⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

💡 Ordinary Abundance: Jordan Dworkin walks you through an ordinary apartment and lets witnesses from 1306 to 1908 say, in their own words, what each object was worth before it became furniture. Read it here.

🌌 How to See the Milky Way: Sarah Williams turns stargazing into a set of instructions, travel far from crowds, find a cloudless night and a new moon, rest your head on someone’s chest and wait, and Maria Popova offers it as a manual for being more alive. Read it here.

🌱 How to Replace Your Dopamine Addictions with Creativity: Josh Czuba spent three years training himself out of the scroll, and his way back to having ideas starts with doing nothing at all, until you are bored enough for one of them to surface. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

A Morning Glory cloud rolling in over the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia, photographed by Mick Petroff from his own small plane. These are tubes of circulating air, up to 1,000 kilometers long and often only a couple hundred meters off the ground, and they arrive over Burketown, Queensland from late September to early November on a schedule reliable enough that glider pilots travel there to ride them. Roll clouds turn up elsewhere in the world. Nowhere else can you plan a trip around one. The leading edge moves at 10 to 20 meters a second across ground where there is almost no wind you can feel. What actually causes it is still unsettled: the best account has sea breezes colliding across Cape York Peninsula, the air folding over a layer where the atmosphere gets warmer as you climb instead of colder, then rolling along it all night. One of the largest and most punctual things the sky does, and we are still working out why. See it on APOD.

✨ Magic: An Endangered Species

To some magic is considered an endangered species.

A vestige of a time before we smartened up to the cold hard facts of life.

There’s an unfortunate smug categorization that magic is child’s play.

Invoking ideas of unicorns and potions.

Too smart to find the sacred hiding in plain sight.

So caught up in disproving the impossible that they could not muster astonishment in the face of the possible.

That we exist at all. That these words are reaching you. That you just exhaled.

THAT is magic.

Magic isn’t an endangered species.

It is the ground we stand on.

It is the soil from which all life blooms.

We are enveloped in it.

And our ability to see it is a skill of attention.

It is a process of undressing our arrogance, of loosening our grip on our fixed ideas of what this world is.

Our knowledge is only a tiny island, a speck in the vast ocean of the incomprehensible unknown.

And when we learn to embrace the grandeur of this mystery, the tectonic plates of our being shift to cause an eruption of wonder, cascading into the cracks and crevices of a previously deadened world.

No, magic isn’t an endangered species.

But those who know it, feel it, and breathe it…

Those who can taste it on the edge of this moment.

Are becoming increasingly rare.

This highlights the exquisite burden and gift of being bastions of bedazzlement.

You see, magic exists abundantly all around us like gas waiting to ignite.

We are the spark.

Is this day worth setting ablaze?

🕰️ Wind The Clock

Reflect on these words from E. B. White, written in 1973 to a man who had written to him convinced the human race was finished:

🤓 Learn This Word

Psithurism: the sound of wind moving through trees, the rustle of leaves against each other. From the Greek psithuros, whispering, the same root that gives us words for gossip and slander.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Multiscale causality and the meaning crisis

“We no longer feel the ocean that pushes and pulls the waves. We are still being pushed and pulled, only we are in a state of resistance, incoherently wasting energy and resources because we fail to listen to the vast sound of the universe to which we belong, hopelessly swimming against the riptide.

We end up feeling homeless, afraid, alone, while treading water in abundance. We end up impermeable to the cognitive nutrients we need from the larger whole. The ant wanders away from its colony and cooks in the sun. The cell becomes cancerous—disregulated, disintegrated, out of touch, multiplying in the direction of its own destruction.”

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