⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️ Poetry as a Sacred Calling: The poet’s duty is to witness the eternal and translate the mystery of being into words that awaken wonder. Read it here.

🤯 A Sense of The Sacred: In this discussion on the final chapter of his magnum opus, Author Iain McGilchrist explores the mystery at the heart of existence, inviting readers to rediscover a deeper reality that cannot be grasped by reason alone but must be felt, lived, and honored. Watch it here.

🌿 The Evolutionary Wonder of Leaves: Water-hoarding cacti, needled pines, and sun-soaking monstera are all perfectly adapted to their natural environments. Watch it here.

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

🎇 Image of The Week

Sumela Monastery is a 4th-century Greek Orthodox monastery dramatically built into a steep cliffside in the Pontic Mountains of northeastern Turkey. Overlooking the lush Altındere Valley, it is renowned for its breathtaking location, richly painted Byzantine frescoes, and deep spiritual history. Founded by monks inspired by a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary, the monastery became a vital religious and cultural center through Byzantine and Ottoman times. Its architectural audacity, historical resilience, and the harmony it represents between nature and sacred tradition make it one of Turkey’s most awe-inspiring heritage sites.

🎶 Break Out Into Song

It feels to me as if there is a force in this world that causes people to undermine their value.

It’s so near to us that I feel I have to fight against it even as I’ve typed this first sentence.

When I say value I’m not talking about money or markets, skills or degrees.

I’m describing a value that is inherent to your subjectivity, tied to the presence of your being, and fused to the story of your unfolding participation in the world.

The idea that your life in the grand scheme of things is insignificant is a lie.

Our culture has constructed great plumes of mind pollution.

There are scientists who reek of arrogance and hypocrisy, practicing scientism while disparaging religion. They claim they have answers to questions that their instruments can’t even begin to assess.

There are fundamentalists who claim to be agents of love while implanting guilt and terror into little children for having committed the crime of existing.

News anchors will screech that your neighbors are terrible and the world is about to collapse as if their sensationalism and histrionics were based on fact and not fear-fueled financial gain.

These are all cataracts on the eyes of the truth.

You are not a speck of dust. You are a wellspring. You are a river of riches.

You were born of perfect innocence. You were not born a clod of defects needing forgiveness before you’ve even opened your eyes.

You have the power to bless the world around you. To bring attention to the gift of life.

There is so much beauty in the world, but we cannot help but feast on tragedy.

“Sorry but the real world isn’t all rainbows and butterflies” is the common cynical retort.

But this isn’t true thought. It’s a habitual mental movement. These folks have been conditioned into negativity by the world around them. They don’t recognize that our best anti-venom to the sting of tragedy is a belly full of beauty.

This isn’t a rejection of the reality of tragedy. It’s not wool-covered eyes. It’s clear vision.

Nourished by beauty, we can march forward with strength in the face of tragedy.

Otherwise we risk creating cascades of further tragedy by acting from heart-hardened, grief-riddled spiritual deprivation.

You are a descendant of eons of love.

This is not something many can accept.

Many see the past as solely vicious and brutal and the future as totally apocalyptic.

We live in the razor thin line of today being pulled apart by time from both ends. Ashamed of yesterday and terrified of tomorrow.

But it need not be this way.

There is treasure in our past, not just travesty. The future is ripe with possibility.

It’s fine to wrestle with your demons and psychoanalyze your insecurities. But that’s not all there is.

You have a part to play in the grand symphony of this mystery called life.

There is a force that would prefer you toss out your instrument and forget how to hear the music.

I’m asking you to tap your foot to the drum beat and break out into song.

⭐️ The Treasured Past

Contemplate this notion from Viktor Frankl:

🤓 Learn This Word

Psychomachia: a conflict of the soul (as with the body or between good and evil)

⏳ From The Archives

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

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the young more than a century later in his magnificent commencement address, “involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”

Every generation believes that it must battle unprecedented pressures of conformity; that it must fight harder than any previous generation to protect that secret knowledge from which our integrity of selfhood springs. Some of this belief stems from the habitual conceit of a culture blinded by its own presentism bias, ignorant of the past’s contextual analogues. But much of it in the century and a half since Nietzsche, and especially in the years since Heaney, is an accurate reflection of the conditions we have created and continually reinforce in our present informational ecosystem — a Pavlovian system of constant feedback, in which the easiest and commonest opinions are most readily rewarded, and dissenting voices are most readily punished by the unthinking mob.

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