⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📸 What is Contemplative Photography: A photography practice rooted in presence, awareness, and learning to truly see what’s in front of you. Read it here.

🪄 A Rationalist’s Guide To Manifestation: Or, how to live a magical life. Read it here.

🦋 Self-Help for Cocoons: Personal transformation emerges from nurturing the networks, contexts, and relationships around you. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“Mono Lake, located in California near Yosemite National Park, is one of North America's oldest lakes, over a million years old. Its unique environment is defined by extreme salinity — 2.5 times that of ocean water — and high alkalinity conditions caused by the evaporation of freshwater that has left behind salts and minerals washed in from Eastern Sierra streams. The lake is particularly famous for its dramatic tufa towers — calcium-carbonate spires formed by the interaction of freshwater springs and the alkaline lake water that looks like something straight out of Sci-Fi. The lake's ecosystem supports a vast array of wildlife, serving as a crucial resting spot for 1 to 2 million migratory birds annually. Mono Lake’s otherworldly landscape, with towering tufa formations and sparkling winter snow, makes it a popular destination for photographers and nature enthusiasts.”

💥 Something Rather Than Nothing

The quote above excerpted from a poem by William Blake rhymes with the passage I’ll share below from the late John O’Donohue. This passage mirrored my own recurring but vague notions about the enormity of detail in this world, here expressed with such precision and lucidity, it was as if those thoughts had found their voice:

“One of my favorite sentences in the Western philosophical tradition is from Leibniz; it was subsequently used by Schelling and Heidegger: "The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing." I think this is a great sentence, because it alerts one immediately to the mystery of the presence of things, which we so often tend to forget. In post-modern culture, we live increasingly in a virtual world and seem to have lost visceral and vital contact with the actual world.

Another way of looking at this statement is: the real mystery is that there is so much. Everywhere the human eye looks, everywhere the human mind turns, there is a huge panorama of diversity; the difference that lives in everything and between everything, the fact that no two stones, no two fields, no two faces or no two biographies are the same. The range and intensity of this difference is quite staggering. This is not an abstract thing. People who live in small farms in country areas could spend hours telling you about all the differences they experience between two places in the same field. Patrick Kavanagh spoke of the "undying difference in the corner of a field."

Part of the way we can rediscover magic in the “mundane” is by leaning past our conditioned ways of viewing everyday objects and widen the aperture of our attention such that the details that are always there but unseen finally get noticed.

Around you right now are hundreds, thousands of tiny details slipping past your awareness. This is useful and functional. We need to be able to attend to what matters. But sometimes what matters is what we haven’t been attending to. It’s a worthwhile skill to explore the novel territory living beneath the conceptual map of our everyday life.

🚶🏻 Walking on Earth

Hear this truth from Thich Nhat Hanh:

And this thought-provoking sentiment from Sophie Strand:

🤓 Learn This Word

Eldsjäl: This Swedish noun is literally ‘fire-soul’, but the actual meaning is ‘enthusiast’ or ‘driving spirit’.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Consciousness: a primer

This is the introduction to consciousness I wish I’d had when I first got curious about the topic. Avoiding complicated philosophical terms, I’ll describe what we mean by consciousness, present the different problems and theories, etc.

Hope it can help others as well!

What consciousness is (and isn’t)

Simply, consciousness is the fact of having an experience. There is something it feels like to be you right now. That’s the whole definition.

But because people still get confused by this definition, let’s clear some of this up:

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