🌀🐇 Rabbit Hole Roulette

🎧 Revisiting Past Editions

June 15, 2024

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We’re coming up on 4 years of Down The Rabbit Hole. In this audio message, I use a random number generator to revisit some of the potent passages in past editions. Feel free to listen or click the transcript below!

It is coming up on four years that I started down the rabbit hole.

And with that in mind, I wanted to do a little rabbit hole roulette and use a random number generator to help me explore some past issues and share some of my favorite pieces from those past issues.

So this will be a little retrospective. If you have been a reader for a long time, then I think that you will enjoy this recapping some of these issues that I've published in the past. And if you have more recently signed up to read Down the Rabbit Hole, then you'll get a chance to dive into some of the content that you haven't even been exposed to before.

So let's get started.

🙏 The Family of Things

So the first issue I'm reviewing is issue 21, published way back in February of 2021 and in this issue, I offered a quote from Mary Oliver. She writes,

“You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

I really love this because it feels like an invitation to consider our participation in life. And it's very easy in this world to feel isolated and alienated. The way that things are structured, leave us feeling pretty atomized and disconnected from the world.

And if we, Especially in spending time in nature, we can feel ourselves as a part of a broader ecosystem. Not simply a skin encapsulated ego, as Alan Watts was fond of saying, but something that reaches out and stretches further beyond even our biological body into the body of the world. And if we can see the way that we participate with these things and these great systems and the macrocosm and the microcosm, it's hard to feel so lonely.

📻 Eternal Jukebox

The next edition that I've pulled up is edition 25, and that was published in March of 2021, and one of the links I included in this edition is a fun web app. This was included in the Enlightening Bolts section of the newsletter, and it's the Eternal Jukebox. So the app lets you search a song on Spotify and then will generate a never ending and ever changing version of that same song.

And so if you have a song that you really love to listen to, you find yourself listening to over and over again. Or maybe you like to work with a sort of consistent background noise if you do a lot of computer work, this might be a fun thing to experiment with to see how this app will continue to revise and iterate on a favorite song of yours.

⛈ Emotional Weather Patterns

The next issue is number 97, published in August of 2022. And I share a quote from Stephen Fry in this edition:

"I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather.
​
Here are some obvious things about the weather:
​
It's real.
You can't change it by wishing it away.
If it's dark and rainy, it really is dark and rainy, and you can't alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.
​
BUT
it will be sunny one day.
It isn't under one's control when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.
​
It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. Depression, anxiety, listlessness - these are all are real as the weather - AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE'S CONTROL.
Not one's fault.
​
BUT
They will pass: really they will.
​
In the same way that one really has to accept the weather, one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes, "Today is a really crap day," is a perfectly realistic approach. It's all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. "Hey-ho, it's raining inside; it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow, and when it does I shall take full advantage."

I think that this is a really beautiful sentiment.

The header was emotional weather patterns, and I think it unlocks a way of relating to our emotions that don't compound them. If we're in a negative space and we really dwell on that negative space and feel bad about ourselves for feeling in that negative space, I think it has a way of prolonging and exacerbating that negativity.

But by using the analogy of weather, it helps us lean into acceptance of those emotional states and that allows us to find that umbrella or find that sort of protective layer of kindness inside of the difficulty that we experience rather than being cruel to ourselves in those spaces, which isn't really what we need. And so I thought that was a useful thing to share.

🌊 The Great Stream

The next issue is issue 121, published in January of 2023. And in this piece, I share a short snippet of my own writing titled The Great Stream.

We are not what we are conditioned to think we are.

A river owes its shape to the landscape as much as it does to the flowing water.

There is an inextricable co-sculpting dynamic "you" have been participating in since you got here. Your nexus of attention, the sphere of your world, is a stitch in the great cosmic fabric.

This is something that can be contemplated intellectually but indescribably more powerful when felt. To experience ourselves fully embedded in the great stream of being.

From this place, everything is enshrined in significance.

I actually don't remember writing this. This is what happens after writing so many of these over the years. And I think that it strikes a similar note to the first quote that we reviewed. The Mary Oliver quote about being a participant in the family of things. And it tunes into that sentiment from a bit of a different direction.

But I think this is a very potent disposition to embrace. Not just intellectually, but to really submerge ourselves in these waters of the great stream and really feel ourselves as being co-sculpted by the world around us.

We are sculptors and the sculpted simultaneously. And in that way, the self extends beyond the body and the self can expand into the environment. We feel stewards to that environment and by taking care of the world around us, in a way, we're taking care of ourselves.

👁️ Ram Dass & Aldous Huxley

And in issue 88, published in June of 2022, I share some quotes from Ram Dass. And to continue in the sort of emerging theme here, one of the quotes I shared is…

“We're all affecting the world every moment. Whether we mean to or not, our actions and states of mind matter because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”

Just to strike that same chord.

And I will pull out one more link because I think it's a really beautiful piece. We'll leave this Rabbit Hole Radio, this experience of Rabbit Hole Roulette, this journey that we've been on together with, a beautiful piece about how Aldous Huxley comforted his dying wife, and how he guided her through the dying process.

I think this is, not very well known that this was something that he did. I think more people are aware of his final moments than the story of him comforting his dying wife.

🎬 End Note

And so this is an edition of Rabbit Hole Radio. I'm not sure how consistent this will be. Down the Rabbit Hole gets published every week, I think it might be more sporadic with these audio messages, but I wanted to take some time to reflect on this journey of writing down the rabbit hole every week for almost four years without fail, without skipping a week, which is probably the most consistent I've been about anything in my life, if I'm honest.

It's a real joy for me to write this. I hope you got something out of this little message and wherever you are, whatever you're doing, I hope that you're able to find some wonder shining through your day today.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin