🌀🐇 #275 hero's journey, sacred technology, simple prayer

Plus An Image of Interstellar Visitor 3I/Atlas

December 31, 2025

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🦸 The Hero's Journey: A Biographical Portrait of Joseph Campbell. Watch it here.

0️⃣ Why ‘Nothing’ Matters: It took centuries for people to embrace the zero. Now it’s helping neuroscientists understand how the brain perceives absences. Read it here.

👁️ The Capture of Sacred Technology in a Values-Nihilistic Culture: A letter to the transformational industry. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900 light-seconds. This deep exposure captures the comet from another star system as it gently swept across a faint background of stars in the constellation Leo about 4 days earlier. Though faint, colors emphasized in the image data show off the comet's yellowish dust tail and bluish ion tail along with a greenish tinged coma. And even as it is scrutinized by arrays of telescopes and spacecraft from planet Earth, 3I/ATLAS is headed out of the Solar System. It's presently moving outward along a hyperbolic trajectory at about 64 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, too fast to be bound by the Sun's gravity.”

🙏 A Simple Prayer

Here’s a simple prayer that I wrote to help keep me centered and attuned as I start each day:

I pray for clarity of mind so that I may appropriately attend to the things that matter and effectively water the garden of my life.

I pray for warm-heartedness and compassion for myself, those around me, and the shifting circumstances I find myself in.

I pray for wisdom in the crucial moments that call for swift action.

I pray for the eyes of wonder to gaze upon this magnificent planet. Each day refreshed, reborn, renewed.

I pray for the awareness that life is a sacred gift so that I may embrace the good fortune of every next breath.

I pray for the inheritance of love raining on down me from my ancestors.

I pray for the opportunity to love this world in new ways.

I pray for the courage to speak the words etched into my heart.

🪦 When Death Comes

Allow this poem from Mary Oliver to ripple through you:

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

🤓 Learn This Word

Insouciant: Free from worry, concern, or anxiety

🕸️ From Around The Web

bye, mom

“I get a text that my mom’s in the ICU.

I don’t know how bad it is. I already have a flight to see her in four days and I’m not sure it’s worth moving. This isn’t the first time she’s been in the ICU; for years she’s been in and out of hospitals and stuff that used to make us panic now makes us go ‘oh darn, again?’

I ask, How serious is it? The answers are fuzzy, and I am frustrated. I ask my dad to ask the doctor if she thinks family should come. I get the message: “Doc says yes come immediately.”

Five hours later, my sister and I are landing in Boise. We stop by my parents’ house to grab my mom’s car; I collect photos, a blanket I made her, a little stuffed otter. My mom loves otters. I haven’t thought too hard about her dying, I don’t know if she’s going to die, but everything we’re doing feels important in a way I haven’t felt before. We’re shaky.

We park in the freezing Idaho hospital parking lot at 1 am; my sister says it feels like we’re walking through a fiery gate into doom. She’s right, we’re bracing. The edges of reality begin to pulse.eaning to our actions, and connects our lives to something beyond ourselves.”

🎬 Endnote

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin