⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👂 On the Yoga of Listening: A practice primer. Read it here.

💗 Loving Kindness: Beautifully produce meditation from Tara Brach and Vivian Koch. Listen here.

🖼️ Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel: So obvious, so hard to remember. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

From Emily Wick: “I have been photographing soap bubbles against the night sky every night for years.

Reminiscent of creatures from the deep sea, a distant galaxy, or the slide of a microscope, they are lit up only by a camera’s flash and ambient outdoor lighting. They are colorful because of the iridescence of the bubble.

For more about the story behind the project, read Satellites of Soap.”

🤩 Unlearning Adulthood

I've made a habit of splitting synonyms and uncovering nuance between words typically treated as identical in meaning.

Today these words are Adulthood and Maturity.

(The caveat here is that these definitions may not be what is typically agreed upon but that's not the point. The point is to allow yourself to sense the subtlety that these distinctions afford).

Adulthood is the culturally prescribed path of growth where one leaves their child-like wonder behind as they "grow up" in pursuit of some contortion that allows them to contribute to the economy.

Maturity integrates child-like wonder into the basic functioning of life never feeling like the mystery has been solved and that the world can be contained into a model that has been taught.

Maturity recognizes the responsibility that needs to be seized to move beyond childhood but doesn't leave the wisdom of childhood behind.

According to these definitions, I would suggest that it is admirable to mature but adulthood is a mutation of maturity forced upon you by a culture that needs you to participate in upholding its structures.

Unlearn adulthood. Become mature.

🌳 Between The Trees

Enjoy this line of inquiry from Matt Allyn:

🤓 Learn This Word

Oneirataxia: The inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality

🕸️ From Around The Web

Swimming and the Meaning of Life

“Looking closely at dang near anything might very well be the key to it all.¹With that in mind, I’ve been trying to get better at this, this deceptively simple act of looking closer.

By dint of pandemic stasis, I suspect we’ve all gotten better at closer looking. Perhaps you’ve noticed the subtle slant of the floor of the room in which you’ve been stuck for months on end, or the daily rhythms of that one old dude on your neighborhood block that you’ve now walked around a million times. Maybe you noticed how exhausted you are by video calls, but in noticing that you recognized that it’s really the audio delays and wonky noise cancellation that makes video so stressful.² Perhaps you noticed how different countries handled the pandemic (how could you not), and from that you recognized the flaws and strengths of the varied responses, and in that the cracks in social systems that we hitherto took for granted.

The point being: Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.”

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