⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👽 Gnos and The Dervies: The gods have a prison and we call it Earth: UFC fighter Cory Sandhagen turned that premise into a fully illustrated comic about reincarnation, free will, and a kid breaking in to rescue his father. Support it here.

🧘 Mettannealing: Ethan Kuntz of the Qualia Research Institute lays out a three-step recipe, energize with breathwork, pour that energy into loving-kindness, then cool slowly, so the wish for all beings to be well sets into the mind like tempered metal. Read it here.

🕊️ True to Your Deepest Desires: A Rob Burbea talk and short guided meditation from Gaia House on listening beneath your surface wants until you touch the desires that actually steer a life. Listen here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The universe inside a sand dollar. The white shell you find on the beach is only the skeleton: in life, a sand dollar wears thousands of tiny moving spines, combed here into velvet swirls by the water. Aron Sanchez-Baranda captured this living one near San Francisco for Atmos. See it move on Instagram.

👓 Venn Diagram Vision

There’s an affliction I’ve dubbed “Venn Diagram Vision” that causes a person to live in a chronic state of compare and contrast.

Everything they experience is referenced against an image in their mind about how things should be.

This is certainly a useful capacity to cultivate but is certainly not an appropriate way of life.

Here’s why:

When we take the experience we’re having and overlay a multi-dimensional set of mental measuring sticks, we push ourselves one step (or more) away from life.

The disposition towards the moment becomes not embracing what is, but focusing on what isn’t.

The most torturous thing about it is that this endless sizing up of things will not end even if we managed to arrive at a reality that perfectly matches up with our vision.

By that point, we will have created a new vision and we will use that to compare our once dream, now life, against.

Never quite arriving.

Pursuits of personal growth and spiritual advancement can cultivate tendencies that make us hyperaware of all the ways they can be better.

This is done with good intentions. How can we grow if we aren’t aware of the ways we need to grow?

And finding ourselves making progress can be a pretty sweet high.

But this mental pattern run amok can terrorize us to the point we live in a state where all we see are the fixes that need to be made.

This can disconnect us from the beauty and richness of being alive.

The moment begins to feel intolerable in the presence of all the flaws.

This isn’t growth. It’s erosion.

We try to source our motivation from the brief highs we get from small steps of progress rather than a pervading nourishment that can be accessed in the here & now.

This can lead to burnout, breakdowns, and bouts of depression.

If we’re growing a garden, we have to water our plants and pull the weeds.

Sometimes we are so fixated on the horizon that the garden of our lives begins to wither away.

So if you’re stuck in hyperawareness of ways you can be better, you must practice the opposite:

Wanting what’s right in front of you.

Take off the goggles of Venn diagram vision and embrace what is.

Love the world as it is. Love yourself as you are.

This is one of the most significant things you can do.

🕊️ Rest in the Grace of the World

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, poet, and essayist, passed away this week at 92. Rest in these two poems of his:

The Peace of Wild Things

Our Real Work

🤓 Learn This Word

Sesquipedalianism: The love of long words, or the habit of using them. It descends from the Roman poet Horace, who teased writers for their sesquipedalia verba: words a foot and a half long. Fittingly, the word commits the exact sin it names.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Wildflower Beauty and the Search for Home

“I lie down and peer through my hand lens not just to see a colorful spring party, but to taste the nectar of reality. Pink-dusted bees ply generous wildflowers. Here is part of the antidote to algorithm-shaped lies. Celebrating wildflowers is not an anesthetic—attentiveness reveals loss as well as beauty—but a grounding in the world as it is. Because flowers so entrance our senses, they offer memorable lessons, reorienting us back to the living Earth.

What will we tell future generations about our time? Imagine telling our descendants, students, and neighbors about our experiences of wildflowers. How the blooms opened. How we felt and acted as we witnessed the bloom. What the bees did. This will be worth knowing. To have something true to tell the future, let’s pay attention to flowers today.”

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