🍂 The Peace Of Letting People Come and Go: A quiet argument for holding people loosely. When you stop treating every departure as a failure and start seeing relationships as seasons, what is left is gratitude for the time you had rather than grief for the permanence you were promised. Read it here.

🎨 A Chaotic Guide To Making Stuff Instead Of Doomscrolling: Campbell Walker of struthless offers ten things you can do right now to break the circuit of the drained, overwhelmed, endlessly scrolling brain. The cure for consuming, it turns out, is to make something badly. Watch it here.

🌿 How to Find Meaning in Ordinary Days: Ayushi Thakkar makes the case that meaning never announces itself in grand gestures. It settles quietly into rituals, small attentions, and the steady rhythm of the days you were not planning to remember. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The Star Tunnel inside Star Axis, the naked-eye observatory that artist Charles Ross has been carving into a mesa in eastern New Mexico since 1976. Its 147 steps run exactly parallel to the axis of the Earth, so the climb points your body at the north celestial pole. At the top, that circle of sky. Ross is 88 and still building it. See it on staraxis.org.

🧭 The Most Important Questions

It’s easy to slip into an autopilot mode where each day mirrors the previous one.

Falling into these patterns can mean we are missing out on opportunities for deep meaning.

I’ve been asking myself, “What are the most important questions?”

The answers to these questions can act as guideposts, directing how I conduct myself in the world and what experiences I choose to foster with others.

I hope to inspire you with this message to contemplate this as well: What are the most important questions for you at this moment?

Let me provide you with an example of a question I’m currently grappling with:

“How can I best express my love to my parents while they are still here with me on earth?”

This question holds significant importance to me. I’ve interacted with enough individuals who have lost their parents to understand how easy it is to wish you had said or done something differently.

The answer to this question is not a simple sentence to jot down and move on. Certainly not.

The answer is a living one. I utilize the question as a tool to direct my attention towards opportunities to demonstrate my love for them.

Sometimes it’s just small moments and other times for more elaborate projects.

I often fail to answer adequately. But I’m working on that.

There are many “Most Important Questions” to ponder over the course of our lives. What is one for you?

🌌 I Could’ve Just Said The Sky

Reflect on these words from the writer Jessie Raelynn:

i could’ve just said the sky, but when you asked me what i thought was beautiful, all i could think about was how someone centuries ago, whose name i’ll never know, sat under these same skies-maybe even in this very spot-and felt the same grief and wonder i feel now.

and maybe centuries from now, someone else will be sitting here in this same spot, thinking the same thing.

..i could’ve just said the sky.

but i think it’s beautiful how, across timelines, beneath the same sky, we are never truly alone.

🤓 Learn This Word

Contronym: a word that is its own opposite, holding two contradictory meanings at once. To cleave is to split apart and to cling together. To sanction is to permit and to punish. Dust can mean to remove fine particles or to sprinkle them on. Only context tells you which way the word is pointing.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Living in an Alive World

The difference between soft eyes and the implied contrast—perhaps we can call it “hard eyes”—took me back to something that the composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros wrote about her practice of deep listening. Oliveros defined the practice as “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.” For her, deep listening was something directed both outward and inward, to include the sound of “one’s own thoughts.” Oliveros wrote that she found deep listening necessary because we are culturally trained to do the opposite: to quickly analyze and judge, rather than to let something else in. The implication is that learning something like deep listening or soft eyes requires its own form of training.

In How to Do Nothing, I write a lot about art, mostly as a kind of attentional training ground. I mention my friend Scott Polach’s piece Applause Encouraged, in which audience members were ushered to a row of seats at the edge of a cliff, where they witnessed the sunset and then clapped before refreshments were served. I write about attending a performance of a John Cage piece that permanently changed how I hear by rendering me more attuned to the incidental sounds of a cityscape.

[Continue Reading]

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How was this issue?

Just Okay 💙

Good Stuff 💜💜💜

Absolutely loved it! ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

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I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🧠 Landscape of Consciousness: A vast, browsable map of more than 400 theories of consciousness, from ancient idealism to quantum mind, gathered in one place to chart how thinkers have tried to explain the fact of experience. Explore it here.

🚶 Rest in Motion: A reframe of rest and work from Nate Soares. Our natural ground state is not stillness but sustainable motion, and the healthiest life moves through its many streams at a steady pace rather than treating rest as a reward you have to earn. Read it here.

🧓 57 Years Apart: A young boy and an old man, born 57 years apart, sit down and ask each other about life and growing up. What passes between them is tender, funny, and quietly moving. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

A mandala of white stones, arranged in concentric rings from the tiny spiral at its center out to the largest at its edge, by Yorkshire land artist James Brunt. Like all his work, it was left on the ground for the weather and the passing of feet to slowly undo. See more of his work on Instagram.

📖 Stories Are Tools For The Living

Our lives are interwoven with stories, whether they are bedtime tales from our childhood, historical lessons from the classroom, or thrilling blockbuster movies on the big screen. These narratives brim with patterns, qualities, and characteristics that shape our perspectives. However, it’s crucial not to mistake life for a story, expecting it to follow a prescribed path.

Stories are not meant to replicate life, but to enrich it. They serve as a treasure trove of wisdom, from which we can learn valuable lessons and adopt the admirable traits of our favorite heroes. Life doesn’t often come with a neat bow, a grand conclusion, or a final page where everything makes sense and all loose ends are tied up.

The grand narrative of life continues to unfold, and our role within it is not to strive for a storybook existence but to embrace the lessons and inspiration that stories provide. By emulating the virtues, courage, and bravery of our favorite characters in our unique way, we open ourselves up to life’s experiences.

Remember that one day, our songs will no longer be sung by us, but the melodies we leave behind will be carried on by those who cherished us. The story of life, then, does not conclude with a dramatic crescendo but reverberates in the hearts of those we’ve touched, as they continue to sing our song and weave our legacy into the grand tapestry of existence.

🎛️ The Sound of Failure

Reflect on these words from the musician and artist Brian Eno:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

🤓 Learn This Word

Celístia: a Catalan word for the faint light cast by the stars on a clear night. A chiefly literary term, closer to “starshine” than to starlight.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Train Your Attention Span SO GOOD It Feels Weird to Scroll

Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist, spent decades proving this. he found that the brain has two separate systems. one for wanting (motivation, craving, the pursuit) and one for liking (actual enjoyment).

you can spend an hour scrolling and not enjoy a single second of it. the wanting circuit is firing. the liking circuit is empty.

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🌌 A Message For Beings of Space: A tender invitation to recognize yourself as a being of space, and to meet the world with courage, curiosity, and care instead of reflex. Read it here.

🎨 Why Your Best Work Happens When You Stop Taking It Too Seriously: A video essay on creative block, perfectionism, and the strange freedom that arrives when you loosen your grip and let a little play back into the work. Watch it here.

🔍 Wiki Spy: An endless, searchable game of I Spy stitched together from objects cut out of Wikipedia. Search by color or concept, or click anything to find its kin. Explore it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

An ephemeral earthscape by Andres Amador, raked into the beach by hand at low tide and left for the returning waves to erase. The lone figure walking through it gives a sense of the scale. See more of his work on Andres Amador’s site.

🌊 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.

🌍 On the Way Home

Reflect on these words from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell:

The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn’t ‘Them and Us’, it was ‘That’s me!’, that’s all of it, it’s… it’s one thing. And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of ‘Oh my God, wow, yes’, an insight, an epiphany.

🤓 Learn This Word

Solvegg: a Norwegian word that literally means “sun wall.” It’s the act of finding a sunny spot in wintertime where you can sit down and soak up the warmth of the sun.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Why you should talk to your dead ancestors

The first time I spoke to my dead grandfather, I was six years old. My parents had taken us to Armenia to visit ancient monasteries, eat perfectly ripe apricots, and meet relatives whose names I wouldn’t remember.

I learned that ‘talking to your ancestors’ doesn’t involve waiting for a reply. The simple act of communicating without expecting anything in return can bring you closer to them, and to yourself.

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🪂 Surrender as a Non-Stupid Life Strategy: Sasha Chapin makes a grounded, non-woo case for surrender, the quiet freedom of loosening your grip on a life you were never fully steering anyway. Read it here.

🪄 Becoming a Magician: On reclaiming imagination from escapism, where vivid, directed fantasy becomes a real practice for reshaping who you actually become. Read it here.

🧭 How Micro-Adventures May Save Your Creativity & Drive: A gentle case that the antidote to a creative rut isn’t a grand expedition but the small, local detour, the overnight nearby, the unfamiliar trail an hour from home. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Messier 77, a barred spiral galaxy some 45 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s infrared eyes cut through the dust to reveal the galaxy’s threaded spiral arms and the blinding glow of the supermassive black hole at its heart. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy. See it on ESA/Webb.

💎 You Are Valued

It is easy to believe your value is defined by what you can provide to the marketplace. That you matter only because of the roles you hold in society. That your worth is defined by the skills you possess and the exact manners in which you can help people.

This is an extremely utilitarian way to define value.

You are not an automaton who exists solely to regularly complete certain functions.

Your existence has greater significance and depth than that.

You are a fundamentally unique expression of the human spirit inextricably embedded in this ever-unfolding symphony called life.

This unique stitching into the fabric of being is what makes your life, your moment, inherently valuable.

As well as all the lives and moments cascading through your field of experience.

Life changes when we hold this as true and move from this place.

It asserts a form of completeness without denying the process of becoming.

That we may still transform but where our transformation is not a prerequisite for being wholeheartedly valued.

When we use our jobs, skills, gifts, or anything else as a measuring stick that justifies our right to exist, it puts us in status competitions with all others who operate in a similar domain.

This thrusts consciousness into endless comparison. We end up seeing our value as existing on a hierarchy.

This is a game where everyone is climbing everlasting ladders fearful of falling, striving to grab the next rung, and always keeping our eyes on where we are relative to other climbers.

The truth is, value is incomparable. You can’t be any more or less valuable than anyone else.

Of course, you can grow in capacity and mastery in many domains. You can gain competence. You can be better and worse at things. You can compare your skillfulness to others.

But the aggregate of all comparisons across all domains of participation does not situate you on some hierarchy of universal human value. No such thing exists.

All of the skills and gifts you possess are embedded in a complex weaving of experiences, values, and tendencies that interact with your particular social ecology in a way that has never happened before and will not happen again.

This might feel untrue because we chronically, reflexively scrutinize ourselves (especially our shortcomings) while hardly ever acknowledging our true radiance.

When you really let this in, you can participate in the unfolding of your life with a spirit of reverence.

Your story and your life aren’t imbued with value because of what you accomplished yesterday or what you might accomplish tomorrow.

It is already a jewel shimmering in the light.

🌿 Where Your Feet Are

Reflect on these words from Brianna Wiest:

“You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it’s really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it’s okay to slow down. That you don’t always have to prove yourself. That you don’t need to fight forever, or constantly want more. That it’s okay for things to be just as they are. Little by little, you will begin to see that life can only grow outward in proportion to how stable it is inward—that if the joy is not in the little things first, the big things won’t fully find us.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Chrysalism: An amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.

🕸️ From Around The Web

The Way of Mediocre Man

Mediocre man flows through life. It is his birthright. He is not great man aiming at great results but merely trying to do enough of the right things over a long period of time such that it might lead somewhere interesting.

Mediocre man is one who learns to trust the journey because he is fully aware that one cannot quite know what will result from any specific effort. Society tells him he is lazy and that he is a fool and that he should have goals, big goals! But he has stumbled upon a secret: mediocre effort beats extreme effort for most people, most of the time.

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🌀 Sensing Wonder: A hundred of the most-clicked links from 5+ years of this newsletter, rebuilt into a window you can open again and again. Explore it here.

🔎 Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail: The closer you look at anything, the more detail appears, a quietly mind-expanding case for why the world keeps rewarding the people who keep looking. Read it here.

🌳 To Know a Tree: Lamorna Ash sits with the oldest tree in London and finds a slower, more patient way of knowing a living thing. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The amethyst starling (Cinnyricinclus leucogaster), also called the violet-backed starling, whose plumage shifts from deep plum to electric violet as the light moves across it. Photographed by Robbie Phelan. See it on Flickr.

🐇 300 Weeks of Rabbit Holes

I’m a bit gobsmacked, to be honest. This project is the most enduring project I’ve ever attempted.

My aim when I started was to give people a little window into wonder each week. A little interruption that might part the clouds of monotony ever so slightly, such that the warmth of wonder shines through.

I do these as a ritual for myself, to maintain my connection to the pervading sense of mystery I find at the heart of existence, but also to support you as a reader in having a little upliftment and a regular reminder that this world is teeming with magical things.

As I celebrate issue 300, if you’ve been here for a while or are just starting your dive down the rabbit hole, I’d love to hear if this newsletter has made a difference for you. I read every reply I receive.

It’s a real joy to do this. Thanks for being on the ride.

Onward into wonder.

🌿 Nothing Else But Miracles

Reflect on these words from Walt Whitman:

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

🤓 Learn This Word

Stultitia: the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention.

🕸️ From Around The Web

How not to forget what matters

Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped.

And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🎨 The Creative Athlete: Why deliberate training and creative practice are the real antidote to a life of mindless consumption. Read it here.

🌱 Kaizen: The Japanese art of tiny, continuous improvements that quietly compound into a lifetime of growth. Read it here.

🪄 The Secret to Effortless Accomplishment: Joe Hudson on how the strain we assume is necessary is often the very thing slowing us down. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The Eagle Nebula (M16), about 6,000 light-years away, where towering columns of cold gas and dust, including the famous Pillars of Creation, are still busy forming new stars. Captured by Emmanuel Delgadillo. See it full-size on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

🙏 Unearthing Gratitude

That which is pervasive becomes invisible. Novelty is what we notice. This is why we take things for granted.

We forget we’re standing upon a wealth of blessings as our mind tracks the ebbs and flows, gains and losses.

So I invite you to really look around and take stock of all that you have.

All of the creature comforts you have that would shock the royals of ancient times. All the people in your life who have not yet left this earth. The capabilities and skills you possess and all the ways you continue to grow.

Find the beauty quietly residing beneath the quibbles and complaints.

Although we might suffer and endure difficulties, there is still so much to be grateful for. Do what you can to unearth that gratitude and offer it to others. It could mean more than you’ll ever know.

🌿 Wonder Over Information

Reflect on these words from Fred Rogers:

“I don’t think we give that gift very much anymore, the gift of silence. I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence. How do we do that? I mean, in our business, yours and mine, how do we encourage reflection?”

🤓 Learn This Word

Jibaku: The act of unintentionally or inadvertently demolishing your own argument in the process of defending your view.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Your Daydreams Know Something You Don’t. Look Closely

A substantial portion of our waking lives, perhaps as much as 50 per cent, is spent in mind-wandering. According to a paper by the researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard University, people “are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is.”

Yet even when daydreaming becomes maladaptive, its content and intensity can be powerful guides pointing us towards the places where our attention and care are required. Daydreams may return, again and again, to particular themes: relationships, recognition, threats, regrets, desires, fears. Are they trying to tell us something?

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🌊 Incipience: A mesmerizing underwater experimental short by Yaroslav Bulavin. Watch it here.

🎯 The Truth About Distraction: The path to deeper focus begins when we stop expecting important things to feel easy. Read it here.

❤️‍🔥 Love Is To Be Invested In Someone’s Continual Expansion: The people we love become new people over time, and the deepest relationships are built by learning how to keep meeting them there. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Incredible glasscraft by Tim Mazet. You are looking into a dichro vortex marble. The image does not do it justice. Watch the video here.

🗣 Life As Conversation

The stories we live are not monologues. They are conversations.

The shape and motion of our lives is informed by the exchanges we participate in. We put something out there, the world responds, we absorb the feedback, and reply. The world responds again.

On and on this cycle goes although it’s easy to unconsciously relate to this process. Many are confused into thinking they are to-do list conquerors acting upon a static world and if only they collect enough checkboxes they will inevitably reach their concrete destination.

It can be easy to think that a flourishing life is realized by imagining the perfect plan and executing the steps we’ve outlined. But after the first few steps, the world will have changed and we will have changed with it.

These changes may be subtle but they are not insignificant.

If we are wise, we will realize the flaws in our original roadmap and course-correct based on the feedback we’ve received. This is essential. We must not make rigid plans to force upon life but to cultivate an adaptive disposition sensitive to the openings of opportunity cascading across the field of experience. Life is always in flux.

Like we were tubing down a river with a great many tributaries, rather than assuming the stream you are in is the ultimate path, you might notice a fork in the flow and proceed down that route. Here you might encounter the spirit of what you were after with greater ease and grace than you would have otherwise.

I say “spirit” because often the imagined version of things we’re moving towards can look quite different upon arrival. It’s important not to fixate on particular forms and remain connected to the essence of what we’re after.

When we try to force things, we blind ourselves.

When we remain open, we can approach and welcome the experiences that didn’t fit the plan but reveal why the plan existed in the first place.

🥸 Nothing Feels Real

Consider this assessment from Jason Lee Daniel:

“I don’t think people are lonely because they’re alone. I think people are lonely because nothing feels real.

We’ve turned so much of life into a representation of life. Friendships become followers. Conversations become comments. Experiences become content. Even our thoughts start getting shaped by an invisible audience.

And none of this happened because we wanted something bad. We wanted connection. We wanted to share. We wanted to belong.

But somewhere along the way, we started to experience life through screens instead of ourselves.

A sunset isn’t enough anymore. We have to capture it.

A meal isn’t enough. We have to post about it.

A moment isn’t enough. We have to prove it happened.

And when everything becomes content, reality starts to feel distant.

That’s why I think so many people feel disconnected. It’s not from each other. It’s from themselves.

Because a part of us that feels alive doesn’t care about likes or views or algorithms. It cares about presence. It cares about being somewhere fully and having moments that only belong to you.

And maybe what we’re missing isn’t connection. Maybe it’s more reality.

Maybe the cure isn’t finding more people.

Maybe it’s finding your way back to your own life.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Inscape: The essential, distinctive, and revelatory quality of a thing.

🕸️ From Around The Web

J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”

“I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book,” the great Maurice Sendak once said in an interview. “I don’t write for children,” he told Colbert. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” This sentiment — the idea that designating certain types of literature as “children’s” is a choice entirely arbitrary and entirely made by adults — has since been eloquently echoed by Neil Gaiman, but isn’t, in fact, a new idea.

On March 8, 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973), celebrated as one of the greatest fantasy writers in history, gave a lecture titled “Fairy Stories,” eventually adapted into an essay retitled “On Fairy-Stories” and included in the appendix to Tales from the Perilous Realm (public library). At the crux of his argument, which explores the nature of fantasy and the cultural role of fairy tales, is the same profound conviction that there is no such thing as writing “for children.”

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

👂 On the Yoga of Listening: A practice primer. Read it here.

💗 Loving Kindness: Beautifully produce meditation from Tara Brach and Vivian Koch. Listen here.

🖼️ Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel: So obvious, so hard to remember. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

From Emily Wick: “I have been photographing soap bubbles against the night sky every night for years.

Reminiscent of creatures from the deep sea, a distant galaxy, or the slide of a microscope, they are lit up only by a camera’s flash and ambient outdoor lighting. They are colorful because of the iridescence of the bubble.

For more about the story behind the project, read Satellites of Soap.”

🤩 Unlearning Adulthood

I’ve made a habit of splitting synonyms and uncovering nuance between words typically treated as identical in meaning.

Today these words are Adulthood and Maturity.

(The caveat here is that these definitions may not be what is typically agreed upon but that’s not the point. The point is to allow yourself to sense the subtlety that these distinctions afford).

Adulthood is the culturally prescribed path of growth where one leaves their child-like wonder behind as they “grow up” in pursuit of some contortion that allows them to contribute to the economy.

Maturity integrates child-like wonder into the basic functioning of life never feeling like the mystery has been solved and that the world can be contained into a model that has been taught.

Maturity recognizes the responsibility that needs to be seized to move beyond childhood but doesn’t leave the wisdom of childhood behind.

According to these definitions, I would suggest that it is admirable to mature but adulthood is a mutation of maturity forced upon you by a culture that needs you to participate in upholding its structures.

Unlearn adulthood. Become mature.

🌳 Between The Trees

Enjoy this line of inquiry from Matt Allyn:

“My brother shared this Zen concept with me that gives me chills every time I think about it.

Next time you are on a walk, imagine your life as two trees.

The first tree is the day you are born, and the next tree on your walk is the day you die.

Now, how slowly would you walk, knowing every step takes you closer to that second tree?

How much would you cherish every single step?

How much would you appreciate the breeze, the birds, the grass, and other people crossing your path?

Would you actually learn to fall in love with your hardest days, knowing that pain is an unavoidable and inevitable part of life, and not something to run from or escape, because that only gets you closer to the second tree sooner?

Would you learn to appreciate getting stuck in traffic?

Would you relish the moment your mom asks you for help adding photos to her digital picture frame?

What would it feel like to fall in love with the sound of your coffee filling up your mug, and to immerse yourself in the awe and wonder, knowing you have no idea how many more of these you have left?

There is nowhere to rush off to be.

Life is here right now, in the challenge, the pain, the lightness, the love, and my favorite, the excitement of creation.

If you really love what you do, then this is the doing it.

This is the fun part of life.

These are the steps between the trees.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Oneirataxia: The inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality

🕸️ From Around The Web

Swimming and the Meaning of Life

“Looking closely at dang near anything might very well be the key to it all.¹With that in mind, I’ve been trying to get better at this, this deceptively simple act of looking closer.

By dint of pandemic stasis, I suspect we’ve all gotten better at closer looking. Perhaps you’ve noticed the subtle slant of the floor of the room in which you’ve been stuck for months on end, or the daily rhythms of that one old dude on your neighborhood block that you’ve now walked around a million times. Maybe you noticed how exhausted you are by video calls, but in noticing that you recognized that it’s really the audio delays and wonky noise cancellation that makes video so stressful.² Perhaps you noticed how different countries handled the pandemic (how could you not), and from that you recognized the flaws and strengths of the varied responses, and in that the cracks in social systems that we hitherto took for granted.

The point being: Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.”

[Continue Reading]

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How was this issue?

Just Okay 💙

Good Stuff 💜💜💜

Absolutely loved it! ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🪞 The Fear of Being Seen and the Strange Way Out: Understanding why our fear of being judged often drives us to push others away, and how to reverse the cycle. Watch it here.

🗣️ Making Normal Conversations Better: Some notes on an endless skill. Read it here.

🧑‍🎨 Sustaining Creative Aliveness While Working a Full Time Job: Tactics for lunchtime poets. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“This big beautiful spiral shines in X-ray light. It is about 20 times larger than our Galaxy. It belongs to Abell 2029, a galaxy cluster one billion light-years away. (To see only the galaxies, hover your cursor over the image, or follow this link.) Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe that are supported by gravity. Abell 2029 is formed by thousands of galaxies, surrounded by a huge cloud of hot gas and the equivalent of hundreds of trillions times the mass of the Sun in dark matter. The spiral is made of gas, mostly hydrogen and helium, heated to tens of millions of degrees. It was found in a recent study that used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to show that Abell 2029 had a collision with a smaller cluster four billion years ago. The collision affected the gravitational field and caused the intracluster gas to slosh, like wine moving in a wine glass, shaping the spiral.”

⛓ Self-Sabotage or Strategic Ignorance?

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably tried to implement changes to your life only to slip back into old patterns at some point.

This is extremely common.

Many people explain this failure as self-sabotage.

When people get motivated to make big changes, it often comes from a place of restlessness in their experience of life.

Things have lost their luster. The internal dialogue is harsh. The emotional weather is stormy.

So “enough is enough!” I’m going to change things.

Then a big plan is built off of this spike in motivation.

The transformation is set in motion. Spirits begin to rise. Confidence grows.

Until...

Something happens that diminishes motivation and the plan begins to fall apart.

It could be something small like a bad night of sleep or a hangover after a night of too much fun.

Or it could be something larger like a breakup or a job loss.

Whatever the size of the disruption, the person slides back into old patterns.

Then they return to the harsh internal dialogue and stormy emotions with an added feeling of failure.

“Maybe I can’t change? Why do I keep sabotaging myself? What’s wrong with me?”

The answer is...

Nothing.

Nothing wrong with you.

There is very likely something to be adjusted in your approach.

You see, oftentimes, self-sabotage is strategic ignorance.

We have to expect the wild curveballs from life that disrupt our motivation rather than remaining blind to them.

So here’s what you should do:

Focus on consistency over intensity.

If you start small, you’ll be better able to continue when the unexpected strikes.

And if you still fall off the wagon you must learn to forgive yourself.

If you’re punishing yourself whenever you slip up then it’s worth asking the question:

Are you operating from a place where you’re already whole and complete or are you striving to reach wholeness?

Already complete and whole means you recognize your flaws, you are learning and growing through your failures, and celebrating your successes on this wild ride through life.

If you are striving and straining then you are borrowing your wholeness from some imagined actualized version of yourself in the future. If you deviate from that specific vision then your wholeness is held in question leading to self-talk that is callous and cold.

