⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🚪 Where Wonder Went Episode 2: The Day The Magic Died (And How to Bring It Back): Listen here.

🧘 The Best of Alan Watts:An hour long documentary by Elda Hartley surfacing a variety of fascinating perspectives from the cherished “spiritual entertainer.” Watch it here.

🐦‍⬛ A Mystical Ornithology: Immersed in the songs of blue jays, yellow-throated warblers, and red-shouldered hawks on his forty-six-acre farm in rural South Carolina, acclaimed poet and ornithologist J. Drew Lanham exchanges calls with the birds that stop over at his home during their seasonal migrations. Watch it here.

🌊 Just Breath: A mesmerizing view from inside a water fall. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“In nature, it seems like the slowest or smallest member of a herd is the one destined to become prey. However, certain species have developed unique defense strategies that put the most vulnerable at the center—quite literally. When feeling threatened, reindeer herds are known to run in circles, making it almost impossible to target an individual. Due to how imposing it looks from outside, this phenomenon is known as a reindeer cyclone.” Learn more.

🌳 The Cosmic Tree

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

Dan: "By the time I was in my late twenties, I was completely disenchanted. I was living in a world that had no magic left in it... I was trending towards nihilism and was deeply anhedonic. It was really hard to enjoy anything, and at the worst depths of that anhedonia, I actually lost my ability to enjoy music... I decided that rather than slipping away into the nihilistic pit of misery, I was going to take seriously what my mind was trying to show me from the beginning, which is this world that we live in is so much weirder than we admit, and there's evidence of it all around us... And I just made a conscious choice to stop filtering. To just admit everything, say, oh yeah, that did happen, and if it did happen, what should I make of it?"

Mike: "I can reflexively walk by a tree and not take a moment to really experience the tree that I'm passing and recognize it has its own uniqueness and existence outside of the classification that I'm imposing upon it. As I engage with something beyond the classification, I can more clearly see the way that it relates to and is so essentially linked to the sky and the earth. The mind tricks me into believing that, oh, that's just a tree. But that tree is connected to the entire universe."

☕️ The Patience of Ordinary Things

Savor this poem from Pat Schneider

🤓 Learn This Word

Solastalgia: the homesickness you have when you are still at home

🕸️ From Around The Web

Transition through the Liminal Space

“Change cannot be avoided. If we decide to ignore it, no matter. Transitions seem to be built into the large universal plot of life itself. So how do we deal with change, flux, impermanence, even the deeper mysteries that permeate these patterns?

A term used in the fields of anthropology and psychology to describe transitions is liminality. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep used the term in his 1909 book, Rites of Passage. Psychologist Murray Stein writes in Myth and Psychology that liminality comes from the Latin limen, meaning “doorway or threshold.” Stein uses the simple example of when one enters or leaves a room, one crosses a limen, if only for a few seconds. 

Essentially, it is a borderline where one crosses from one bounded space to another. In liminal space, we find ourselves loosened from fixed views, open, vulnerable, confronted at times with ambiguity. Our fixed positions are moderated, however briefly, which can create unsettling anxiety in their uncertainty. In extreme cases, they can even cultivate fear and acrimony. 

Yet, being in liminal space can invite entertaining new ways of thinking about what has been familiar, safe, and protected. Liminal space is creative space, but it requires courage to risk listening to other viewpoints, ways of thinking, and new beliefs or angles on what has been taken for granted. It requires that we risk something.”

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