⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🦋 Imaginal Cells: Bill Plotkin borrows the dormant cells that turn a caterpillar into a butterfly to name the people quietly dissolving and reassembling the world from inside its cocoon. Read it here.

📖 Every Feeling You Can’t Name Explained: Brainosophy gives names to eleven feelings you have had but never had a word for, most of them drawn from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: sonder, kenopsia, vellichor, and the ache for a time you never lived in. Watch it here.

🌳 The People Who Planted Trees They Never Sat Under: lina on Sabr, the patience of the soul, learned from an older woman who watered olive trees in a home she would be forced to leave. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

A meteor photobombs the Great Lacerta Nebula, the faint red cloud drifting through the middle of the frame. Tom Burnett was partway through a long exposure of the nebula, from Death Valley Observatories in Nevada, when the streak arrived and vanished inside a single second. The meteoroid was likely no bigger than a pebble, and most of that light is not the rock burning but the air itself, heated and excited as the thing tore through it. The colors along the trail are clues to what it was made of. Two objects, then, that only look like they share a sky. Good week for it: the Perseids peak tonight against a new moon, as many as 100 meteors an hour, and today the Moon crossed fully in front of the Sun over Greenland, Iceland, and northern Spain. See it on APOD.

🌊 Spreading Goodwill

What if you sent a message to a friend or a family member that they really needed to hear?

Nothing fancy or profoundly creative.

Just a little nudge of love: “Hey I’m thinking about you. Hope everything is going well. Appreciate you.”

There are times when we can fall into dark nights and those around us are unaware.

A message of care like that can really be a glimmer of sunshine.

It can be the rope that gets thrown down to help us out of a pit.

It can disconfirm the belief that others don’t care and that we’re all alone.

A simple act taking a few seconds that can have beautiful consequences on another person’s heart.

And perhaps you reach out to someone who’s doing well.

Your message will still be a lightning bolt of good feelings in their world.

It could make their day.

This opportunity is always available to us but rarely do we think to actually do it.

That’s why I’m writing about this today.

If just a fraction of you who read this email sent a quick note we could get a wave of goodwill started.

Who knows how your kindness will impact those around your recipient.

They could be more present with their kids, more patient with their elderly parents, more loving towards themselves, more hopeful for the future.

Just a few seconds of energy opens up these possibilities.

We can’t be sure any of them will come to pass and we won’t know if they do.

But isn’t a few seconds of energy worth it?

With all this said, I encourage you to stop reading now and send a quick note of appreciation to someone you care about.

🍅 August Is Generous

Reflect on these words from Kate Bowler:

🤓 Learn This Word

Ruliad: Stephen Wolfram’s word for the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible, the result of following every possible rule in every possible way. Every physics that could hold, every mathematics that could be built, every universe that could have run: all of it already there, all at once. What we call reality is the thin slice of it a mind shaped like ours is able to sample.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Déjà vu

“Déjà vu, the eerie sense that something new has been experienced before, has confounded us for hundreds of years. Along with the public, philosophers, physicians, intellectuals and, more recently, scientists have tried to get to the bottom of the phenomenon.

Now, research emerging from my lab and others suggests that déjà vu is not just a spooky experience, but a possible mechanism for focusing attention – perhaps an adaptive mechanism for survival shaped by evolution itself.”

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