The former provides a sustainable, ongoing fuel source for transformation. Our own self-love and acceptance.

The latter creates a prison that we’ll inevitably rebel against.

So start small and be kind.

From there you can grow changes into your life like you were planting seeds, nourished by water and sun until they blossom into a garden of beautiful possibilities.

❤️‍🔥 Moment of Eternal Harmony

Dive into these words from Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Ultraterrestrials: Non-human entities believed to exist in a wavelength of energy beyond human detection, often associated with UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. The term was coined by John Keel to describe beings that may interact with humanity in ways that challenge our understanding of reality.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Swimming and the Meaning of Life

“One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my body, the strange and lovely simultaneity of absolute presence and absolute peace. I didn’t yet know the word for transcendence.

Not long after that, I began swimming competitively in a chlorinated Olympic pool, investing long hours in perfecting my stroke and bettering my lap times. Those four years became a hard initiation into a culture that prizes productivity above presence. At eleven, I was beginning to see how the moment we incline action toward achievement, we drain the activity of joy; how anything we approach transactionally will never yield transcendence. I stopped swimming abruptly, disaffected and worn out. It would take me a quarter century to return to the water — it was only when I was drowning in the 800-page manuscript of my first book that I began swimming daily in the open ocean to think through the edits, to feel myself in the womb of the world while trying to birth something bigger than myself.”

[Continue Reading]

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🤯 The Superconducting Soul: Unifying mind, matter, and the architecture of reality. Read it here.

👁️ Mercy, Judgment, and the Refusal of Form: What the Criticism of Bryan Johnson Reveals About Psychedelic Culture. Read it here.

⛓️ Escaping the Prison of Time and Work: Finding presence in each hour of life. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Stunning photo by Manfred Auer: “This wonderful flower was growing in my garden, and when I saw these amazing flower stamens with all the little pollen on it, I knew what I had to do. I set up a small studio in my kitchen to avoid any movement from the wind and took this stacked shot. I’m always amazed at how much magnification you can get out of a ‘normal camera.’” See more here.

❤️‍🩹 The Sacred Wound

The Sacred Wound is a term I first heard from Jean Houston. It expresses in clear terms what I already understood intuitively: that our suffering can be potent fuel for transformation.

Tragic loss can wake us up to the gift of all those we still have in our lives. Pain can become the birthplace of immense compassion.

Our hurt can catalyze us into action to be the person we wished we had while we were suffering. It can guide our gaze to hidden pockets of the world that need our help.

This can turn a victim narrative into an empowering pursuit where we harness the ugly and vicious parts of our story and author them into precursors of beauty.

None of this says that our struggles are deserved. Or that it’s good that bad things happened. But it does suggest that we can alchemize our anguish. It means the perpetrator does not get the last stroke of the pen.

The story is still being written. We can’t change the past but we can choose to use the past to birth a future that shows our suffering wasn’t an end. It was a beginning:

“They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”

❤️‍🔥 From Anonymous To Intimate

Consider this sentiment from John O’Donohue:

“If you have an infused sense of wonder then your wonder is able to transfigure that which is unknown within you and around you and it will take away the anonymity, the distance, and the separation, which the unknown always makes the vulnerable and fragile human creature experience. Wonder makes the unknown interesting, attractive, and miraculous and that’s why when wonder awakens in your life it is the lovely subtle presence that is always at threshold of your heart transfiguring the anonymous into the intimate. When your heart is alive with wonder, you are ready to receive the hidden affinity and kinship that awaits you and welcomes you at the heart of that which is unknown within you and around you.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Infraordinary: The unnoticed texture of everyday life, consisting of the ordinary details, habits, sounds, and rhythms that become invisible through familiarity.

🕸️ From Around The Web

On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking

“Charles Darwin was an introvert. Granted, he spent almost five years traveling the world on the Beagle recording observations that produced some of the most important scientific insights ever made. But he was in his twenties then, embarking on a privileged, 19th-century naturalist’s version of backpacking around Europe during a gap year. After returning home in 1836, he never again stepped foot outside the British Isles.

He avoided conferences, parties, and large gatherings. They made him anxious and exacerbated an illness that plagued much of his adult life. Instead, he passed his days at Down House, his quiet home almost twenty miles southeast of London, doing most of his writing in the study. He occasionally entertained a visitor or two but preferred to correspond with the world by letter. He installed a mirror in his study so he could glance up from his work to see the mailman coming up the road—the 19th-century version of hitting the refresh button on email.

Darwin’s best thinking, however, was not done in his study. It was done outside, on a lowercase d–shaped path on the edge of his property. Darwin called it the Sandwalk. Today, it is known as Darwin’s thinking path. Janet Browne, author of a two-volume biography of Darwin, wrote:”

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

👁️ How a sense of awe can be good for your mental health: Art, music, nature, crowds, and big ideas can all trigger it, and there are simple ways to invite more of it into ordinary days. Read it here.

🐬 John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office: The daring experimenter Dr. John C. Lilly dedicated his life to radical self-investigation and unlocking the mysteries of consciousness and communication. Watch the trailer here.

😌 How to Simplify Your Life in 2026: New Tips from Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman. Listen here.

🎇 Image of The Week

The image above features a wide shot of the night sky taken from Cerro Paranal in Chile. Up top you’ve got Rigel, the bright blue star at Orion’s foot. In the middle is the Witch Head Nebula, a small wispy blue cloud lit up by Rigel. And running across the bottom is Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS), with its long tail streaking up and to the left, crossing right in front of the nebula and the star from where we’re looking.

👁 The Sage and The Child

We live in a world that constantly bombards us with messages about how we’re not enough.

It’s easy to fall into constant comparison and feel bad about ourselves.

We’re drowning in social media posts with people showing off to gain “clout” and heighten their status.

There’s an inspirational quote that floats around the internet that I quite like:

“Don’t compare your behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel.”

There is so much that goes unsaid online, so much hidden behind the curtain.

So it’s important to clarify: your struggles and challenges don’t make you unworthy.

You are enough as you are.

That does not mean you can’t become better.

And it does not mean that becoming better isn’t worthwhile.

It simply reframes how you fuel the pursuit of your betterment.

I think about it like a relationship between two parts within you.

The inner child and the wise sage.

The innocence of the inner child is susceptible to the venomous messages from mass media and surrounding culture.

The wise sage protects and fortifies the child against these influences.

A lost job, failed relationship, or other crash-and-burn event can send a person spiraling into shame and self-criticism.

These are moments where the child is most vulnerable and where a well-developed wise sage is most beneficial.

By recognizing an unshakeable core worthiness, the child can find an inner stability that transcends circumstance and thus navigate through the chaos.

The sage can be viewed as an ideal parental figure that has perfected the art of nurturing guidance.

The keyword is ideal.

A mother and father looking to their newborn experience a profound love.

Of course, over time, our parents’ issues can distort the purity of that love.

They are only human after all.

But many people have internalized looking inward through their parents eyes.

This comes with a lot of baggage that the parents unconsciously implanted.

It can come with a long accounting of wrongs and insufficiencies.

Many of these things are a reflection of their own under-developed inner sage. It communicates that the child within them is under attack.

It can lead people to develop a drill sergeant to relate to their inner child replacing the wisdom of the sage with control and coercion.

Even though it might be effective fuel for accomplishment, this sort of internal tyranny inevitably breeds resentment, bitterness, and burnout.

This is true both in your relationship with yourself and with others.

The sage sees the drill sergeant as an outgrowth of the child’s fear.

It’s a strategy to find that feeling of “enoughness.”

Instead of attacking the drill sergeant, the sage sees its childish nature and helps iron out the flaws in its perception.

This is because the sage is the embodiment of the highest representation of love you can imagine.

So rather than loving yourself as your parents did, you love yourself as they would if they were capable of loving without distortion.

We’ll often fail to love ourselves this deeply.

But making the effort affords us an abundance of sustainable fuel.

It endows us with a degree of “soul force” that we can bring to the world to make it a more beautiful place.

The relationship we have to ourselves is crucial.

The wise sage and the inner child are just colorful ways of illustrating this dynamic.

It’s a reminder that we don’t have to relate to ourselves as others have.

We can strive toward new heights of internal encouragement and kindness.

So much that it spills out over our edges, flooding the world around us.

From one sage to another...

From one child to another...

You’re precious. You’re unique. You’re capable.

You have something significant to offer this world.

Don’t give up.

🌊 Dissolved In The Sea

Swim in these waters offered by playwright Eugene O’Neil:

I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret.

🤓 Learn This Word

Allocentric: Concerned with the interests of others more than one’s own; community-minded

🕸️ From Around The Web

The two directions your life can go

“If you’ve ever been whitewater rafting, you might remember the safety briefing before you hit the rapids. The lead guide, probably a sun-leathered dude in Chacos named Dave, explains what to do if the raft flips and you end up in the water. Look for me, he tells you. I’ll be pointing in a direction. Always swim that way.

You reach the gnarliest section of rapids, the part you paid for. The raft flips. You’re tossed in the river. The life preserver pops you to the surface, but the whitewater is deafening, and you’re disoriented. You don’t have time to think. All you can do is find your guide standing in one of the other rafts, pointing. He’s pointing toward safety. Usually to the shore, but sometimes away from a danger you cannot even see.

What the guide never does is point in the direction you should avoid. He doesn’t gesture at the rocks and shout, “Not there!” And good thing, because under that kind of duress, your brain can’t compute a negative; it will hear “rocks” and swim toward them. So the guide only ever points towards where you need to go.

In outdoorsmen’s lingo, this is called point positive.”

[Continue Reading]

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I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🐌 The radical act of slowing down: A meditation on how our obsession with speed and productivity undermines our health, relationships, and chances for lasting success. Read it here.

☯️ Quantum physics, taoism, and the hemispheres: A really fascinating and accessible exploration by physicist Ruth Kastner. Read it here.

❤️‍🔥 The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love: Thich Nhat Hanh’s quiet, practical magic for being fully there with someone you love. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This week’s image of the week comes from Shea Fitzpatrick: a still from his “galaxy in a ball” carbon plasma crystal globe. Inside is mostly krypton with a touch of xenon at about a tenth of sea-level air pressure, and the colors come from a tungsten carbide nanoparticle dopant (plus a few other ingredients) reacting to the field. If you think the image is cool, you have to watch the video.

🌎 The Social Fabric

Many people say they want to “make the world a better place.”

This is a beautiful desire.

But so often people pursue this future in a way that’s disconnected from their now.

They have a grand, almost utopian, vision of how the world could be.

People will start businesses, write books, and build movements to bring about the change they wish to see.

All the while being disconnected from how they could live from their vision.

People focus on fixing society in an abstract sense while completely neglecting the social fabric around them.

If you want to make the world a better place, it’s okay to have a vision of a possible future.

But don’t let its beauty blind you from all the ways you could begin seeding that world in the lives of those around you today.

Notice the people who flow in and out of your experience. Who could use some extra kindness? Who needs a call or text? What’s something you could do that would be so extraordinarily helpful that it could even restore someone’s faith in humanity?

Strands of the future we wish to inhabit can be woven today if we properly attend to the social fabric around us.

😑 We’ve Seen It All

Consider this provocation from Scottish philosopher Ronald Hepburn:

“The attitude of ‘We’ve seen it all!’ is even more hostile to wonder than the attitude of taking-for-granted, for behind it stands an implicit false picture of the world. It sees us as standing vis-à-vis nature as a spoiled child stands to his home — arranged for his sole convenience and support, and when it fails so to function, the proper object of his rage, resentment or sullen boredom. Humility, like wonder, involves openness to new forms of value: both are opposed to the attitude of ‘We’ve seen it all!’”

🤓 Learn This Word

Anchorage: A word from the dictionary of obscure sorrows that speaks to the desire to hold on to time as it passes, like trying to keep your grip on a rock in the middle of a river, feeling the weight of the current against your chest while your elders float on downstream, calling over the roar of the rapids, “Just let go—it’s okay—let go.”

🕸️ From Around The Web

Can Adults Learn to Be Playful Again?

“Imagine that after work, a woman decides to take her dog to the park. Although rules mandate that pets must be leashed at this hour, she decides it will be fine to let her dog roam freely since the park is mostly empty. Before long, the dog becomes distracted by a group walking across the park and dashes toward them.

Horrified, the woman worries the dog will jump on them and that they will judge her for breaking the rules. To her surprise, the group is not upset at all. Instead, they smile and say, “Thank you for letting us share in your dog’s joy.” If you imagine yourself in this situation, what would you notice first: the joy of the dog or the violation of the rules?”

[Continue Reading]

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Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

✨ Choose The Life You Already Have: The opposite of settling. Read it here.

🧠 Where thinking ends and life begins Breaking your addiction to thought and waking up the right side of your brain. Read it here.

👁️ No Small Wonder: Dacher Keltner On The Science Of Awe. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

An enchanting image captured by Hungarian photographer Csaba Daróczia:

“I was photographing a wedding in a forest clearing in the beautiful surroundings of Uzsa, Hungary. The hall lights attracted a lot of insects to rest on the windows. At one point, I saw some guests taking pictures with their phones next to one of the red lights. As I moved closer, I noticed an oak peacock moth (Antheraea yamamai) had taken up residence on the window. I waited until everyone had finished their pictures, and then it was my turn.”

🧐 The Pursuit of Wisdom

While in college a friend told me he didn’t think chasing happiness was the point.

I asked him what then?

He said...

“Wisdom.”

He was right.

Happiness is one particular state of emotional weather patterns.

Wisdom is knowing how to embrace the storms, seeing the beauty in the blizzard, and not wishing away the rain because we know it’s nourishing.

Trying to freeze your emotional state into happiness is like trying to lasso a cloud. It’s not going to work and the whole enterprise distracts from enjoying the shade.

Wisdom is escaping from the notion that we should only experience positive emotions and negative emotions should be shunned.

The other side of the emotional spectrum is fertile ground for so much richness.

Grief and sadness point us to what matters.

Anger points us to what must be done.

Embrace the totality of your being.

Allow your full humanity.

Let happiness arise and emerge.

Don’t chase it when it drifts or you’ll find it fades even faster.

Simply welcome the emotional weather patterns with open arms and you can find the peace that lives beyond the need to chronically seek change.

That’s wisdom.

🛟 From Thrashing To Floating

Drink in these words from Henry Shukman:

“Like an early morning sun, self-love starts to break in through the cloud cover and to slant up the valley of our life, warming the atmosphere and allowing things to glisten and shine. It renews our love of life. It may go deeper still, as meditation teacher James Baraz has taught in his Awakening Joy classes.

At a certain point in learning to swim, we go from flailing in the water to floating on the water which we have been fearful of and fighting against. When we trust it and relax and lay our body out on it, we find it turns out to have been here, ready to support us all along. Likewise, in meditation practice, at a certain point we find it’s not just about loving ourselves but also about being loved by a deeper innate tenderness intrinsic to awareness itself.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Symhedonia: Learning to enjoy someone else’s accomplishments

🕸️ From Around The Web

Try seeing your personality as dimensional

‘I’m not very hopeful,’ I caught myself saying to a friend the other day about an application I’m anxious to hear back about. ‘I’m just so impatient to know!’

In that one conversation, I had labelled myself as a ‘hopeless’, ‘anxious’ and ‘impatient’ person, the implication being that I am not hopeful, calm or patient. What chance did I have at stomaching the wait?

It’s easy to think of ourselves and others in such absolute terms – to say with certainty ‘I am an empath, so I feel things deeply’ or ‘They are an introvert and this is why they don’t like group activities.’ The internet is awash with quizzes that seek to satisfy this need to put ourselves in boxes.

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

👁️ Unraveling The Dream: This documentary investigates the neuroscience of consciousness, illustrating how psychedelics and meditation can dismantle the ego’s “controlled hallucination” to provide a glimpse into the interconnected nature of reality. Watch it here.

✨ Recovering a Forgotten Sense: On the imaginal, its loss, and the possibility of return. Read it here.

🎈 How To Reconnect With Your Inner Child: The experiences you had as a child influence your emotional life as an adult. Recognising these dynamics can be healing. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“What’s happening at the end of that street? Pictured here are not auroras but light pillars, a phenomenon typically much closer. In most places on Earth, a lucky viewer can see a Sun pillar, a column of light appearing to extend up from the Sun caused by flat fluttering ice-crystals reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere. Usually, these ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground. During freezing temperatures, however, flat fluttering ice crystals may form near the ground and are sometimes known as a crystal fog. These small ice crystals may then reflect not the Sun but ground lights. The featured image captured not only numerous light pillars but also the iconic constellation of Orion, and was taken in Mohe, the northernmost city in China.”

🌎 An Intro Guide For Earthlings

Welcome to our weird wide world.
It can get pretty crazy around here.
It’s been that way for a while. Maybe the whole time.
You’ll run into lots of people who speak confidently.
That doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
Best to witness their conduct, their day-to-day behaviors.
Then decide whether to heed their words.
There can often be great chasms in speech and action.
Certain folks love their high-horsing and grandstanding.
But that doesn’t mean you’re beneath them.
They just like to feel like you are.
You don’t have to play their game.
You can opt out.
There are a lot of things in culture that seem to demand your participation.
But you can unsubscribe.
You can build your life à la carte.
You don’t need to mirror the images in pop culture.
Speaking of pop culture, there’s something we invented you should know about.
The screen.
We love it around here.
People spend their days interacting with pocket screens, desk screens, and lap screens.
Jumbo screens are even bolted to our walls.
We learn about the “world” this way.
Algorithms will tell you this place is filled with terrible people.
There are some for sure.
But so many kind souls exist outside the blinding light of attention-seeking screen games.
The world portrayed on the flashy-light-boxes is not the whole story.
Always remember that.
These devices are often used by competing and hidden forces.
They seek to capture your attention and wield it for their own means.
Don’t let anyone tell you what you need to care about.
Let your care be a natural eruption from your inner depths.
Let it be the product of cultivation. Soil tilled over time with roots clawing into the earth.
Grounded.
There’s a breed of care that is like fast fashion.
That rapidly refreshes with news cycles and viral memes.
This form of care is mostly social signaling.
Very little effective action.
It’s about being seen as a certain type of person.
Rather than being it, independent of who sees.
It’s not all humdrum though.
There are lots of ways to experience joy in this world.
You’ll no doubt find that out.
The wonders abound.
This planet is teeming with life.
The natural sights will make you dizzy with awe.
With an archive of human art sprawling millennia.
But I’d be remiss not to point out the cruelty and suffering.
I don’t know why the world is like this.
There are different theories.
We live in a fallen world pervaded by evil.
Or we’re evolving out of a brutal state of nature.
Or we’re a bored god playing hide-and-seek with oneself.
The why can be endlessly debated but the what cannot.
The suffering is real.
But by embracing our natural inclinations for care.
We can become unique healing balms for particular pockets of pain.
I encourage you to tune into the greater forces of benevolence and compassion.
Even if only imagined.
Because the consequences of the actions they inspire are very real.
There’s so much more I wish I could say.
But time is short.
I’m sorry if this message got to you decades too late.
It’s good that you’re here.
Thank you for being here.

🗝️ The Key To The Riddle

Consider these words from Rachel Carson:

“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us — a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.”

“Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of the meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Kairosclerosis: A moment in which you realize that you’re happy but simultaneously destroy that happiness by overthinking it

🕸️ From Around The Web

An extremely non-comprehensive list of how to increase your surface area for luck and magic (and instantly sprinkle fairy dust on your life)

“I’m trying to consciously uncouple from Instagram/Meta (boring, I know, been done before, so overplayed, yada yada, but I fear it is finally my time to go gentle into that good night), so I stumbled onto the 2016 trend just yesterday for my aloted five minutes of scroll.

Soooo glad so many people enjoyed where they were ten years ago, and I love that you’re nostalgic for that time. But personally? There’s not enough money in the ever-expanding universe to bribe me into being 26 again.

‘Twas a wretched and cursed time, and sifting through my camera roll evidence of that year I felt my former despair roll over me like a fog. Finally, FINALLY, when I got to the very tippy tail of 2016, the camera roll slowly gets less depressing; things started to look up, and in 2017 an amazing series of twists and turns and synchronicities put me on a trajectory to start my own business, make dear friends, meet my husband, etc.

I remember exactly what the catalyst for the shift — I went on a roadtrip to Big Sur and saw a sign on the road that said, “Holy Granola” with an arrow pointing up a steep mountain.”

[Continue Reading]

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

☄️ Notice Your Limp Heart Until It Becomes A Rose-Colored Meteor: A brief personal guide to heart practice. Read it here.

🔎 Your Attention Is Not A Resource: L.M. Sacasas argues that framing attention as a scarce “resource” is itself the trap. It hands attention over to the logic of extraction and trade, when attention is really a bodily, relational act of stretching toward what is good in front of you. Read it here.

🏔️ There are Mountains in the Clouds: An exploration of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy of ‘man thinking’ to warn against the dangers of becoming trapped in a self-referential cycle of academic consumption that replaces real-world experience with abstract theories. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This image captures the inside of a cauliflower coral in a way most people would never normally see it, turning the coral into something that looks almost like a glowing underwater forest. Photographed in Lembeh Strait, Indonesia, Ross Gudgeon used a specialized extended macro wide lens to slip deep between the coral’s branches and then illuminated the scene from behind with two flashes, revealing its delicate internal structure. The result highlights both the beauty and biology of this soft coral: each branching tip is lined with tiny polyps and feathery tentacles that filter plankton from the water, showing how these invertebrates survive not through photosynthesis, but by feeding on drifting microscopic life.

🎟️ Not Just A Ticket To Tomorrow

Today is not just a ticket to tomorrow. Today is the marrow; it is the actual stuff of life. It is happening here. This is it.

Too often, we treat our days as a moment in the arrow’s flight. The real time, we think, is coming when that arrow hits its target, when it lands on the bullseye. Then we will have arrived. But that arrival is just another day. That arrow will be pulled from where it is stuck, only to be shot again.

Today is not just meaningful because of the part it plays in the arrow’s flight. Today stands luminous in its own right, without the justification of achievement, without the grandiosity of the extraordinary. Today, in all its common, ordinary monotony, is shining. Today is the stuff of life. It is here. This is it.

We can live our lives as though they were a movie but how much ends up on the cutting-room floor? How much is jammed into the fast-forward montage while we work toward the climax? Life is not a movie.

These analogies can aid us, but when confused for reality, they can cause us to devalue our lives as we are living them. This moment can be a climax in its own right. How many times over the arc of one’s life do we puncture the film of familiarity and greet the presence of our lives fully?

This day, this moment, carries with it a unique and special quality. It is the nexus of time and space that you inhabit with your current set of perceptions and faculties, completely singular on a cosmic scale. Your stitch of existence has a truly luminous quality that can be attuned to, that can be apprehended and appreciated, if only we can emerge from the drowning waters of drama addiction, media distraction, and status anxiety.

Dulled by routine, we have become foreigners to our own senses. Come back to the electricity of seeing, the ecstasy of listening, the velocity of feeling.

Today is not just a ticket to tomorrow. Today is the marrow; it is the actual stuff of life. It is happening here. This is it.

👁️ The Hidden In The Apparent

Digest these profound words from Abraham Heschel:

“The mystery is an ontological category, a dimension of all existence. We do not encounter it only at the climax of thinking or in observing strange, extraordinary facts, but in the startling fact that there are facts at all: being, the universe, the unfolding of time. We may face it at every turn—in a grain of sand, in an atom, as well as in stellar space. Everything holds the great secret. The world is something we apprehend but cannot comprehend.”

“What stirred their souls was neither the hidden nor the apparent, but the hidden in the apparent; not the order, but the mystery of the order that prevails in the universe. The deeper we search, the nearer we arrive at knowing that we do not know. The Hebrew word ‘olam, which in post-Biblical times came to denote ‘world,’ is, according to some scholars, derived from the root ‘alam, which means to hide, to conceal. The world is itself hiddenness; its essence is a mystery.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Kavod: A Hebrew word that literally means “weight” or “heaviness,” used to describe the felt radiance of a living presence. It’s the substance a being gives off simply by being fully alive and fully there. Usually translated as “glory,” but closer to the thickness in the air when something real is in the room.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Enchantment and the Courage of Joy: René Magritte on the Antidote to the Banality of Pessimism

“In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and spark it in others, is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. This is not a matter of denying reality — it is a matter of discovering a parallel reality where joy and hope are equally valid ways of being. To live there is to live enchanted with the underlying wonder of reality, beneath the frightful stories we tell ourselves and are told about it.

Having lost his mother to suicide, having lived through two World Wars, the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte (November 21, 1898–August 15, 1967) devoted his life and his art to creating such a parallel world of enchantment.”

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

📖 Poetry as a Spiritual Practice: Can reclaiming poetry spark a second renaissance and wake us from our digital slumber? Watch it here.

❓The Big Here Quiz: 30 questions to elevate your awareness of the greater place in which you live. Read it here.

👤 Who are you? A poem by Marina Fraser. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Via Nasa: “The Artemis II crew captured this view of Earth setting on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. As the astronauts flew over the Moon’s far side, the crew photographed and described terrain features including impact craters, ancient lava flows, and surface cracks and ridges formed as the Moon slowly evolved over time. They also noted differences in color, brightness and texture, which provide clues that help scientists understand the composition and history of the lunar surface.

