⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🙏 8 Poems of Gratitude: Let us pause now and give thanks. Read them here.

🕸️ Selfless Gratitude: The buddhist practice of cultivating gratitude leads to the direct experience of the interconnectedness of all of life. Read it here.

📸 Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude: Nature's beauty can be easily missed — but not through Louie Schwartzberg's lens. His stunning time-lapse photography, accompanied by powerful words from Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, serves as a meditation on being grateful for every day. Watch it here.

🚪 Where Wonder Went: Catch up on my new podcast. Episode 1. Episode 2. Episode 3.

🎇 Image of The Week

These images might look cosmic in nature, yet they come from something completely ordinary that ends up becoming a small window into wonder. In January 2020 Emily Wick began photographing soap bubbles using a toy wand and a homemade mix of water, lubricant and concentrated dish soap. At first she captured them during the day on her phone and simply tried to make each photo slightly more interesting than the last. Over time she noticed how tiny shifts in light, weather and angle created patterns she had never paid attention to before. The limitations of her phone pushed her to switch to a mirrorless Fuji camera so she could finally capture what she was actually seeing. A few months later she began taking photos at night, and the reflections from nearby lights made the bubbles glow like swirling galaxies. That discovery turned the practice into a grounding ritual during the early lockdowns and revealed how something as mundane as a soap bubble can open into a universe of detail. See more here.

👁️ Unusual Gratitudes

Enjoy this quick collection of unusual gratitudes:

The Unbefallen Tragedies: I’m grateful for all of the terrible things that could have crashed into my life that for whatever reason, I have averted. There are innumerable ways for things to go wrong, and although I have not been unscathed in this life (and no one is), I am present to the multiplicity of ways things could have radically veered off course. I’m grateful these comets zipped by instead of making contact.

Unwritten Main Characters: I’m grateful for the potential that lies in the friendships yet made, the children yet born, and the pivotal chance encounters that wait for me on the horizon. The roster of characters in our lives is always in flux and there are certainly some who are still to be penned into my story, who will fill many pages.

The Transfiguration of Wounds: I’m grateful that the lightning strikes of pain and difficulty I have faced in life can be reshaped as the future spills into the present bringing fresh meaning to the past. There’s a recontextualization that can happen as the capacities forged as a consequence of life’s crucibles open new paths of beauty and redemption.

Forgotten Ancestral Heroics: I’m grateful for the unspoken reservoir of courage that has been poured out by generations past. Their leaning into life literally made my life possible. I will never know the fullness of their conquest of fear, but I can be certain it happened and for that I’m grateful.

🤫 The Silence

Digest this poetry from Wendell Berry:

🤓 Learn This Word

Misenchantment: The diversion of a fundamental human need for meaning and purpose towards superficial or materialistic aspects of modern life, creating a false or misguided sense of enchantment.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Just do the thing

“Back in 2001, when David Allen published the groundbreaking productivity book Getting Things Done, he coined the "two-minute rule": if you encounter a task that would take under two minutes to complete, just do it now. He wasn't recommending that you spend your days ricocheting between random little activities, the moment they pop into your head. His point was that anyone who takes a systematic approach to managing their time – with some combination of to-do lists, plans, schedules, and so on – inevitably incurs overheads. Those lists and plans take time and effort, and for some smaller tasks, it's simply not worth it. By the time you've "clarified the next action", or made an entry on a list, or scheduled a time to focus on it, you could have just done the thing. 

Case in point: recently I realized I'd made three separate reminders to myself to order new bags for the vacuum cleaner. There's no way that didn't use up as much time and effort as just ordering the bags.

I've long practiced the two-minute rule as a way to power through tedious chores (even if far from perfectly, as the previous paragraph indicates). But I was struck to hear the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein talk in similar terms about a different personal policy he adopted a few years back: whenever he experiences the impulse to be generous, he tries to follow through on it, there and then.”

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