⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👽 The ‘Panzoic Effect’: The Benefits of Thinking About Alien Life. Reflecting on the potential for extraterrestrial life can inspire awe and have a profound effect on your worldview. Read here.

👁️ The Sense of Wonder: A classic excerpt from an Alan Watts lecture. Listen here.

❓ Deep Rest In The Not Knowing: We live in a world that worships certainty. Read here.

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

🎇 Image of The Week

Eternal Flame Falls is a small waterfall located in Chestnut Ridge Park in New York, where a natural gas seep allows a flame to burn continuously behind the falling water. The gas, primarily methane, escapes through cracks in the shale rock and collects in a small grotto beneath the falls. When lit, the flame can stay burning for long periods, although visitors sometimes reignite it if it goes out due to wind or water. The result is a striking and unusual scene where fire and water coexist in the same space, creating a rare and mesmerizing natural wonder.

🐰 250 Weeks of Rabbit Holes

That day I sent the first edition of this newsletter was the same day I learned my grandmother had passed away.

She was a marvel of a woman who possessed of force of love so strong it carved a sense of inherent worthiness in me.

To be a grandfather to my (eventual) grandchildren in the way she was a grandmother to me has become an aim I hold over the long arc of time.

I ask myself what I must do today to cultivate a gentle, loving presence for them.

Just yesterday, one day shy of 250 weeks later, I introduced her to my firstborn son. In a pilgrimage back to my home state, I brought him to her gravesite and “met” her in the imaginal realm.

I envisioned how she would react to the news. “Oh, Mike. Isn’t he just wonderful?” are words I could hear spoken in her voice. It brought me to tears.

She lived to be 40 days shy of 103 years old. She’d be nearing 108 today. I never expected her to live as long as she did. I was blessed with bonus time. It’s a rare luxury to have a lucid centenarian grandparent.

Yet, 250 weeks later, her absence still stings. The inevitable pang of loved ones lost. It’s an ache but not one I yearn to leave me. It’s evidence of her and her impact on me.

The entanglement of this newsletter’s birth with her death feels fateful. In some ways the continuity of this project is an ode to her. An honoring of her legacy in my life.

My cup might be a little more filled with love than most because of her. So I seek to pour that out into the world in this small way.

So, 250 weeks going, that’s part of why this little weekly letter persists.

More to come. Much more.

🌱 Make Your Soul Grow

Take note of this thoughtful letter from Kurt Vonnegut:

🤓 Learn This Word

Sonder: the realization that everyone has a life as vivid and complex as your own); coined by John Koenig. This is the word that opened so many doorways to pondering that it inspired the “learn this word” section years ago.

A word is more than sound and set of letters with meaning attached to it. A word can reshape your perception by giving you a lens for realities you have been habituated into not noticing. I hope this section gives you little windows into seeing the world slightly differently.

⏳ From The Archives

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

Wild Clocks

“Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live.

In every living thing, there ticks a clock. “Lodged in all is a set metronome,” wrote W. H. Auden: when May comes round, birds “still in the egg, click to each other ‘Hatch!’” and “October’s nip” is the signal for trees to release their leaves.

Once, these rhythms comforted and consoled, orchestrating innumerable ecological relationships and offering glimpses of the greater wheels within which our small lives turn. But as climate breakdown takes hold, more and more species are struggling to keep time as they once did. Biological clocks that evolved an exact synchronization over millions of years are falling out of sync: the beat does not fall where it should; syncopation becomes dissonance. Failing wild clocks are resulting in misalignments in time between predators and prey, herbivores and plants, or flowers and pollinators. The results can be catastrophic, as breeding seasons fail and the long-held relationships that weave species together around shared needs fray. In Australia, mountain pygmy possums are leaving hibernation before the emergence of their preferred food, the bogong moth, risking starvation. Plants are losing touch with their pollinators: warm springs in Japan have led to earlier flowering of spring-ephemeral plants relative to their pollinating bees. One study warns that the timing of phytoplankton blooms could be shortened if the oceans continue to warm, introducing a calamitous mismatch at the very base of the marine food chain.

In a time of ecological crisis, it can be difficult to know exactly what time it really is.”

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