The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon. The Apollo 8 mission was the first crewed spacecraft to circumnavigate the Moon.”

Find more Artemis II imagery here.

☀️ Rekindling Optimism

We live during a time where there is no short supply of things to be worried about.

Social media and broadcast news seem to be constantly flooding our minds with bickering and mudslinging.

It’s a business model that profits from making you angry and anxious.

This information environment suffocates our sense of optimism in the harsh winds of digital chaos.

We cannot hear hope when it’s drowned out by the noise of legions of lost souls shouting into the void of status boxes and comment sections.

There’s an African proverb I quite like:

“A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest.”

I remember it frequently. It invites me to listen more deeply. To sense into greater subtlety.

The spectacle and hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle are the trees falling. And if this was all you ever saw, you’d have a pretty wicked image of humanity.

Pessimism is the only logical conclusion.

But humanity is more than the cartoonish characters on your 2-dimensional screen telling you what the world is.

The world is so much bigger than hot takes and scandals.

The snow fell today. A baby learned to walk. A grandmother smiled.

A single bead of dew on a withering leaf shimmered in the light of the first morning’s sun.

These simple “mundane” moments are the delicate and fleeting sounds of the whole forest growing.

There is more goodness in this world than you can fathom.

There’s also a lot of bad. You know that already.

You might also know that shouting at how bad the bad is doesn’t make it better.

That’s like setting the fallen tree on fire and accidentally setting the forest ablaze.

In trying to eliminate the bad we destroy the good.

Instead, embody goodness and elevate beauty.

Be the beacon that reminds people that although this world is filled with tragedy and suffering, it is still a world worth cherishing and nurturing.

Give what matters your concentration and focus.

This is how you rekindle optimism.

Listen to the trees.

They are growing.

And so are you.

🐳 The Magic of Whales

From the Movie Boyhood by Richard Linklater

Mason: Dad, there’s no real magic in the world, right?

Dad: What do you mean?

Mason: You know, like elves and stuff. People just made that up.

Dad: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, what makes you think that elves are any more magical than something like a whale? You know what I mean? What if I told you a story about how underneath the ocean, there was this giant sea mammal that used sonar and sang songs and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you’d think that was pretty magical, right?

🤓 Learn This Word

Transverberation: A spiritual piercing of the heart by divine love

🕸️ From Around The Web

How to get to know your neighbourhood

“Maybe you just moved to the neighbourhood or just started working there. Maybe you’re a visitor who’s staying awhile. Or a teen exploring on your own for the first time. You could even be a longtime resident. If any of these describes you, there are aspects of your neighbourhood that you don’t know. And because knowing each other, knowing our history and taking part in local institutions is what strengthens our communities, rooting ourselves in place has never been more necessary. This Guide offers some strategies for knowing your neighbourhood in a new and deeper way.

A neighbourhood is the product of people and culture. It’s as much a feeling as it is an area on a map: many people can sense it in their bodies when they cross into their own neighbourhood. No neighbourhood has just one story, nor even just one neighbourhood. People often disagree on its boundaries or names; there are overlapping neighbourhoods and micro-neighbourhoods. And throughout, there are multiple, even contradictory histories, imaginings, claims and meanings.

While neighbourhoods are often written about from an urban point of view, rural and suburban places have their own shapes of neighbourhood. These might be geographically larger than some urban neighbourhoods if they involve the reach of a car – though this can be true in cities, too – and they might intersect more with natural or agricultural spaces in addition to built ones. Wherever we live, most of us have a need to connect with the people around us, to feel that we belong where we find ourselves. I invite you to interpret this Guide for wherever you are, wherever you go.”

[Continue Reading]

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That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🧠 The Hypercurious Mind: ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information. Read it here.

🙉 The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul. Read it here.

🌀 Explore Internet Rabbit Holes: Cloudhiker is like a random button for interesting pieces of internet. Try it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

By Angelo Richardson: “The steady trade winds and the waves they produce, make the rugged northeast coast of the island of Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean, a true beachcombers paradise. These sea fans are one of the most common jewels you can find there along the beach. I dipped one into the sea and photographed the waves crashing on the rocks through it. The tiny seawater lenses captured a different view of that same moment.”

🥸 Venn Diagram Vision

There’s an affliction I’ve dubbed “Venn Diagram Vision” that causes a person to live in a chronic state of compare and contrast.

Everything they experience is referenced against an image in their mind about how things should be.

This is certainly is a useful capacity to cultivate but is certainly not an appropriate way of life.

Here’s why:

When we take the experience we’re having and overlay a multi-dimensional set of mental measuring sticks, we push ourselves one step (or more) away from life.

The disposition towards the moment becomes not embracing what is, but focusing on what isn’t.

The most torturous thing about it is that this endless sizing up of things will not end even if we managed to arrive at a reality that perfectly matches up with our vision.

By that point, we will have created a new vision and we will use that to compare our once dream, now life, against.

Never quite arriving.

Pursuits of personal growth and spiritual advancement can cultivate tendencies that make us hyperaware of all the ways they can be better.

This is done with good intentions. How can we grow if you aren’t aware of the ways we need to grow?

And finding ourselves making progress can be a pretty sweet high.

But this mental pattern run amok can terrorize us to the point we live in a state where all we see are the fixes that need to be made.

This can disconnect us from the beauty and richness of being alive.

The moment begins to feel intolerable in the presence of all the flaws.

This isn’t growth. It’s erosion.

We try to source our motivation from the brief highs we get from small steps of progress rather than a pervading nourishment that can be accessed in the here & now.

This can lead to burnout, breakdowns, and bouts of depression.

If we’re growing a garden, we have to water our plants and pull the weeds.

Sometimes we are so fixated on the horizon that the garden of our lives begins to wither away.

So if you’re stuck in hyperawareness of ways you can be better, you must practice the opposite:

Wanting what’s right in front of you.

Take off the goggles of Venn diagram vision and embrace what is.

Love the world as it is. Love yourself as you are.

This is one of the most significant things you can do.

✨ Trees and Stars

Ponder this reminder from Tolkien:

“You look at trees and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Aduantas: An Irish word that describes the angst that comes with being in an unfamiliar place and among unfamiliar people

🕸️ From Around The Web

Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist

“One of the most important things that’s ever happened to me was by accident.

Years ago, I attended a meditation retreat during a tough time. I had just broken up with a co-founder and a girlfriend in the same week and gone from two jobs to no jobs in a day. The retreat was supposed to help. It didn’t. I injured my knee trying to sit still, and I had three migraines in eight days. Worst of all was my self-critical looping. I was frustrated that I couldn’t do it right, then frustrated at the frustration, then frustrated at that.

On the last day, desperate, I broke my promise to practice only as instructed and changed the technique. Almost immediately, my latest stress headache went away. Four hours later, tears rolled down my face, something between bliss and relief that I had little reference for.

The instructors told me to ignore it. “States come and go,” they said. “Don’t get attached.”

But I had no choice. I suspected such a peak experience in an otherwise dark time was a fluke. But what if it wasn’t?”

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

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I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🏛️ The Rare People Who are Solid: Notes on congruence. Read it here.

❤️‍🔥 Alchemy of The Heart: A classic Ram Dass meditation: Listen here.

A Vision for Betterment: A deeper look at the difference between advancement and actual human flourishing. Watch it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“An expert in the hypnotic, Wales-based artist Jon Foreman continues his exquisite constructions that position stones and shells into perfectly arranged formations. His most recent pieces include a mesmerizing gradient circle, concentric swirl, and seaside surge that show an evolution from his earlier land art by adding even more density and precision to his already meticulous practice. Because he works in public spaces subject to the elements, Foreman’s compositions last only a short period, although he sells prints in his shop for those wanting to preserve their entrancing nature. You can follow his latest creations and travels on Instagram.” See more here.

🪄 The Magic of Speech

This week, I’m reminded of the way our words can ripple out. To speak is a tremendous power. It almost feels ridiculous to say, because speech is so ubiquitous, but that’s part of why it must be said. We so often use our speech in a way that devalues and overlooks its true power, treating it as pedestrian.

A part of this is because it doesn’t often register for us when our speech has that lingering, staying power in the heart of another. We’re very infrequently told, so we forget that our words could burn like firewood, shielding those we love from the harshness of life.

So I share this as a reminder to you, so that you might hold this magical capability with renewed reverence, and you might seek out opportunities not to gossip or complain, but to speak life into another, to uplift, to distribute life rafts in the deep, thrashing ocean of uncertainty we are all swimming in.

Never expect your words to be returned to you. Do not need your efforts to be noticed, while remaining tremendously grateful when thank yous sail your way.

Today, I invite you to speak beautifully, with eloquence and enthusiasm, as though you were from a foreign world where your spirit had not been buckled by the overwhelming pressures of cynicism and disenchantment.

Your words can rekindle something sleeping in the spirit of your community, and they can awaken those around you to the power their words possess as well.

Abracadabra.

🦗 This Grasshopper

Enjoy this classic from Mary Oliver:

“Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

🤓 Learn This Word

Ma: A Japanese word referring to the pregnant negative space between things—in architecture, music, conversation, time. The character combines “gate” (門) with “sun” (日): light beaming through a doorway. Unlike Western negative space, ma is not defined by what surrounds it. It is ontologically primary. The emptiness comes first; form arises within it.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Tricking Your Ears: Auditory Illusions

“It is quite fascinating that the combinations of abstract sounds we call music have such a powerful impact on our individual lives, and world cultures in general. Somewhere during our evolutionary process, our bodies became astonishingly receptive to sounds—starting an avalanche of emotional, cognitive, and physical responses. Yet more than that, each of us has unique ears with deeply individualized acoustic and perceptual architecture.

“Perceptual” is the key term in this article. Although we may all get together in the same room to listen to the same sound, each of us will experience it differently depending on a variety of factors. Furthermore, our sensory organs are limited, and are prone to error—which adds yet another layer of subjectivity to the experience. “Error,” in this case, is not necessarily a bad thing, but rather an inherent potential to misinterpret what we hear or see, and in other cases a capacity to construct a completely imagined reality in response to (or sometimes independently of) external stimuli. We call these effects illusions when they are caused by external stimuli, and hallucinations when they happen on their own.

While both hallucinations and illusions have their own evolutionary causes (and value), the latter is much easier to study, as most people can predictively experience the effect, and the results are consistently repeatable. Throughout this article, we aim to investigate some of the more interesting auditory illusions discovered, and explore their potential for creative use in our artistic practices. As you will shortly see, the subject is tightly connected with electronic music, and particularly audio technology in general.”

[Continue Reading]

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With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🌊 Robin Wall Kimmerer on the Language of Animacy: A reflection on how language can either deepen our relationship with nature or distance us from it. Read it here.

🧠 How To Take Back Control Of Your Mind In 1 Day: This video covers how to replace consumption habits with meaningful practice and how to rewrite limiting beliefs so you can navigate through the difficult process of starting. Watch it here.

🧘 What We Think We Are Is Mostly Just Tension: Reflections on a recent Jhana retreat. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

This photo was taken by Nathan Myhrvold. There is something deeply disorienting about seeing a snowflake this clearly. Not because it becomes unfamiliar, but because it reveals how little we ever really see of what surrounds us. Here, a passing fragment of winter appears almost monumental, full of structure, balance, and impossibly fine detail. The image makes visible a kind of hidden extravagance in the world, the lavishness with which reality is made even at its smallest scales. What usually registers as atmosphere becomes, for a moment, a singular and astonishing thing.

📝 Notes From The Road

Some of my scattered notes you might find meaningful:

Seeking a grand purpose can sometimes block you from experiencing the small purpose in front of you already inviting you to act. An accumulation of small purposes leads to grand purpose. Sometimes people wait to find grand purpose but never do because they never sowed the seeds of small purpose that allow it to bloom.

The recognition of innocence is the antidote to dehumanization. Remember your enemy was born a baby.

Misfortune that cultivates character becomes good fortune.

People tend to blindspot their brilliance. We’re so close to our gifts that they can be difficult to see. This causes people to discount their value as they focus too much on their shortcomings.

Today is tomorrow’s nostalgia. Can you find fondness for this moment before it has passed?

🕊️ The Peace of Wild Things

Savors these words from Wendell Berry:

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Waldeinsamkeit: A German word that refers to the feeling one has while being alone in the woods, usually a sublime or spiritual one.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Polyvagal Theory is Dead. Now What?

“Polyvagal Theory has been the darling of body-mind practitioners in recent years, being taught in everything from yoga teacher trainings to psychology graduate programs—especially those focused on trauma informed care.

However, a recent paper authored by thirty-nine of the world’s leading experts on autonomic nervous system control, physiology, anatomy and evolution of the vagus nerve just dropped a nuclear bomb into the middle of this theory.

Their assessment?

It’s not ambiguous. These experts aren’t debating controversial details or offering suggestions for nitpicky refinement. The conclusion was unanimous.

Polyvagal Theory is untenable.

Meaning: it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—and that’s important. (More on why below.)

If you’re a practitioner who has built any part of your work around PVT, this probably lands somewhere between disorienting and devastating.

I know, because I’m one of you.”

[Continue Reading]

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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin

🏔️ Two Ways Of Knowing: On scientific And Native American views of the natural world. Read it here.

👁️ Japanese Ways of Seeing Space: Ma, the interval that gives shape to experience; Yohaku no Bi, the beauty of blankness; and Hikizan no Bigaku, the aesthetics of subtraction.. Watch it here.

🙏 Simone Weil Against Distraction: The French thinker conceived of attention as akin to prayer. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

You’re looking at a soap bubble. Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero blows them through a straw in the Colorado foothills when it drops below 20°F, then watches through her lens as ice crystals race across the surface. At 12° the bubble freezes in 33 seconds. At 20° it can take four minutes, and that extra time is where the geometry happens. These feathered structures spreading across something barely an inch wide that’s already starting to collapse. She backlit this one so the ice catches light like stained glass. The image is called Crystal Moon and it looks more like a planet forming than anything that came from dish soap, sugar, glycerin, and a straw.

🪦 The Unnamed Legacy

We can keep climbing our entire lives trying to “make something of ourselves” to “make our lives matter.”

To create a “legacy” which often means no more than seeking the applause you’ll never hear from people you’ve never met, all clapping for a caricature of who you are and not the real thing.

Do not worry if your name is remembered.

Instead, be concerned with acting as a force of love so strong that your children’s children’s children will still swim in that same reservoir of nourishment.

Because your time on earth will have left an impression on those you leave behind.

And they will carry with them your subtle ways of being that invite kindness, compassion, and care.

As the years pass, the origin of such warmth will be lost on them, but love will still permeate the room.

And that is what matters.

🧚 The Wonder Fairy

Enjoy this wish from Rachel Carson:

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.”

🤓 Learn This Word

Bricoleur: A French word referring to one who creates using whatever materials are available.

🕸️ From Around The Web

On Being a Dad

“One month after my first daughter was born, a younger friend from work asked me to explain what parenthood was like.

I can’t do that, I said. Wisely, she appealed to my vanity, reminding me that my professional identity was based on explaining complicated ideas, and so wouldn’t it be a little sad actually, a little bit pathetic even, if I couldn’t explain something as basic as fatherhood? I took the bait.

People tend to explain parenthood by comparing it to other real-life experiences, I said. But parenthood isn’t conceptually combinatorial in a way that benefits from that exercise. You can’t multiply I have a puppy with My 2-year-old nephew pooped on me once and it was funny to arrive at the experience of parenthood.

“Have you been to Paris?” I asked. She had not. Paris is my favorite city, I said. You might tell me that you’ve practically been to Paris, because you’ve been to London and Montreal, and what more could the city of Paris offer beyond some blend of Major European Capital and City That Speaks French And Serves Buttery Sauces? But those travel experiences aren’t additive in a way that captures the experience of being in Paris. So, in this narrow respect, I said, parenting is like Paris.

But, much more to the point, parenting is nothing like Paris. Imagine that every day you wake up in your left-bank apartment, and the city has meaningfully morphed into some magically strange variant of Paris. On Tuesday, the streets and boulevards no longer meet at their old familiar intersections. On Wednesday, the Louvre moves to another arrondissement. The Arc de Triumphe turns upside-down on Thursday and floats in the sky on Friday. Now we’re talking. Now that is more like parenting. To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to be your home.”

[Continue Reading]

🎬 Endnote

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Down The Rabbit Hole. Feel free to reply and tell me what you think.

Want to help spread the word?

I love sharing these gems of wisdom and wonder with you each week. If you love receiving them and want to help me spread the word, here is one quick way you can do that:

Forward this email to one friend.

That’s it. It will take 5 seconds and will help me spread the good vibes and reach more people. I appreciate you.

With Wonder,

Mike Slavin