⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🗂️ Living From the Wonder: Marylynne Abbott on why, as a high school math teacher, she never opened the box of index cards about her incoming students, and the quiet power of leaving room for what’s possible. Read it here.

🎶 How Is Music Possible: Henrik Karlsson wonders how tones and rhythms, which are almost pure abstraction, can make a familiar beech forest look otherworldly. Read it here.

🦋 Conquest Impulse and Aesthetic Impulse: Kasra of Bits of Wonder names two kinds of curiosity, one that wants to understand a thing so it can control it and one that simply loves it, and why “truly loving something means surrendering your desire to control it.” Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

A Ghost Rainbow. At 1:29 in the morning near Grodno, Belarus, the moon shone from behind the photographer and cast their shadow onto a bank of fog. Three rare things appeared at once: a giant shadow called a Brocken spectre, a small ring of color around its head called a glory, and a pale arc overhead, a lunar fogbow. Moonlight is too faint for our eyes to see its colors, and fog droplets are too small to split light into a full spectrum, so a moonbow in fog glows white, like the ghost of a rainbow. Photographed by Sergey Morozov. See it on Wikimedia Commons.

👁 Practice Sensory Immersion

"Close your eyes. Listen, moment-to-moment, to the sounds of your immediate environment. Listen to how your mind may make sense of the sounds: naming, categorizing and figuring them out. Now, give yourself permission to simply listen to the sounds as different energies. You can do this by not associating meaning to any of these sounds and just let the sounds come sweeping through you as currents of sonic energy. Let these sonic forces have their way and go where they may within, around, under and over you. If they like, let them merge forces with other sounds to produce new levels and overtones of sonic resonance. Your sensory task is this: How much can you give yourself over to this experience and let it envelop and encompass you…until you are at one with the sounds?"

This quote is from Antero Alli’s book Angel Tech. Instead of seeing, I encourage you to drink in the sights. Rather than hearing, I ask you to soak up the sounds. Rather than focusing on distinct elements, allow yourself to sink into the field of senses where overlaps and ambiguity reign. From here you might more clearly experience the vibrantly textured, kaleidoscopic weirdliness we call reality.

Try It: Treat your sensorium as a single field. Imagine that every input is just a temporary whirlpool pattern in a pond of sensation. Let the lines between things soften. Embrace the whole.

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.

🃏 The Most Impossible Thing

Reflect on these words from Sean Oulashin:

🤓 Learn This Word

Lucubration: Intense and prolonged study or meditation, especially late at night. It comes from the Latin lūcubrātiō, “nighttime study,” from lūcubrō, “to work by artificial light,” from lūx, “light.”

🕸️ From Around The Web

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

“All I can do is reply on my own behalf, realizing that what I say is relative. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.

[…] In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.”

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