⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

❤️‍🩹 The Essence of Healing: Safety and attunement in the journey toward wholeness. Read it here.

🧘🏻‍♂️ Ram Dass before he was Ram Dass: The Harvard Professor Richard Alpert describes ego death. Watch it here.

⏳ You are not late: The greatest chapters of the internet and the biggest opportunities are still unwritten. Read it here.

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

🎇 Image of The Week

At some point I'll do an aggregation of all the otherworldly natural phenomena that I've uncovered in writing this newsletter. I’m 246 issues in and I still continue to find things didn’t know happened on this beautiful planet of ours. Today we explore airglow: “Why would the sky glow like a giant repeating rainbow? Airglow. Now, air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however -- like an approaching storm -- may cause noticeable rippling in the Earth's atmosphere. These gravity waves are oscillations in air analogous to those created when a rock is thrown in calm water. The long-duration exposure nearly along the vertical walls of airglow likely made the undulating structure particularly visible. OK, but where do the colors originate? The deep red glow likely originates from OH molecules about 87 kilometers high, excited by ultraviolet light from the Sun. The orange and green airglow is likely caused by sodium and oxygen atoms slightly higher up.” Learn more here.

 👶 Gremlin Child

Found this in the farflung corners of the internet, from an anonymous author:

“Oh to be a gremlin child again. Covered in grass stains and grazes, hair unbrushed with daisies in the knots, no concept of my own physicality, half way up a tree and eating an apple around my missing tooth. To be unabashedly ugly, to be unashamedly hungry, to be healthy and hearty and lean and covered in bruises and full of love and sun warmed strawberries. To feel time stretch forever, only flying when I fall into books. To love summer once more, and her insects and sweat.”

To which Madelyn Pitt replied “This is why people have kids. I just spent two hours outside with my daughter. We played in the pool, in the sand, in the grass. We ate popsicles and drank sweet tea, and i could almost see summer through her eyes.”

While I don’t agree this is the sole reason for having children, it’s certainly a beautiful thing to experience a second set of firsts through the wide eyes of a child. Their fresh perspective is a gift that helps us pierce the film of familiarity that tends to settle around us as we grow older.

I am just beginning this journey with my son. So much novelty lies ahead for him, and so many memories for us to make together.

What magical moments do you remember from your own childhood?

🌳 The Tree of Life

Enjoy this passionate riff from Astrid Lundberg

🤓 Learn This Word

Dustsceawung (Old English): contemplation of the fact that dust used to be other things - the walls of a city, the chief of the guards, a book, a great tree: dust is always the ultimate destination. Such contemplation may loosen the grip of our worldly desires.

⏳ From The Archives

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

Pioneering Biologist and Writer Rachel Carson on Wonder, Parenting, and Why It Is More Important to Feel Than to Know

Our inborn capacity for wonder, Carl Sagan reminded us in his remarkable reflection on spirituality, is both the heart of worship and the soul of science — in fact, what more beautiful and true way to define science than “systematic wonder”? But wonder is also one of the most endangered human faculties, and we frequently forget just what’s at stake as we risk its extinction in adulthood — a risk that begins, though far from ends, with how our hopelessly unimaginative formal education system handles young minds, rewarding rote memorization over curiosity and measuring achievement by standardized tests scores rather than character-building.

Marine biologist, conservationist, and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) is credited with sparking the modern environmental movement with her groundbreaking 1962 book Silent Spring. A cultural message equally timeless yet timely came three years later, in the posthumously published The Sense of Wonder, which Carson originally wrote as a 1956 article for Woman’s Home Companion. The book endures as a magnificent manifesto for the vibrant curiosity with which we are all born, and which we all risk of losing as we slip — slowly, imperceptibly, yet steadily — into our adult apathy and resignation. Above all, it extends a reminder that the faculty for wonder is our most precious natural resource and our greatest responsibility to conserve.

Carson writes:

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