⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📺 The Barely There: A generation raised on screens and starved of attunement, left feeling half-alive. Read it here.

🦋 The Novice Soul: An invitation to bring wonder and curiosity back into your life. Watch it here.

🌱 Introduction to Adult Development: Adult Development made as simple as possible. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Lençois Maranhenses National Park sprawls across a surreal terrain of brilliant white dunes that roll for more than 43 miles along the Brazilian coast and extend over 30 miles inland. The park's name translates to "bedsheets" in Portuguese, a nod to the vast, pale sand formations that define the landscape. Between May and September, seasonal rains transform the valleys between dunes into countless crystal-clear lagoons, their turquoise water set against the stark white sand in vivid contrast.

👁 Seeing The Invisible

"A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest." - African Proverb

I've adored this proverb from the moment I heard it.

I find too often our collective attention is fixated on conflict, both genuine and manufactured.

Sure, conflicts need to be addressed but a consciousness only riddled with resolving fights and settling feuds misses something essential.

By bringing light to the trees growing in the background, we encounter a space of nourishment that can imbue us with the strength and resilience to navigate the falling wood.

Making choices and attempting transformation from a place of fear and hatred begets more fear and hatred.

By seeing beyond the front and center, we find an abundance of reasons to love this world as it is, despite its flaws.

By seeing behind the curtain, we find pathways to greater significance.

Then we can reckon with our own imperfections, instead of projecting our perceived lack of wholeness onto the world.

This isn’t about fabricating something from nothing or perceiving what isn’t there.

It’s about seeing what is there that we no longer notice. Countless treasures get rendered into the background as we age and our constructs of the world solidify.

Other things have always lived in the background. That is because we are much more prone to notice the dynamic aspects of our “salience landscape” rather than the still and silent ground upon which they rest. The things that remain pervasive are often left unconsidered. That which is ubiquitous becomes invisible.

Bringing these things into focus can serve as a profound wellspring of gratitude and wonder.

⌛️ Don’t Leave It All For Nostalgia

Heed this reminder from an unknown author:

🤓 Learn This Word

Querencia: A Spanish word referring to a place from which one's strength is drawn, where one feels at home, the place where you are your most authentic self

🕸️ From Around The Web

For Warmth: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Poetic Antidote to Anger

“The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands,” the poet and storyteller turned activist Grace Paley’s father told her in what remains the finest advice on growing older. “You must do this every morning.”

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese Zen monk and peace activist turned poet Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022), just a few years younger than Paley, was channeling a kindred sentiment into one of his poems as he watched the world come undone by the oldest ugliness in the bosom of the human animal, in a war breaking countless hearts and robbing countless lives of the gift of growing older.

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