⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🍎 Slices of Wisdom from Alan Watts: Awe at existence, the peopling universe, and the point of it all. Read it here.

🌎 Powers of Ten: A mesmerizing visual journey that zooms out from a picnic by Lake Michigan to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, then back inward to the quarks inside a carbon nucleus. Watch it here.

❤️‍🔥 Attention is The Beginning of Devotion: A story of Mary Oliver’s empathy in action. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The Blue Morpho butterfly is one of nature’s optical marvels. Its vivid blue comes not from pigment but from structural coloration, where microscopic scales on its wings bend and scatter light, creating a shimmer that shifts with every angle. Native to the rainforests of Central and South America, the Blue Morpho flashes bright as it flies, then disappears when it folds its wings to reveal a muted brown underside for camouflage.

🔎 The Myth of Perfect Clarity

The desire to have perfect clarity before taking action is one of the biggest inhibitors to personal progress.

Many feel as though they need the vivid details mapped out as a first step, not realizing that the details emerge as a vision is refined through real-world action.

Abstract visions and aims eventually need to collide with reality so that your map can become a closer representation to the territory.

Sometimes people spend far too much time obsessing over the map when they need to get out in the wilderness and see where it takes them.

Then you can actually recognize the flaws and the insufficiencies in the map. You might realize that certain ground was not accounted for. That the topography is different than you expected.

That you might need additional tools like a compass to keep yourself oriented. You might realize you need to learn how to read the stars to keep moving in the proper direction.

Rather than trying to engineer perfect clarity, the better approach is to use the slivers of clarity you have as jumping-off points into the fog.

You'll eventually need to navigate through the cloudiness of uncertainty.

Eventually, you'll come upon a clearing in the woods. From this space, you'll be able to see a greater perspective. You will have arrived at a deeper clarity that is only possible through navigation, not pontification.

Armed with this heightened awareness, you'll proceed forward eventually merging back into the fog. And so it repeats.

There is an oscillatory nature to clarity and cloudiness.

As the pendulum swings between these two poles, a pixelated image (the original vision) is transformed into a high definition multi-dimensional rendering that draws on encounters with reality paired with predictions informed by battle-tested theory.

These details are gifts only earned through experience.

Experience that offers a wisdom that "lives in the bones" that goes far beyond the flickerings of the mind.

All this to say, don't feel like you need to have it all figured out to justify taking the first step towards a vision.

The perfect plan does not exist. The idea that one does is veiled procrastination.

So start. Get out into the wilderness and see what you discover.

🤔 Curiosity vs. Wonder

Savor these words from Eilon Schwartz as he reflects on the work of Mary Midgley:

🤓 Learn This Word

Scansion: the breaking up of poem's lines or verses into metrical feet and identifying the stressed and unstressed syllables

⏳ From The Archives

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

Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

“Who are you?” the caterpillar barks at Alice from atop the giant mushroom, and Alice, never quite having considered the question, mutters a child’s version of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Before he was Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books, Charles Dodgson was a logician. His Wonderland is a series of nested thought experiments about change and the limits of logic. When the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom would make her smaller and the other taller, Alice is stupefied by how something perfectly round can have sides, how a single thing can produce such opposite effects. And yet inside this fictional parable about the nature of the self is a biological reality about the nature of fungi — organisms that operate according to a different logic. They belong to a single kingdom, yet they are endowed with polar powers: the lion’s mane mushroom that can sharpen a mind and the honey fungus that can slay a tree; the cordyceps that can drive an ant to suicide and the psilocybin that can drive you to delirium; the Penicillium that has saved millions of lives and the Puccinia graminis that has blighted nations into deadly famines, changing the census of the world.

I grew up with Alice, and I grew up with mushrooms. Around the time I discovered Wonderland, my mother — my complicated mother oscillating between the poles of the mind — discovered foraging. Each weekend we would head into the forests of Bulgaria and spend long hours searching — for mushrooms, yes, but also for a common language between our two island universes. I delighted in the unbidden flame of a chanterelle on a bed of moss, in the shy bloom of a shaggy parasol between the pines, and, once, in finding a king bolete bigger than my awestruck face. Here was a world that was wilder yet safer than my own, resinous with wonder. I was captivated by the notion that edible species could have poisonous doubles, by the way the brain forms a search image that trains the eye on the inconspicuous domes. Mushrooms were helping me learn so much of what life was already teaching me — that a thing can look like something you love but turn dangerous, even deadly; that the more you expect something, the more of it you find.

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