⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🪵 The Radical Reasons Why You Dream of Making Things by Hand: Philosopher Joshua Habgood-Coote asks whether the beekeeping, baking, and leatherwork so many of us daydream about is escapism or the first draft of a more human way to work, beginning with the silk weavers of 18th-century East London who grew tulips between shifts until the mechanical looms took their Mondays. Read it here.

🍄 The Underground Atlas: SPUN has turned 2.8 billion fungal DNA sequences from 25,000 soil samples across 130 countries into the first map of the planet’s mycorrhizal fungi at one-kilometer resolution, and found that more than 90 percent of the richest underground ecosystems sit outside any protected area. Explore it here.

🕯️ Always Go to the Funeral: Deirdre Sullivan’s This I Believe essay on her father’s one rule, and on the discovery that most days the real battle is not good versus evil but doing good versus doing nothing. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

A desert that blooms once every three to five years, under the Milky Way. This is the clay pan at Farm Sandhof in southern Namibia, seven hundred hectares that sit cracked and empty most of their life. When enough rain falls to flood the pan a foot deep, millions of Sandhof lilies come up almost overnight, peak for two or three days, and are gone by the fifth. The green glow along the horizon is airglow, the night sky faintly lit by its own chemistry. Photographed by Kyle Goetsch. See it on his site.

👁️ The Child’s Mind

As we age, we become more stiff and rigid. Not just physically.

Our minds calcify. Our spirit hardens.

We become jaded characters living in a world stripped of magic.

This is not how it has to be. It is not how it always was.

A child new to the world gasps in wonder as they encounter the most mundane things.

For them, the common has not yet become ordinary.

They are still living in a kaleidoscope of extraordinary discoveries.

And as we learn skills to become effective in the adult world, it’s easy to leave this shimmering existence behind.

You have to be practical, after all.

But that doesn’t make this world of wonders disappear. Many of us have just chosen to shut the door.

And I’m here to tell you to open it.

Charles Baudelaire said, “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will.”

If you can remember when you lived in a world before you knew what everything was...

You might realize that just because you have a name for something doesn’t mean you know something.

All of our labels have their limits.

There is more to be seen than we currently see.

That is always true.

Reunite with your child mind in your grown body.

Now your discoveries aren’t constrained to riding your bike around the block.

You can venture into the distance, past where the rainbow hides the pot of gold.

Where the ant parade marching through the grass extends into infinity.

Where the dragon-shaped clouds swallow up the sun before the rhythmic raindrops of a cooling summer storm drum to the beat of your imagination.

Play tag with mystery and adventure.

If magic isn’t real, then perhaps for too long you’ve been reading dictionaries written by people who’ve lost their sense for it.

What if, like when you were a child, it’s everywhere and it’s obvious.

You just need the eyes to see.

Tag.

You’re it.

These letters are free and always will be. If they’re worth something to you, you can support the work here. Always optional, never expected.

🪄 Who Benefits From a Disenchanted World?

Reflect on these words from Relik:

🤓 Learn This Word

Éanlaith: An old Irish word for birds taken all together, built from éan, bird, and flaith, realm or sovereignty: a bird reign. The Irish mystic John Moriarty lamented that when Ireland won independence in 1922 it declared a republic when it might have declared an éanlaith, a country that lives fluently with the natural world instead of in opposition to it. English has no word for it. We look up and see some birds. Moriarty looked up and saw a kingdom worth pledging a nation to.

🕸️ From Around The Web

How to Unclench

“I’ve spent the better part of a decade teaching nervous system regulation to thousands of people, and I’ve realized that most of what I teach distills down to one word: unclench.

Try it for yourself as you’re reading this: deliberately clench your entire body like you're trying to vacuum-seal yourself from the inside. Now, try to feel an emotion: joy, pleasure, or anything at all.

You almost certainly won’t be able to. That’s because clenching drastically reduces the range of options and feelings available. It’s like paying an invisible tax on your experience: dulling aliveness and reducing perceived options.”

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