⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🔮 Magical Substrate: The collective unconscious as a distributed substrate for magic as subtle communication. Read it here.

❤️‍🔥 Ram Dass on The Sacred In The Everyday: A discussion about "somebodyness", and the urge to break out of our conditioned bonds of the thinking mind and into the spacious realm of compassion and being. Listen it here.

🤯 How To Experience More Wow: Awe might seem an unobtainable luxury to many but, with the right approach, you can enjoy it daily – no mountain required. Read it here.

💌 Want More? Down The Rabbit Hole readers also enjoy these awesome (and completely free!) newsletters. Explore

🎇 Image of The Week

After posting the Spiral Jetty image in last week’s edition, I stumbled across this whimsical overhead shot that I had to share: “This Overview captures Spiral Jetty, an earthwork sculpture by Robert Smithson, consisting of a 1,500-foot-long (460 m), 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) counterclockwise coil jutting from the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA. Smithson reportedly chose this site because of the vibrant colors of the water (salt-tolerant bacteria and algae thrive here in 27% salinity) and its connection with the primordial sea.”

 🤔  Inconvenient Convenience

I often think about the experiences almost imperceptibly lost as we march forward towards our notions of "progress."

We cherish technology that makes our lives more convenient.

But value isn't only stored in ease of access and speed of delivery.

When my father was young and new music would be released he would go on a whole journey leading up to the actual listening.

He'd head to the record store, find the record in question, make his purchase and perhaps interact with the employees a bit.

Then head home and remove it from its packaging before placing the needle on the vinyl and allowing for the auditory odyssey to commence.

He'd absorb the art in its entirety.

Now we have what feels like all the world's music at our fingertips. An astonishing accomplishment. Even going back in time and showing Spotify to a human living in the walkman era would seem like wizardry.

I don't have that same journey with music that my father did and part of me feels like it diminishes the value of the music.

Somehow it's harder to cherish.

But this isn't about music.

It's about all the ways our shortsighted pursuit of convenience can unintentionally commodify what made something precious.

Limitations have their usefulness. Going through a process to obtain something of value is part of why we value it.

I'm not suggesting we revert to a time before streaming music or throwing our phones away. I'm a technophile who has greatly benefited from technology so I'm not preaching death to digital.

But this is a bit of an ode to analog.

And an encouragement to explore the ways we can optimize for reverence over convenience.

Write a letter. Develop some film. Make a time capsule.

You might be surprised by the kind of significance these sorts of activities can imbue into your daily life.

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🌟 Star-bright Network

Consider this passage from Donna Ashworth:

🤓 Learn This Word

Moriturism: The sudden reminder that you will one day no longer occupy this earth

⏳ From The Archives

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

How to Meet Your Mystery: Thomas Merton on Solitude and the Soul

“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his reckoning with how to find your destiny. “Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” On the one hand, destiny is a ramshackle concept, trembling with reverberations of determinism and self-recusal from responsibility — we shape the path of our lives with our choices, often not knowing or not wanting to know that we are choosing with every action at every turn, then look back on the trail and call it destiny. On the other, some things in life seem indeed to choose us and not we them: our birth, to begin with; our talents; great love. Solitude may be one of those things — a life of solitude, whether it lasts a lifetime or a season of being, chooses the solitary as much as the solitary chooses it.

The theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915–December 10, 1968) takes up the choice of solitude, its preconditions and its consequences, in a thirty-page essay titled “Notes for a Philosophy of a Solitude,” found in his 1960 collection Disputed Questions (public library) — a fine addition to the canon of great artists, writers, and scientists who have reaped and extolled the creative and spiritual rewards of solitude.

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