⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🏔️ Two Ways Of Knowing: On scientific And Native American views of the natural world. Read it here.

👁️ Japanese Ways of Seeing Space: Ma, the interval that gives shape to experience; Yohaku no Bi, the beauty of blankness; and Hikizan no Bigaku, the aesthetics of subtraction.. Watch it here.

🙏 Simone Weil Against Distraction: The French thinker conceived of attention as akin to prayer. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

You're looking at a soap bubble. Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero blows them through a straw in the Colorado foothills when it drops below 20°F, then watches through her lens as ice crystals race across the surface. At 12° the bubble freezes in 33 seconds. At 20° it can take four minutes, and that extra time is where the geometry happens. These feathered structures spreading across something barely an inch wide that's already starting to collapse. She backlit this one so the ice catches light like stained glass. The image is called Crystal Moon and it looks more like a planet forming than anything that came from dish soap, sugar, glycerin, and a straw.

🪦 The Unnamed Legacy

We can keep climbing our entire lives trying to "make something of ourselves" to "make our lives matter."

To create a “legacy” which often means no more than seeking the applause you’ll never hear from people you’ve never met, all clapping for a caricature of who you are and not the real thing.

Do not worry if your name is remembered.

Instead, be concerned with acting as a force of love so strong that your children's children's children will still swim in that same reservoir of nourishment.

Because your time on earth will have left an impression on those you leave behind.

And they will carry with them your subtle ways of being that invite kindness, compassion, and care.

As the years pass, the origin of such warmth will be lost on them, but love will still permeate the room.

And that is what matters.

🧚 The Wonder Fairy

Enjoy this wish from Rachel Carson:

🤓 Learn This Word

Bricoleur: A French word referring to one who creates using whatever materials are available.

🕸️ From Around The Web

On Being a Dad

“One month after my first daughter was born, a younger friend from work asked me to explain what parenthood was like.

I can’t do that, I said. Wisely, she appealed to my vanity, reminding me that my professional identity was based on explaining complicated ideas, and so wouldn’t it be a little sad actually, a little bit pathetic even, if I couldn’t explain something as basic as fatherhood? I took the bait.

People tend to explain parenthood by comparing it to other real-life experiences, I said. But parenthood isn’t conceptually combinatorial in a way that benefits from that exercise. You can’t multiply I have a puppy with My 2-year-old nephew pooped on me once and it was funny to arrive at the experience of parenthood.

“Have you been to Paris?” I asked. She had not. Paris is my favorite city, I said. You might tell me that you’ve practically been to Paris, because you’ve been to London and Montreal, and what more could the city of Paris offer beyond some blend of Major European Capital and City That Speaks French And Serves Buttery Sauces? But those travel experiences aren’t additive in a way that captures the experience of being in Paris. So, in this narrow respect, I said, parenting is like Paris.

But, much more to the point, parenting is nothing like Paris. Imagine that every day you wake up in your left-bank apartment, and the city has meaningfully morphed into some magically strange variant of Paris. On Tuesday, the streets and boulevards no longer meet at their old familiar intersections. On Wednesday, the Louvre moves to another arrondissement. The Arc de Triumphe turns upside-down on Thursday and floats in the sky on Friday. Now we’re talking. Now that is more like parenting. To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to be your home.”

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