- Down The Rabbit Hole
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- 🌀🐇 #314 six years down the rabbit hole, a rainbow riding a wave, the full-service grandad
🌀🐇 #314 six years down the rabbit hole, a rainbow riding a wave, the full-service grandad
Plus how to actually feel your emotions
⚡️ Enlightening Bolts
🫀 How to Actually Feel Your Emotions: Joe Hudson condenses decades of teaching emotional intelligence into one piece, arguing that the pain lives in our resistance to a feeling rather than the feeling itself, that overthinking and judgment are signs of an emotion we’re avoiding, and that every emotion is like a young child that turns back to you in love once it gets attention. Read it here.
🌳 Life Begins and Ends With Attention: Erifili Gounari moves from blue whales and redwoods to the toilet cleaner in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, who has a perfect day almost every day, to argue that awe doesn’t require the extraordinary, only the kind of attention that makes us feel alive. Read it here.
📚 Future Library: In 2014, artist Katie Paterson planted a thousand spruce trees in a forest outside Oslo, and every year since, one author (Margaret Atwood first, then David Mitchell, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong and more) has handed over a manuscript that will stay sealed and unread until 2114, when the forest planted for them finally becomes the paper their hundred books are printed on. Watch it here.
🎇 Image of The Week
A rainbow riding a wave. As the wave stands up to break, an offshore wind tears a plume of spray off its crest, the mist surfers call spindrift. Each droplet does what a raindrop does: it bends sunlight on the way in, bounces it off its back wall, and splits it into colors on the way out. With the sun behind the camera, only the droplets sitting at just the right angle send color back toward your eye, so the rainbow lives for a second or two inside the plume and travels down the line with the wave until the spray falls back into the sea. Filmed by Yas Zare and Hadi Sahih. See it on Instagram.
🎙️ Six Years Down The Rabbit Hole
Six years ago today, I published the first issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. That same day, my grandmother Maisie passed away. She was born in 1917, lived through two pandemics, and was 40 days shy of her 103rd birthday.
1 year ago today, in the first episode of this podcast, I promised to try to recover a file from a laptop I thought was dead: a recording of the last conversation I ever had with her. This is the story of what happened next. The repairman told me the recovery would work on what would have been her 108th birthday. Then I finally pressed play and heard our last "I love you" again. I also heard something I had forgotten.
Grief is very much enmeshed with death and death is enmeshed with life. And when you ponder the mystery of death, you ponder the mystery of life. These things are inextricable and go hand in hand. And so in encountering grief and encountering loss, I’ve thought about this relationship, the way that we experience loss, how it can bring forth a real appreciation and sense of wonder for the life that we have and the gift that is our feet on this earth and our eye contact with those that we love.
This is one of the gifts that grief holds in its hands: that reconnection to the preciousness of life. It’s easy to get swept up in racing forward through time as we try to make something of ourselves or try to accomplish our goals or try to resolve whatever insufficiencies we feel we have in the present moment. But there is a preciousness to our life in this current instant, in this blink of time.
Loss can put all of that in perspective and give us a refreshed context, a renewed awareness around our life where the loudness of those insufficiencies and the speed of time can begin to slow and we can become acquainted with the moment as it is, not for its insufficiencies but for its beauty and the brilliance of the gift of life, not generally but precisely and particularly right now.
🌹 Beauty With a Capital B
Reflect on these words from Gabriela Gutierrez:
William Blake, James Joyce and Mary Oliver all tell us that if we're not regularly consumed by the great beauty of the world, if we're not constantly feeling pricks of the eternal or regularly placed in aesthetic arrest, as James Joyce called it, then something must be changed. You must change your life, wrote Rilke. It's the moments that make us gasp with rapture that wakes up our sense of relatedness with all of life. And this is Blakeian consciousness and Joyceian rapture. They pivot us towards beauty, you know, beauty with a capital B, which is different to glamour. Glamour comes from the mists that surrounded the Isle of Avalon, the fairy glamour through which you have to wade through in order to find your way to the centre. I think that when we choose to follow beauty and we let beauty be our guiding light and the thread that we follow, we're led to a form of participation with life, a participatory experience in which we're organically entered into right relationship with the living world by virtue of appreciation and adoration of it.
🤓 Learn This Word
Eigengrau: The dark gray you see when you close your eyes in total darkness. German for “intrinsic gray.” It isn’t black, because your eyes and brain never fully go quiet: even with no light at all, the retina keeps firing faint signals and the visual system reads that noise as a dim, grainy gray. Which means a black object in a lit room looks darker than the inside of your own closed eyes.
🕸️ From Around The Web
The full-service grandad
“I had, I think, been a very present dad to our two boys. And yet, years before my granddaughter was born, I expressed to the family – everyone was home for the holidays – ‘Wasn’t it great that, because I’m a professor, I could be home so much when you were small?’ How everyone laughed that day. When the chortling subsided, a son had mopped his eyes, he said: ‘You were never around.’ Had I missed out, I wondered? Maybe. One thing I do know about family life now: despite how arduous and all-consuming it is, no matter how tired you feel, that phase is over too quickly. I am a full-service grandad, and yet I realise there is a clock ticking on that service.
I had promised myself that I would not turn my granddaughter into a project. It is tempting, as an ecologist, to observe her too closely. But what interests me most is not what she reveals as a subject, but what she helps me see again. Yes, yes – that is a sparrow, a doggie, a worm, a hawk in a tree, a puddle worth splashing in. The success of my method lies in the fact that young children and elderly gentlemen alike take everything slowly. I will not make a study of her, and yet by catering to her attention I’ve learned how to see the world with fresh wonder.”
🎬 Endnote
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With Wonder,
Mike Slavin
