the culmination of an unbroken cascade of events.

Everything. All of it.

Begins to add up.

Every plot twist. Every obstacle. Every leap of faith.

All an integral part of the unfolding symphony that is your life.

And in the stillness you might began to feel something else.

Something exhilarating.

Because you didn’t just sit down.

You were shot out of the cannon called your past.

Picking up the momentum called strength and wisdom along the way.

Landing on the bullseye called now.

So with the velocity of life coursing through your veins, you might see it all with fresh eyes.

A simple seat becomes upholstered with astonishment.

Your next breath laced with gratitude

Because you recognize...

That is no ordinary chair.

And you are living in no ordinary moment.

🎶 Dance To The Music

Enjoy this potent reminder from Alan Watts:

🤓 Learn This Word

Numinous: Describing an experience that makes you fearful yet fascinated, awed yet attracted - the powerful, personal feeling of being overwhelmed an inspired

⏳ From The Archives

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

You Are a Wonder, You Are a Nobody, You Are an Ever-Drifting Ship: Melville on the Mystery of What Makes Us Who We Are

“The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth,” the poet Robert Penn Warren wrote in his impassioned and insightful challenge to the notion of “finding yourself” — something the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert captured half a century later in his memorable quip about our blind spots of becoming: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

An epoch earlier, Herman Melville (August 1, 1819–September 28, 1891) wove the everlasting questions of being and becoming into the heart of Moby-Dick (free ebook | public library) — the 1851 classic he composed as a 927-page love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Two millennia after Plutarch probed what makes you you in his enduring thought experiment, two decades before Nietzsche admonished that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” and a century before James Baldwin turned to the sea for existential evidence that nothing in this world is fixed, including us, Melville considers the myriad twists and turns, the forward leaps and backward steps, the detours and digressions by which the story of life tells itself through us. At the heart of his meditation is a warning: We must set ourselves free from the illusion that there is a steady vector of personal growth, along which we glide unperturbed toward some final completeness, where we at last become our fully realized selves and where life is at last permanently becalmed. He writes:

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