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- 🌀🐇 #306 listening to the whims, the existence of magic, childlike wonder
🌀🐇 #306 listening to the whims, the existence of magic, childlike wonder
Plus 50 Seasonal Meditations
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
🍂 50 Seasonal Meditations: Emergence Magazine built fifty short practices around the year’s smallest turnings, each one an invitation to notice what the season is doing while you’re busy elsewhere. Listen here.
🔭 Transit of Wonder: Ananya Palivela on the shadow that crosses the Sun twice every 122 years, and on the astronomers who sailed through war zones and lost eleven years of their lives chasing it. Read it here.
🗣️ The World is a Word: Vosa spends twenty-five minutes on the idea that language does not simply describe the world, it gives birth to it. Watch it here.
🎇 Image of The Week
A blue carpenter bee, Xylocopa caerulea, at rest on a twig. The blue is not a coating. It comes from dense, fine hairs paired with a pigment that swallows the red end of the spectrum, so almost nothing but blue makes it back to your eye. They live across Southeast Asia, India, and southern China, boring their nests into dead wood. Mostly solitary, though every so often several will share one front door.
👂🏼 Listening To The Whims
Life isn’t all about strategy and game-planning. Amazing life developments can spring out of what seems like pure randomness.
Sure, if we create goals for ourselves and reverse engineer the path to accomplishment, we can go on an exciting journey. It’s a worthwhile exercise to have some goals and build the competence to realize them.
But life isn’t all about setting an aim and reaching it. Sometimes it’s about listening to the subtle pull. And this pull can be completely disconnected from your existing plans. It might not have any rational basis.
On a particular day, you might feel drawn to this coffee shop or you feel moved to call an old friend or you venture to a new part of your city “on a whim.”
What is a whim? “A sudden desire or change of mind, especially one that is unusual or unexplained.”
What I’m describing is developing the sensitivity to notice and act on these whims. Give yourself permission to listen even if you can’t explain why.
Listening to these subtle signals can increase the landscape from which serendipity can operate. They might lead you to a place where you recognize your prior goals were only stepping stones. Now that you’re standing on new ground you can see the horizon more clearly. So you march in a slightly different direction.
We can have an approach toward life that is more like a conversation than a conquest. More like a shapeshifting riddle than a picture-perfect roadmap. So I ask you...
Is there a ripe whim in you now that you need to heed?
This is a nudge to listen.
🪄 Among Us
Reflect on these words from Xenia Viray:
If you are really paying attention, it is becomes impossible to deny the existence of magic.
Among us live wild animals, no matter where we are. Beings who can fly, see in the dark, change color and shape and see the energy field of the earth.
Among us live people who invent cures, spend their waking lives taking care of strangers, write poems that change lives, orchestrate fantasies that move us on screen and stage.
Among us music is played that vibrates the air in a way that shifts the waters of our bodies, that makes us sway in unison, that expresses what was hidden inside so it can be felt en masse. Somewhere right now, strangers are dancing near a river.
Yes, there is also sorrow. There is also the feeling of defeat. There is pressure building and violence happening. There are people not listening to each other. There are people not even trying. But this does not make obselete the ones who are leaning in with their whole chests, going against the current to listen to the drum of their own heart, to find what it means to be alive again and again.
Some people teach us how to find the lightness of things. They see the world the way a child or wizard does. They want to use their creative agency to shift the nature of the game, to free more imaginations, to divest energy from what makes us think that heaviness is who we are.
Some people honor the gravity of things. They bare themselves in the most difficult situations to say, you are not alone. They undo the collective gaslighting that wants us to believe any of this is normal. They honor the tragedies by not letting them go unwitnessed.
We are creative beings by nature. We open those portals miracles - some with art and kindness, others with telling the truth. Some doing both at the same time. We are unlearning the habit of policing love. We are unlearning the habit of rolling our eyes as a way of protecting our hearts. We are learning to sacrifice the desire to be cool so we can receive our desire to be love.
🤓 Learn This Word
Inframince: Marcel Duchamp’s word for a difference so slight it can only be pointed at, never defined. The warmth left in a chair someone has just stood up from. The whistle of velvet trouser legs brushing as you walk. Exhaled smoke that still smells of the mouth it came from.
🕸️ From Around The Web
the neuroscience of childlike wonder (and how to find it again)
“Childlike wonder (as nostalgic as it may feel) is not a memory. It’s a distinct neurobiological state. And when we understand what’s happening in the brain during those wide-eyed, heart-open moments, we can begin to create the conditions for it to arise again.
Wonder is a very specific orchestration of neural events. It begins with attentional capture, when our sensory systems rapidly focus on something new, surprising, or beautiful.”
🎬 Endnote
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With Wonder,
Mike Slavin
