⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🐲 The Child and The Shadow by Ursula Le Guin: A short story about the dangers of repressing one's darker, more assertive side and the importance of integrating both light and shadow aspects of oneself to achieve genuine creativity and personal fulfillment. Read it here.

🎶 Music You Can See: These visuals literally are the sound - the left and right audio waveforms respectively control the horizontal and vertical positions of a rapidly moving beam, ultimately tracing out the shapes. See it here.

🧐 50 Life Lessons: Things Cate Hall wishes she knew sooner. Read them here.

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🎇 Image of The Week

This is a beautiful photo of Jervis Bay in New South Wales, Australia. The beautiful landscape is not why I share it, but rather to point to the wonders that lurk beneath the surface. “Octopolis and Octlantis are two non-human settlements occupied by gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) in Jervis Bay, on the south coast of New South Wales. The first site, named "Octopolis" by biologists, was found in 2009. Octopolis consists of a bed of shells (mainly scallop shells) in an ellipse shape, 2–3 meters diameter on its longer axis, with a single piece of anthropogenic detritus, believed to be scrap metal, within the site. Octopuses build dens by burrowing into the shell bed. The shells appear to provide a much better building material for the octopuses than the fine sediment around the site. Up to 14 octopuses have been seen at Octopolis at a single time. In 2016, a second settlement was found nearby, named "Octlantis," which includes no human-made objects and can house similar numbers of octopuses.” Source.

👁 Wanting What's Right In Front Of You

The comparative mind will convince you that the "good life" is always just beyond where your feet stand. This highlights the importance of the distinction between "wanting what's right in front of you" vs "hyper-awareness of ways things could be better."

Now surely recognizing the ways you can improve your experience of life is important. Striving to better our conditions is one of the ways we can experience great adventure.

But to only do that and to atrophy your capacity to savor and enjoy the moment as it exists now, will leave you in this predicament Alan Watts so lucidly expressed:

"Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly."

If I find myself preoccupied with all the ways that I can improve my circumstances to the point that I am not embracing the beauty and grandeur of the now, I deliberately shift into a mode where I engage the senses and find contact with all the good fortune flowing towards me and the immensity of blessings that envelop me.

🦋 Save The Butterfly Wings

Consider this from Professor Maurice Wilkins:

🤓 Learn This Word

Jamais vu: a French loanword meaning "never seen", is the phenomenon of experiencing a situation that one recognizes in some fashion, but that nonetheless seems novel and unfamiliar.

⏳ From The Archives

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

How to Be a Happier Creature

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world.

Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our animal body knows where we came from and where we belong.

“Our origins are of the earth,” Rachel Carson wrote. “And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” A century before her, William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — another of humanity’s great writers devoted to rewilding the human spirit — captured the essence of what science now calls “soft fascination”: the way our brains and bodies respond when we immerse ourselves in the natural world. In a passage from his altogether wonderful 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), Hudson writes:

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