⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🎨 Neil degGasse Tyson on Why Art Matters: Creativity is expressing something only you can bring into existence. Watch it here.

🔗 The World is a Network: Fritjof Capra shows how life emerges from patterns of connection, revealing that everything from living cells to human societies to ecosystems exists within interdependent, self-organizing networks that shape our shared reality. Watch it here.

👻 Welcome, ghosts: Simon Sarris drifts through the internet’s vast, hidden museums of memory, where forgotten photographs, vanished spaces, and permission-less inventions reveal how time formalizes life and turns vibrant places into ghosts. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“That yellow spot -- what is it? It's a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. Although we can't look into the past and see Earth's formation directly, telescopes let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars. At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk -- the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric rings mark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk -- the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.” Source.

🗝 Elders and Exemplars

I was reflecting on celebrity worship and the fixation so many have on "influencers" in today's world.

There are so many waiting and watching for them to mess up so they can chatter about the drama.

It should not be a surprise that anyone with a large following acts in ways to upset large swathes of people.

This isn't to say having a large following inherently makes you a bad person. It's just that followers are attracted through polarization.

These figures are lightning rods for controversy. Their audiences grow through agitation. This might be deliberate or unconscious.

The point here is that people look to cultural icons as if they are meant to be figures of moral purity and guidance.

They are not that. They never have been.

They are entertainers.

The everlasting drip of drama is latched onto as a form of digital opium.

It's a way of distracting ourselves from the stressors and pains present in our lives.

That's fine. I'm just trying to clear up a confusion.

Don't be shocked that the boat gets rocked. Don't clutch your pearls that people with large audiences express abhorrent opinions. It's that way by design.

Opinions with no shock factor don't captivate attention in the same way. We all know this intuitively but it's easy to get swept up in the scrum and lost in the tension of us vs. them.

Some people expect to gather elder wisdom and moral examples from the digital platforms we travel through on the winding roads of the internet.

I feel we've become disconnected from the grounded reality around us.

The people in your 3D offscreen life are meant to be the source of this kind of wisdom where it can be held in flesh and blood relationships with a shared context.

I'd much prefer we treat our grandmothers and grandfathers as the portal to insight than the never-ending social media buffoonery and over-the-top moral grandstanding.

Learn from the example of people with a vested interest in us. Not necessarily about how the world SHOULD be but to understand what they regret and what really matters to them.

There is a lack of focus on gathering personal perspectives informed by years of living. There's something clarifying about a long life. A lot of the captivating BS can fade away the closer we get to the end so that the heart of the matter can really shine through.

I'd love to see the reinvigoration of elderhood within our culture.

The path to get there? It's unclear from where I sit. But pointing it out seems like a good first step. I'll listen and watch how this seed grows over time. Maybe you have some thoughts on it?

🎉 For Celebration

Enjoy this blessing from John O’Donohue:

🤓 Learn This Word

Moledro: A feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you'll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away

⏳ From The Archives

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

How to instantly be better at things

“It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.

Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is.

Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward. There is a pregnant silence, and I think, ah, what should go in that silence? Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote about my recent life. After quickly flipping through a few possibilities, I settle on one and utter a few words. They work fine, but there’s not that effortless fluidity of real skill. And as a result, the conversation remains leaden — people don’t feel comfortable responding to me because I don’t sound natural. (This happens to me all the time, by the way.)

Sometimes I fare better by simply telling myself to act like a charismatic person. I know some of those, and I can slip into a passable imitation of one much more easily than I can break their talents down into steps. My personality naturally distorts the imitation, but that’s fine — I tell myself that’s just my own spin on being a charming conversationalist.”

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