⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🎅 Santa Is Real: We don’t have to lie to children, and we don’t have to be in a rush to disillusion them, either. We can initiate them into a higher level of understanding, that is compassionate, enriching, even profound. Read it here.

🍄 Music For Mushrooms: A narrative feature documentary that explores the intersection of music, ceremony, and the healing power of inner work. Watch it here.

😴 Lucid Dreaming Isn’t Sleep or Wakefulness—It’s a New State of Consciousness, Scientists Find: And it gets even trippier. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“What's happening in the sky? Lightning. The most commonly seen type of lightning involves flashes of bright white light between clouds. Over the past 50 years, though, other types of upper-atmospheric lightning have been confirmed, including tentacled red sprites and ringed ELVES. Although both last only a small fraction of a second, sprites are brighter and easier to photograph than their more common electrical-discharge cousins. ELVES are rapidly expanding rings that are thought to be created when an electromagnetic pulse shoots upward from charged clouds and impacts the ionosphere, causing nitrogen molecules to glow. Capturing either form of lightning takes patience and experience -- capturing them both together, since they usually occur separately, is rare. The featured image is a frame from a video recorded from Possagno, Italy late last month above a distant thunderstorm over the Adriatic Sea.”

✨ Magic: An Endangered Species

To some magic is considered an endangered species.

A vestige of a time before we smartened up to the cold hard facts of life.

There’s an unfortunate smug categorization that magic is child’s play.

Invoking ideas of unicorns and potions.

Too smart to find the sacred hiding in plain sight.

So caught up in disproving the impossible that they could not muster astonishment in the face of the possible.

That we exist at all. That these words are reaching you. That you just exhaled.

THAT is magic.

Magic isn’t an endangered species.

It is the ground we stand on.

It is the soil from which all life blooms.

We are enveloped in it.

And our ability to see it is a skill of attention.

It is a process of undressing our arrogance, of loosening our grip on our fixed ideas of what this world is.

Our knowledge is only a tiny island, a speck in the vast ocean of the incomprehensible unknown.

And when we learn to embrace the grandeur of this mystery, the tectonic plates of our being shift to cause an eruption of wonder, cascading into the cracks and crevices of a previously deadened world.

No, magic isn’t an endangered species.

But those who know it, feel it, and breathe it…

Those who can taste it on the edge of this moment.

Are becoming increasingly rare.

This highlights the exquisite burden and gift of being bastions of bedazzlement.

You see, magic exists abundantly all around us like gas waiting to ignite.

We are the spark.

Is this day worth setting ablaze?

❤️‍🔥 Love Everything

Heed these words from John Keene:

🤓 Learn This Word

Wabi-sabi: The Japanese word that refers to finding beauty within the imperfections of life and peacefully accepting the natural cycle of growth and decay.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Your purpose isn’t something to find, it’s something you form

“In my work as a clinical psychologist, I have supported numerous people who described feeling listless, apathetic, and lost in life. These clients often say they lack a guiding light to direct their efforts. ‘I’m searching for my North Star,’ one recently said. ‘Finding purpose in life’ is a commonly cited reason for seeking support. But years of clinical experience have taught me that trying to ‘find’ purpose can become part of the problem rather than the solution.

Before I explain, let’s first reflect on what purpose is. The preoccupation with living a purposeful life is as old as civilisation itself: scripts dating back millennia bear witness to religious deities and spiritual leaders (Krishna, the Buddha and the prophet Muhammad, to name a few) and a litany of ancient philosophers (such as Confucius, Laozi and Aristotle) who extolled the virtues of purpose. In more recent times, the existentialist school of philosophy identified purpose as a key ingredient in a meaningful life. Purpose is now widely understood as an enduring reason for being – a motivational force that guides our choices, gives meaning to our actions, and connects our lives to something beyond ourselves.”

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