⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🏛️ The Stoic Vault: Feel the power of Stoicism with this massive collection of practices and member-only courses from friend of the newsletter, Jon Brooks. Learn more here.

👤 Consciousness Isn't Self-Centered: Think of consciousness like spacetime—a fundamental field that’s everywhere. Read it here.

🔗 How Synchronicity Works: A Cheat Sheet. Read it here.

🧭 How to find your InnSæi: In uncertain times, an Icelandic concept can help you reconnect with your intuition and follow your inner compass. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“Oh what a tangled web a planetary nebula can weave. The Red Spider Planetary Nebula shows the complex structure that can result when a normal star ejects its outer gases and becomes a white dwarf star. Officially tagged NGC 6537, this two-lobed symmetric planetary nebula houses one of the hottest white dwarfs ever observed, probably as part of a binary star system. Internal winds flowing out from the central stars, have been measured in excess of 1,000 kilometers per second. These winds expand the nebula, flow along the nebula's walls, and cause waves of hot gas and dust to collide. Atoms caught in these colliding shocks radiate light shown in the featured false-color infrared picture by the James Webb Space Telescope. The Red Spider Nebula lies toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). Its distance is not well known but has been estimated by some to be about 4,000 light-years.” Source.

🛝The Child’s Mind

As we age, we become more stiff and rigid. Not just physically.

Our minds calcify. Our spirit hardens.

We become jaded characters living in a world stripped of magic.

This is not how it has to be. It is not how it always was.

A child new to the world gasps in wonder as they encounter the most mundane things.

For them, the common has not yet become ordinary.

They are still living in a kaleidoscope of extraordinary discoveries.

And as we learn skills to become effective in the adult world, it's easy to leave this shimmering existence behind.

You have to be practical, after all.

But that doesn't make this world of wonders disappear. Many of us have just chosen to shut the door.

And I'm here to tell you to open it.

Charles Baudelaire said, "Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will."

If you can remember when you lived in a world before you knew what everything was...

You might realize that just because you have a name for something doesn't mean you know something.

All of our labels have their limits.

There is more to be seen than we currently see.

That is always true.

Reunite with your child mind in your grown body.

Now your discoveries aren't constrained to riding your bike around the block.

You can venture into the distance, past where the rainbow hides the pot of gold.

Where the ant parade marching through the grass extends into infinity.

Where the dragon-shaped clouds swallow up the sun before the rhythmic raindrops of a cooling summer storm drum to the beat of your imagination.

Play tag with mystery and adventure.

If magic isn't real, then perhaps for too long you've been reading dictionaries written by people who've lost their sense for it.

What if, like when you were a child, it's everywhere and it's obvious.

You just need the eyes to see.

Tag.

You're it.

👁️ Appreciate Everything

Ponder this passage from G.K. Chesterton:

🤓 Learn This Word

Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops

🕸️ From Around The Web

The Three Elements of the Good Life

“To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of cohesion, predictable and perfectly self-consistent — the impossibility of that is the price of our complex consciousness — but a promise to own every part of yourself, even those that challenge your preferred self-image and falsify the story you tell yourself about who you are.

There is a peace that comes from this, solid as bedrock and soft as owl down, which renders life truer and therefore more alive. Such authenticity of aliveness, such fidelity to the tessellated wholeness of your personhood, may be the crux of what we call “the good life.”

That is what the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) explores in a chapter of his 1961 classic On Becoming a Person, anchored in his insistence that “the basic nature of the human being, when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy” — a bold defiance of the religious model of original sin and a cornerstone of the entire field of humanistic psychology that Rogers pioneered, lush with insight into the essence of personal growth and creativity.”

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