- Down The Rabbit Hole
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- 🌀🐇 #300 nothing but miracles, sensing wonder, what we forget
🌀🐇 #300 nothing but miracles, sensing wonder, what we forget
Plus Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
🌀 Sensing Wonder: A hundred of the most-clicked links from 5+ years of this newsletter, rebuilt into a window you can open again and again. Explore it here.
🔎 Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail: The closer you look at anything, the more detail appears, a quietly mind-expanding case for why the world keeps rewarding the people who keep looking. Read it here.
🌳 To Know a Tree: Lamorna Ash sits with the oldest tree in London and finds a slower, more patient way of knowing a living thing. Read it here.
🎇 Image of The Week
The amethyst starling (Cinnyricinclus leucogaster), also called the violet-backed starling, whose plumage shifts from deep plum to electric violet as the light moves across it. Photographed by Robbie Phelan. See it on Flickr.
🐇 300 Weeks of Rabbit Holes
I’m a bit gobsmacked, to be honest. This project is the most enduring project I’ve ever attempted.
My aim when I started was to give people a little window into wonder each week. A little interruption that might part the clouds of monotony ever so slightly, such that the warmth of wonder shines through.
I do these as a ritual for myself, to maintain my connection to the pervading sense of mystery I find at the heart of existence, but also to support you as a reader in having a little upliftment and a regular reminder that this world is teeming with magical things.
As I celebrate issue 300, if you’ve been here for a while or are just starting your dive down the rabbit hole, I’d love to hear if this newsletter has made a difference for you. I read every reply I receive.
It’s a real joy to do this. Thanks for being on the ride.
Onward into wonder.
🌿 Nothing Else But Miracles
Reflect on these words from Walt Whitman:
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
🤓 Learn This Word
Stultitia: the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention.
🕸️ From Around The Web
How not to forget what matters
Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped.
And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.
🎬 Endnote
How was this issue? |
I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.
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With Wonder,
Mike Slavin
