⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🪄 The Day The Magic Died (And How to Bring It Back): Episode 2 of my new podcast Where Wonder Went where we explore revitalizing our sense of wonder. Listen here.

💎 Hell is a Rich House Far From Home: This electric rant from Harry Miller weaves together themes from Christianity, Buddhism, and Star Wars. Watch it here.

👁️ Seeing and doing mythically: How we find the foundational self-possibilities that rationality cannot provide. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The double lava fountains pictured above is a screenshot from a video captured on October 17th at Hawaii Volcano National Park. This is the Kilauea Volcano’s 35th episode of this eruption which began nearly a year ago in December 2024. The video footage is even more spellbinding. Watch it here.

⚔ A Foundation of Unknowing

Here’s an excerpt from the latest episode of Where Wonder Went:

Mike: "How do we know what we know? When I use this word mystery—the mystery of being and these things—how could you even use language or a construct of knowledge to sufficiently answer the question of being? One way of describing this is the deepest answer shaped like a question. You can't—it's not something to know, it's almost like something to unknow. And then inside of that foundation of unknowing, you can know things, but I feel a lot of people don't have that foundation of unknowing and they try to build their foundation on the known. And that's fundamentally going to be insufficient and incomplete. Does that make sense?

Dan: "It makes a lot of sense. And it's really hard to wrap in language because words are quite limited. The phrase that came to my mind as you were speaking was: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. Right. This is Asian mysticism 101. It's the first thing anybody hears. They pick up a Lao Tzu book and they're like, okay, but what does that mean? What does it mean? So I guess I can elaborate on that. And the first thing I'll say is going to completely undermine everything else I'll say, which is why it's a great thing to lead with. Language is a sword that cuts the world into the speakable and the unspeakable. And because we are logo-centric humans, we get confused and think that the speakable part of the world is all of it. It's actually the smaller part."

🤩 Radical Amazement

Enjoy these brief message from Abraham Joshua Heschel:

🤓 Learn This Word

Listopad: A Russian word that refers to the falling of the leaves

🕸️ From Around The Web

The Art of Listening

“Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen. Perhaps never was a little strong – but certainly my listening often occurred through a fog of distraction and self-regard.

On my worst days, this could make me a shallow, solipsistic presence. Haltingly, I began to try to reach inside my own mental machinery, marshal my attention differently, listen better. I wasn’t sure what I was doing; but I had crossed paths with a few people who, as a habit, gave others their full attention – and it was powerful. It felt rare, it felt real; I wanted them around.”

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