⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🛩️ On Autopilot: Michael Ashcroft explains why so much of life runs without our consent: familiarity doesn’t feel familiar, it feels right, which is how habit quietly makes our choices for us. Read it here.

🎹 Mushroom in the Wild Playing Synth: In a Derbyshire woodland, BionicandtheWires wires up a wild mushroom so its own bioelectrical fluctuations drive robotic arms striking a synth pad, and the music that comes out sounds strangely alive. Watch it here.

🦋 To See the World Through a Kaleidoscope of Butterflies: Lea Korsgaard set out to see every butterfly species in Denmark in a single year, a project she calls useless, and found that learning their names turned dull fields into whole universes and her hunt into a kind of prayer. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

An Anticrepuscular Rainbow Fan. Over the hills of Presenzano, Italy, a rainbow glows only inside a fan of sunlight that seems to pour from a sun just below the ridge. But rainbows need the sun behind you, and here it really was setting behind the photographer. Gaps in the clouds let its rays stretch across the entire sky and appear to converge on the opposite horizon, a rare effect called anticrepuscular rays. Aurelia Degli Esposti caught it on a phone while hanging up the laundry. See it on NASA APOD.

🎭 The Tragedies That Never Were

Sometimes I consider all the tragedies my ancestors had to transfigure for my life to come about. In many ways, all our lives are the transfiguration of historical brutality.

If you trace any lineage long enough, you’ll find heaps of the terrible and atrocious. This is where we all come from.

Tragedy is never evenly distributed. Today, some lives are exposed to harshness others will never encounter. Nevertheless, we’re all touched by tragedy. We all ache. We all bleed.

Every moment of beauty you can hold in your heart despite what has harmed you is a triumph.

Yet transfiguring tragedy isn’t the whole story. What we often fail to include in our counting of blessings is all the tragedy that could have befallen us but never did.

We live in the light of countless storms that never crossed our skies. They broke before they reached us. We may have heard the thunder rumble from the hills, but we remained just beyond its path.

Gently holding all the ways our lives could have gone wrong gives us perspective on how often things tend to work out.

It can inspire deep gratitude for the shape of our lives today. Though folded with tragedy, we sense only a handful of sharp, discordant notes amid an otherwise beautiful symphony of blessings.

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.

⛰️ Here’s Where Things Grow

Reflect on these words from Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

🤓 Learn This Word

Retronym: A new name coined for an old thing once something newer arrives, so we can tell the two apart. Nobody said “acoustic guitar” until the electric guitar showed up, just as “film camera” followed digital, “landline” followed the mobile phone and “snail mail” followed email. Language quietly reorganizes itself around every new invention. The word itself was coined by Frank Mankiewicz in 1980 and popularized by William Safire.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Everyone Is Numbing Out: The Dark Side of Ironic Detachment

“It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your boyfriend brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice. Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers. Maybe you take it a step further: “Actually, flowers are really basic and lame. Only basic girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.”

If this goes on for long enough—even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—you will see them as a kind of joke. Flowers are now a bit. It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your “receptors for flowers” for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.

[…]

Thanks to the internet and our insatiably consumerist culture, it is finally possible to distract yourself for every waking minute of your life and barely even notice you’re doing it. When you mix all colors of paint together, you get black. Everything quickly becomes nothing.”

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