⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️ Scientists claim to have discovered 'new colour' no one has seen before. By stimulating specific cells in the retina, the participants claim to have witnessed a blue-green colour that scientists have called "olo", but some experts have said the existence of a new colour is "open to argument". Read more here.

🔮 Magic is real (if you know how to look): The cornerstones of the Enchanted Gaze. Read it here.

🕊️ Birds do not sing in caves: A poetic, philosophical dive into what we've lost in the name of progress—and how to remember. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty coils 1,500 feet (460 m) into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a counter-clockwise ribbon 15 feet wide built from more than 6,000 tons of local black basalt, earth and salt crystals that Smithson trucked onto the remote Rozel Point shoreline. Conceived as an “earthwork” that would collaborate with entropy, the Jetty rises, submerges, crusts in white salt, or glows against the lake’s pink, microbe-rich water as lake levels and salinity shift—an ever-changing barometer of the desert ecosystem. Since prolonged drought drove the lake to record lows in 2022-25, the Jetty has remained dramatically exposed, drawing a steady pilgrimage of artists, scientists and curious travelers who drive the rough causeway to walk its volcanic spine.

⛅️ Watch The Clouds

Carve out some time to find a patch of grass and lean up against a tree.

Leave your phone behind. All the messages and notifications will be there when you return.

Let your mind wander as you immerse yourself in the original screensaver: the sky.

Watch the clouds pass on by.

Notice the different shapes they can take.

Notice the various meanings you can derive from these temporary forms.

A dragon. A flower. An elephant.

Notice the moments where the clouds look just like balls of cotton and nothing more.

Our lives can sometimes feel like this.

We see crystalized meaning. Things make sense.

Other times we see pure potential or nothing at all. Something that has yet to take a discernable form.

Sometimes events in our lives won't make sense until some time has passed.

It's okay to be a in state of not-knowing.

Even if things seem ominous, the dark storm clouds eventually pass on through.

All of life moves in seasons and cycles.

There is so much wisdom in the phrase "This too shall pass."

It's a reminder to appreciate our blessings while we have them.

It's a flame of hope that all suffering is temporary.

And sometimes watching the clouds is enough to gain a seed of this perspective.

To put down our chronic worries and petty grievances.

To discover the beauty that is here and now.

☄️ Galaxies Colliding

Ponder these words from Author Caitlin Moran:

🤓 Learn This Word

Aesthete: Someone with deep sensitivity to the beauty of art or nature

⏳ From The Archives

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

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

pro-cras-ti-na-tion |prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-|
noun
the action of delaying or postponing something: your first tip is to avoid procrastination.

Who would have thought that after decades of struggle with procrastination, the dictionary, of all places, would hold the solution.

Avoid procrastination. So elegant in its simplicity.

While we’re here, let’s make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should avoid being out of the ocean.

No, “avoid procrastination” is only good advice for fake procrastinators—those people that are like, “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m such a procrastinator!” The same people that will say to a real procrastinator something like, “Just don’t procrastinate and you’ll be fine.”

The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional—it’s something they don’t know how to not do.

In college, the sudden unbridled personal freedom was a disaster for me—I did nothing, ever, for any reason. The one exception was that I had to hand in papers from time to time. I would do those the night before, until I realized I could just do them through the night, and I did that until I realized I could actually start them in the early morning on the day they were due. This behavior reached caricature levels when I was unable to start writing my 90-page senior thesis until 72 hours before it was due, an experience that ended with me in the campus doctor’s office learning that lack of blood sugar was the reason my hands had gone numb and curled up against my will. (I did get the thesis in—no, it was not good.)

Even this post took much longer than it should have, because I spent a bunch of hours doing things like seeing this picture sitting on my desktop from a previous post, opening it, looking at it for a long time thinking about how easily he could beat me in a fight, then wondering if he could beat a tiger in a fight, then wondering who would win between a lion and a tiger, and then googling that and reading about it for a while (the tiger would win). I have problems.

To understand why procrastinators procrastinate so much, let’s start by understanding a non-procrastinator’s brain:

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