⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📚 The Infinite Books Canon: 100 Timeless Books that you probably haven't read! Read it here.

👁️ Exploring Consciousness and Non-Ordinary Religion, Panpsychism, and Heretical Ideas: Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University. His main research focus is consciousness, but he is interested in many questions about the nature of reality. He is most known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. Watch it here.

🌱 Seed Saver Exchange: This grassroots seed-saving community is saving and sharing America’s gardening heritage for future generations. Just pay postage and receive acces to thousands of rare heirloom seeds that would have gone extinct without this community. Learn more here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Vatnajökull is Europe’s largest ice cap by volume, sprawling over ~8 % of Iceland’s landmass. The most photogenic “Blue Ice Caves” appear each winter in its south‑eastern outlet glaciers—especially Breiðamerkurjökull near Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon, sometimes nick‑named the Crystal or Sapphire cave.

🎭 The Tragedies That Never Were

Sometimes I consider all the tragedies my ancestors had to transfigure for my life to come about. In many ways, all our lives are the transfiguration of historical brutality.

If you trace any lineage long enough, you’ll find heaps of the terrible and atrocious. This is where we all come from.

Tragedy is never evenly distributed. Today, some lives are exposed to harshness others will never encounter. Nevertheless, we’re all touched by tragedy. We all ache. We all bleed.

Every moment of beauty you can hold in your heart despite what has harmed you is a triumph.

Yet transfiguring tragedy isn’t the whole story. What we often fail to include in our counting of blessings is all the tragedy that could have befallen us but never did.

We live in the light of countless storms that never crossed our skies. They broke before they reached us. We may have heard the thunder rumble from the hills, but we remained just beyond its path.

Gently holding all the ways our lives could have gone wrong gives us perspective on how often things tend to work out.

It can inspire deep gratitude for the shape of our lives today. Though folded with tragedy, we sense only a handful of sharp, discordant notes amid an otherwise beautiful symphony of blessings.

🕯️A Candleflame in Tibet

Enjoy these passage from poet William Stafford:

🤓 Learn This Word

Aimonomia: Being scared to learn the ‘why’ of something

⏳ From The Archives

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

Carl Jung and the Shadow: The Ultimate Guide to the Human Dark Side

“How well do you know yourself?

If you’re like most people, you probably have a decent idea about your own desires, values, beliefs, and opinions.

You have a personal code that you choose to follow that dictates whether you are being a “good” person.

If there is any one thing you can know in this universe, surely it is who you are.

But what if you’re wrong?

What if much of what you have come to believe about yourself, your morality, and what drives you is not an accurate reflection of who you truly are?

Now, before you launch into a, “Hey, you don’t know me, you don’t know my life, you don’t know what I’ve been through!”-style defence, ponder this for a second:

Have you ever said or done something really shitty, mostly on an impulse, that you later regretted?

After the damage was done and the other person involved was hurt, you couldn’t bury your shame fast enough. “Why did I say that?” you might have asked yourself in frustration.

It’s that “Why?” question that indicates the presence of a blind spot. And though the reason for your reaction may have been obvious (perhaps even “justified”), the lack of control you had over yourself betrays the existence of a different person lurking beneath your carefully constructed idea of who you are.

If this person is coming into focus for you, congratulations—you’ve just met your shadow self.”

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