⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🌊 Incipience: A mesmerizing underwater experimental short by Yaroslav Bulavin. Watch it here.

🎯 The Truth About Distraction: The path to deeper focus begins when we stop expecting important things to feel easy. Read it here.

❤️‍🔥 Love Is To Be Invested In Someone’s Continual Expansion: The people we love become new people over time, and the deepest relationships are built by learning how to keep meeting them there. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Incredible glasscraft by Tim Mazet. You are looking into a dichro vortex marble. The image does not do it justice. Watch the video here.

🗣 Life As Conversation

The stories we live are not monologues. They are conversations.

The shape and motion of our lives is informed by the exchanges we participate in. We put something out there, the world responds, we absorb the feedback, and reply. The world responds again.

On and on this cycle goes although it’s easy to unconsciously relate to this process. Many are confused into thinking they are to-do list conquerors acting upon a static world and if only they collect enough checkboxes they will inevitably reach their concrete destination.

It can be easy to think that a flourishing life is realized by imagining the perfect plan and executing the steps we’ve outlined. But after the first few steps, the world will have changed and we will have changed with it.

These changes may be subtle but they are not insignificant.

If we are wise, we will realize the flaws in our original roadmap and course-correct based on the feedback we’ve received. This is essential. We must not make rigid plans to force upon life but to cultivate an adaptive disposition sensitive to the openings of opportunity cascading across the field of experience. Life is always in flux.

Like we were tubing down a river with a great many tributaries, rather than assuming the stream you are in is the ultimate path, you might notice a fork in the flow and proceed down that route. Here you might encounter the spirit of what you were after with greater ease and grace than you would have otherwise.

I say “spirit” because often the imagined version of things we’re moving towards can look quite different upon arrival. It’s important not to fixate on particular forms and remain connected to the essence of what we’re after.

When we try to force things, we blind ourselves.

When we remain open, we can approach and welcome the experiences that didn’t fit the plan but reveal why the plan existed in the first place.

🥸 Nothing Feels Real

Consider this assessment from Jason Lee Daniel:

🤓 Learn This Word

Inscape: The essential, distinctive, and revelatory quality of a thing.

🕸️ From Around The Web

J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”

“I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book,” the great Maurice Sendak once said in an interview. “I don’t write for children,” he told Colbert. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” This sentiment — the idea that designating certain types of literature as “children’s” is a choice entirely arbitrary and entirely made by adults — has since been eloquently echoed by Neil Gaiman, but isn’t, in fact, a new idea.

On March 8, 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973), celebrated as one of the greatest fantasy writers in history, gave a lecture titled “Fairy Stories,” eventually adapted into an essay retitled “On Fairy-Stories” and included in the appendix to Tales from the Perilous Realm (public library). At the crux of his argument, which explores the nature of fantasy and the cultural role of fairy tales, is the same profound conviction that there is no such thing as writing “for children.”

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