⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

😑 Letting boredom heal me: How we replaced boredom with rotting. Read it here.

🌏 Ancient Earth: Search for addresses across 750 million years of Earth's history. Try it here.

🛌 Dream Recorder: Capture your subconscious in ultra-low definition. Wake up, speak your dream aloud in any language, and watch it come to life as a dreamscape in the aesthetic of your choice. Learn more.

🎇 Image of The Week

Since December 2024, Hawaiʻi’s Kīlauea volcano has been erupting inside its summit crater, Halemaʻumaʻu, in a stop and go pattern. Instead of a single continuous flow, it has produced more than thirty short episodes, each marked by fountains of lava, glowing ponds, and bursts of volcanic gas. These episodes typically last for several hours before pausing as magma builds up again beneath the crater.

The photo above shows Episode 33, which began on September 19, 2025. For much of the day, fountains of molten rock rose hundreds of feet before the eruption subsided. While all of the activity has remained confined to the crater, volcanic gas, smog (vog), and fine glassy strands known as Pele’s hair have drifted downwind across the island.

 ✨⛅️Grounded Optimism vs. Blind Idealism

Holding an image of the future you'd like to inhabit isn't enough to bring that future to life.

Constantly rolling around the mental imagery isn't what compels it to arrive.

It's certainly a part of the equation, but without another key ingredient, you're left in a trance of blind idealism destined for disappointment.

This is what's missing: direct contact with the REALITY of your circumstances.

If you hold the future vision in order to disconnect you from your discomfort today, you'll numb yourself to the opportunities rolling through your experience that could actually improve your condition.

There's a story of Admiral James Stockdale who was a prisoner of war during Vietnam for 8 years. He was tortured over 20 times.

The prisoners that died were the ones that held onto a belief that their release would come at a certain point in time. If they believed they would be freed by Christmas, and by christmas they were still imprisoned, their optimism would be shattered. They'd come crashing down hard into reality and they would lose the will to live.

Stockdale survived. His spirit did not break.

Here's how his approach was different:

He held the faith that he would ultimately prevail at some unknown point in the future and that this experience would serve as a defining moment in his life. But he did not deny the hellish circumstances he found himself in. He confronted reality and through that he was actually able to interact with it.

He was able to use what influence he had to raise the morale of the group. Finding real meaning in what some would call a hopeless situation.

One sun in a room a black holes can make all of the difference.

So here's the point…

Yes hold your vision.

AND connect deeply with the truth of where you are RIGHT NOW.

In relating to both, the chemical reaction of urgency and desire generates the necessary creative tension to pull that future towards you until it is the same as the ground you stand on.

That's the spirit of grounded optimism.

🫆 The Mystery of Being Here

Sink into this blessing from John O’Donohue:

🤓 Learn This Word

Nepenthe: Something that helps you forget grief or suffering

⏳ From The Archives

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

Hannah Arendt on Being vs. Appearing and Our Impulse for Self-Display

“Pay no attention to appearing,” young André Gide wrote in his rules of moral conduct in 1889. “Being is alone important.” But even for the most idealistic among us, real life — the act of moving as an embodied being through a world of appearances — makes the two increasingly difficult to disentwine.

That’s what the great German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the clearest and most transcendent thinkers of the twentieth century, explores in a section of The Life of the Mind — the immensely mind-stretching book based on her 1973 Gifford Lecture, which rendered her the first woman to speak at the prestigious event. Established in 1888 in an effort “to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term” by bringing together influential thinkers across science, philosophy, and spirituality, the series had previously hosted such luminaries as William James, Werner Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr, and later gave us Carl Sagan’s Varieties of Scientific Experience.

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