🌀🐇 Down The Rabbit Hole Special Edition

In partnership with

Down The Rabbit Hole is delighted to partner with Penguin Random House. Just by clicking the link below, you help me cover costs and keep this newsletter free. I truly appreciate the support!

A free weekend reading retreat available!

Enter to win $1,000 from Penguin Random House for the weekend reading retreat of your dreams, plus a stack of books and wellness goodies!

Click to enter

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. US Residents, 18+. Ends June 30, 2024. See Official Rules at bit.ly/3SRNqEU 

I’ve just recently gained the ability to send you audio messages. That’s what I’m sharing with you today.

In this brief note, I share my thoughts on embracing wonder and beauty as sources of strength amidst the world’s negativity.

I emphasize the importance of reflecting on nature's inherent beauty and maintaining an open, flexible mindset.

It’s a little over 8 minutes long. Give it a listen and let me know what you think!

Transcript: Wonder & Strength

Hello to Down the Rabbit Hole readers. This is Mike Slavin. I curate Down the Rabbit Hole every week, and for those of you who have been reading for a long time, or perhaps a short time, Down the Rabbit Hole is really a labor of love for me. The newsletter software that I use recently enabled audio embedding.

So that’s why I’m sending you this little rabbit hole radio, let’s say, just a short audio message to share a few things and connect with you from a different place—via an auditory channel rather than text. And so, if you’ll allow me, I want to briefly riff on this notion of wonder as strength. The technological ecosystem that we participate in just pumps our senses with all of the negativity, the horror, the terror, and the tragedy in the world. I’m not saying it is not important to know about these things.

But I think it goes without saying that this can go too far, to the point where people feel like they are inhabiting a world that is essentially irredeemable, not worth saving, and not worth living in—all kinds of side effects. We can’t appropriately address tragedy and the terrible things about this world from that place.

We need to have reserves of beauty, wonder, and meaning. We need to carve out our own spaces where we can truly sit with all that there is to live for and all that we’re grateful for about the life that we get to live, so we can be in contact with the gift of life.

And so, with that said, I’d like to read a quote from Rachel Carson. She said, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” I think this is a really beautiful quote because it reminds us that if we tune into some of this inherent beauty in this world, it can provide us with these reserves, as she says. And those reserves are really important for us to be able to have resilience as we confront the world and all its uncertainty. It enables us to move forward and take action, not from a place of hate, disgust, and contempt, but a place of reverence, care, and concern. Clearly, that second place, that internal psychological standpoint, is going to create better circumstances and better conditions. If we try to act from this place of hatred, contempt, disgust, and bitterness—all of these different words that orbit around that kind of disposition—it’s only going to create more of those things.

So, it’s so important to have that space to contemplate this beauty and wonder of the earth—not just in the macrocosm, witnessing the eclipse, the sunset, or the majestic mountain vistas, but in the microcosm. The recognition that the processes your body is performing right now, just so you can listen to this message, is miraculous. All of the things your body does for you to be able to imbibe the grandness of this world, to see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, touch it—all of these things require processes that you are basically constantly unconscious of. They have to continue on. These natural processes unfolding in your body for you to be able to experience these things—the gratitude for that and these small things that are wonderful in our everyday environment that are easy to miss, like the tree we pass every day on our commute but never really attend to, all the delicate detail of its branches and leaves, and the way the sun can glisten off the trees, especially in the morning dew, or noticing the lone dandelion set up in the grass waiting for the next gust of wind to carry its seeds and scatter them to new places.

There are all of these little pockets of wonder that we can discover if we can find the time to attend to them. When I say find the time, I don’t mean we need to go on any grand adventure and expel ourselves into the wilderness, which, if you have the ability and the means to do that, great. That might be a really enjoyable experience for you. But we don’t need to add more time to our day. We can find the time within the context we already participate in. When we wake up in the morning, do our morning routine, go to work, come home, go to the gym, and whenever we do any of these rather mundane things that we do quite consistently, and in some ways on autopilot, we can find an attentiveness in those spaces and reacquaint ourselves with the familiar, find ways of viewing it that are unfamiliar, and in that unfamiliarity, find wonder.

It is there. It goes unnoticed. It’s under the surface of our perception, but it is incessant in a way, constantly there singing its song. If we could just listen and tune into it. So, that is my encouragement—a nudge to build those reserves of wonder, meaning, and beauty in your life so that you can effectively act and deploy your care and concern in a way that will be meaningful and can help people.

A small addendum to this is that the strength also comes from the flexibility that wonder permits. When we’re not so tied up in thinking we know it all, and we’re not so tied up in our identities, and we allow room for our models of the world to be updated and changed with the new information that we encounter, then we are like a tree that can withstand a harsh wind. Because we aren’t so stiff, we won’t break, but we can bend with the wind. That flexibility that wonder promotes is also its own sort of strength. Because we can encounter the world, not from the spaces of our preconceived notions, but from the invitation that life is providing and indulge in the newness and the novelty that even the mundane presents to us if we can keep ourselves attentive.

So, I hope that this share was meaningful to you in some way. I really love to write Down the Rabbit Hole. Every week, it is a joy. It’s a labor of love. It’s coming up on almost four years, and I just have so much respect for your attention. I truly appreciate you for reading, and I appreciate you for listening to this message.

You will see beneath this message a small promotion, a partnership that I’ve struck with Penguin Random House. If you click the link in that promotion, it helps me keep this newsletter free. It helps me write it to you every week. Even if you just click it and you don’t fill out the form, it helps me a great deal. I hope that you enjoyed this message. If you’d like me to make more notes like this, I’d be happy to do it. Feel free to reply to this email and let me know. With all that said, I hope that wherever you are and whatever you’re doing in this moment that you’re listening to this message, the wondrousness of this world can find a way to shine through and meet you.

Talk to you again soon.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin