⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🚪What’s this, a door? Humor is the art of uncovering life's hidden surprises, revealing joy even in its darkest corners. Read it here.

🛝 Wonder, Play, and How to Be More Alive: Reveling in a wonderful poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Read it here.

📣 Say The Thing: Sir Patrick Stewarts meditation on vulnerability. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“These incredible images were made more than 100 years ago by a Welsh singer named Margaret Watts Hughes — not by her hand but rather using her voice and an Eidophone, a "recording" device of her own invention. She would sing into the Eidophone's funnel and so make its diaphragm vibrate. She'd then bring this vibrating diaphragm in contact with a glass plate covered in pigment to create these wondrous images, akin to visual sound recordings, or what she called Voice Figures (and the more complex Impression Figures).” See more.

🎭 The Tragedies That Never Were

Sometimes I consider all the tragedies my ancestors had to transfigure for my life to come about. In many ways, all our lives are the transfiguration of historical brutality.

If you trace any lineage long enough, you’ll find heaps of the terrible and atrocious. This is where we all come from.

Tragedy is never evenly distributed. Today, some lives are exposed to harshness others will never encounter. Nevertheless, we’re all touched by tragedy. We all ache. We all bleed.

Every moment of beauty you can hold in your heart despite what has harmed you is a triumph.

Yet transfiguring tragedy isn’t the whole story. What we often fail to include in our counting of blessings is all the tragedy that could have befallen us but never did.

We live in the light of countless storms that never crossed our skies. They broke before they reached us. We may have heard the thunder rumble from the hills, but we remained just beyond its path.

Gently holding all the ways our lives could have gone wrong gives us perspective on how often things tend to work out.

It can inspire deep gratitude for the shape of our lives today. Though folded with tragedy, we sense only a handful of sharp, discordant notes amid an otherwise beautiful symphony of blessings.

👋 Disappearing Childhood

Ponder this lesson from an anonymous web surfer:

🤓 Learn This Word

Cerulean: deep blue in color like a clear sky.

⏳ From The Archives

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

10 Timeless Reasons Why Your Life Matters

If the world has ever attempted to lasso your soul and pull you into a pit of nihilistic hopelessness, consider this a memo from the universe zapping you with an electrical current of meaning.

There is an inextinguishable significance to your life. Yes, specifically YOUR life. This significance does not exist purely because you wish it into existence. It is not a matter of make-believe. It is real and there are timeless reasons for it.

My hope is that reading this will plant the seeds to help you feel your significance in your bones. That it might burn so vividly that others can see it shining in your eyes. And, who knows, they might even catch a glimpse of their own significance reflected in your gaze.

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